this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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And these days people don’t believe it’s necessary that we move to polyculture farming. Monoculture farming is depleting the soil no matter if you crop rotate.
Do you have any evidence/resources to back that up? I am not trying to start a fight, just interested to learn more, my first intuition being that crop rotated mono culture would be better for economies of scale as equipment tends to be highly specialized
You just need a large enough rotation.
What difference would 8 variety’s planted at once vs each planted over an 8 year cycle? Even if you have 8 different species, you still need to rotate them around. So you’re just doing it smaller scale in the end anyways….
As long as you do it right, they will all take and add their own benefits to and from the soil. Even if you have 1000 plant species on your garden, you can’t plant the tomatoes in the same spot every year, that’s not how poly farming works, you still need a rotate within….
Also excellent point.
The poly culture buddy is talking about is more for self sufficient homes. When you’re talking large farms, it’s easier for them to focus on a single crop a year, and roster through them, less storage requirements, less variety of fertilizers and pesticides (ughh another topic).
But yeah you as a family can’t just eat potatoes one year, beans the next, starve for a year while you use clover to fix nitrogen back into the soil. But yeah a collective of eight farmers all growing and rotating their equipment and shit. Fan fucking tastic best way to operate and best for the soil.
But in the end, it all still needs to rotate every year, your soil can’t magically move nutrients from an acre away. The plant only has access the size of its root network.
Depending on your garden you sort of do crop rotation anyways in many setups.
Like if you have four quarter plots of a 48ft2 piece of lawn and do a different crop in each quarter, then rotate the next year. Makes it easy for even yourself to harvest. Easier to notice where your ripe beans to harvest are when they aren't mixed in with your corn plants.
I’ve got 3 4’x12 plots myself, not quite enough to rotate tall stuff like tomatoes and sunflowers properly, but that’s why I maybe do some clover cover crop behind that one one year instead.
Well for individuals I saw the concept of I forget the exact name, something like forest farming or what, basically you start combining plants vertically too, so you add some producing bushes and trees next to your normal crops
Would start by looking up how plants interact with each other and with mycelial networks—monocropping deprives the farm of an important support network, and the soil and plants’ subsequent underperformance leads to unsustainable use of pesticides, additional water supply etc. to compensate. Monocropping to simplify the field layout and crop gathering makes plenty of intuitive sense, as does cutting down all your trees so you can plant more crops. It’s also not a good long-term plan to treat these unfathomably complex systems that have evolved over millennia as something we’re going to improve using our intuition.
Polyculture farming is good for the land and good for yields, but monoculture is easier for the government to rule over.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/
You don't have to. You can just use some petroleum derived fertilizer to make up for all the issues you're causing and ignore them until you die and it's someone else's problem. This also creates more CO2 emissions, which is just bonus food for your crops and warmer temperatures. Totally not an issue that needs to be addressed...
What people say that? I have never heard anyone have that belief except if I stretch it, in astroturfing ads. Nobody believes that. Corporations decide. They are not humans. You are not controlled by humans but by huge devil machines