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Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

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Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#231

Post by pg_1234 »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #222
HelloMcFly wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That paper would suggest to me that perhaps eggs are as animal as we need to get. I agree with your specific point here, but it feels like a small thing when considering the overall societal and environmental cost of animal protein (esp. beef, pork, lamb).

If you tried to get all your calories from eating eggs, your diet would have too much fat and not enough carbs. In reality you need a balanced and varied diet, and the world couldn’t support 7 billion people all deciding to get their protein intake from one specific food item anyway. Animal products are simply better at providing the protein you need. You _can_ get all of it from plant based sources (I’m not sure whe…

"not enough carbs" is the easiest problem to solve (just add wheat/rice/potato etc.) ... in fact the normal problem is too much carbs.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#232

Post by jimnotgym »

ramblenode wrote: post #197
wolfgangK wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal a…

This is a kind of "wronger than wrong" fallacy [0]. Yes, not all pasture land is suitable for cereal crops. But that doesn't negate the fact that most livestock production does present an inefficient tradeoff when optimizing for nutrition and land/climate impact. This is because a) a large portion of cereal crops are diverted to feed livestock and b) very little livestock comes from natural pasture land. So only a mi…

Of course your point a is true, but it doesn't need to be. In other parts of the world cattle are not fed on cereals at all, or minimally. Equally cereal production has been a major cause of native grassland being plowed up, with much of the biomass turning back into CO2. If it were turned back to pasture it would begin to sequester carbon again. Grazing animals could be grown on that pasture, but not at the intensity of a US factory farm.

The answer is that the system is complex and there are no easy fixes.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#233

Post by fogzen »

seunosewa wrote: post #220
tfourb wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well-designed food forests and agroforestry systems can exceed the calorie production per acre of heavily mechanized and fertilized annual crops like corn, while providing tons more actual nutrition and additional services like wood, good quality soil, etc. with little or no fossil-fuel-based inputs. Check out i.e. Mark Shepard (New Forest Farm) and Martin Crawford (Agroforestry Research Trust) for examples.

If this was true, commercial farmers would probably be doing it already. They tend to rapidly adopt anything that improves yield.

They have little incentive since non-financial externalities are not accounted for in commercial agriculture. In other words, we aren’t accounting for the costs of topsoil and ecosystem destruction, or greenhouse gases from fertilizer and pesticide production.

Industrial agriculture has increased yield mostly via unsustainable external inputs: fertilizer, pesticides, and motorized machines (oil, oil, and more oil).

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#234

Post by Retric »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #217
Retric wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s very misleading because Methane is extremely front loaded in its effects. Year 0 is very bad year 50 is only equal to the amount of carbon in that methane. As rice farming is very consistent year to year, and rice removes carbon as it grows the net effect on future warming is ~zero because all the previous years have already been baked in to current conditions. The great news is reducing Methane from existing…

That math isn’t mathing. With the rice field active, there’s more methane in the atmosphere every year, compared to the world where the rice field doesn’t exist.

It’s climate change.

If global methane from rice fields is identical in 2000, 2023, and 2050 … it has zero impact on climate change.

Rice cultivation isn’t completely static, so the it’s changes in rice cultivation that result in climate change.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#235

Post by imtringued »

wolfgangK wrote: post #139
Aromasin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put this into context, animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of the worlds CO2 emissions, uses 83% of the world's farmland, but only produces 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein.

I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal a…

You don't seem to understand how factory farming works. No, the animals don't get to go outside.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#236

Post by imtringued »

hcurtiss wrote: post #163
tfourb wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on what you define as "usable". I am currently looking out of a window in the Bavarian Forest and see nice lush green meadows which would be perfectly productive under many different types of crops, but which are mostly used as pasture and meadow for hay production, because the landscape is hilly, which isn't well suited to be farmed with the heavy equipment that has become standard in i.e. corn and…

Yes, with humans working hoes. I do not call that progress.

I would have expected comments about AI and robotics instead. If you can build terraces and farm them robotically, then you can reuse the technology on Mars.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#237

Post by whoomp12342 »

darkwater wrote: post #214
sampo wrote: post #168

In one of his videos in Youtube, permaculture farmer Richard Perkins said that mankind has 6000 years of agriculture, but has mostly concentrated plant breeding efforts to annual plants. We mostly eat annuals. (Plants that grow and die in one year.) But, he said, imagine what kind of perennial (plants that live multiple years) food plants we could have, if we invested similar 6000 years of effort to perfecting perenn…

And why humanity didn't do that before? Not an expert but I tend to think there were reasons justifying how it went.

guess: groups of humans are great at short term thinking. long term? not so much

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#238

Post by throwaway2037 »

numpad0 wrote: post #229
contingencies wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With typical rice farming in Asia, you see manual transplanting of each seedling in to small fields by women and children. This is back-breaking work and extremely slow. I can't think of another crop both this widely cultivated and painstaking. Therefore, not having to do this is a huge win. China has a multitude of climatic areas. Some harvest rice once per year, others two or three times per year. Even within Yunna…

Rice planting machines exist, doesn’t look much different from home lawnmowers. IIRC, in spring farmers make a batch of rice sprouts on disposable cups, load them into this, and it lays them down as the old man drives across his field back and forth. 0: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uS54w2ZH-OE

Anywhere that is rich enough uses these rice planting machines. You see them frequently in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#239

Post by throwaway2037 »

contingencies wrote: post #207
hinkley wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be dated information, but I'd heard 3 crops per year going back at least as far as 1900 (Farmers of Forty Centuries), but not that it was three rice crops per year. Instead a rotation of different crops in the same field. One of the tricks with rice is you can germinate it in one field, then transplant it to something like 4-6 times the same space to grow to maturity.

It's absolutely three rice crops per year in some areas. The transplanting strategy is the normal one.

Hot and wet, like some areas of Thailand can support three rice crops per year.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#240

Post by Pigalowda »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #198
hosh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this quote: > Perennial cultivars are strongly preferred by farmers; growing them saves 58.1% of labour and 49.2% of input costs in each regrowth cycle. In 2021, perennial rice was grown on 15,333 ha by 44,752 smallholder farmers in southern China. Seems like it makes sense to them. The increased labor in harvest is probably offset by the decrease in labor for planting.

>> In 2021, perennial rice was grown on 15,333 ha by 44,752 smallholder farmers in southern China. > Seems like it makes sense to them. ...that's not the conclusion I would have drawn. 45,000 farmers and 60 square miles are both pitifully small numbers.

In 2022, the acreage of rice plantations in China amounted to around 29.45 million hectares.

You are right.

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