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
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….
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.
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
I'm unconvinced holding back our people by 5000 years is a bad thing. If that hadn't happened, there might not have been a humanity for us to be born into. Or maybe we'd be at Star Trek levels now.
Though our existence depends on our history, so even if it would have been a better one, we wouldn't get to see it.
I don't think we'd be at Star Trek levels, but I do think it's OK if we went slower. The breakneck pace of development since the Industrial Revolution hasn't been done in a way that's healthy for the planet or for people.
As things are, we might have a Mars colony by the end of the century, but with a ruined Earth behind it. If we pushed that Mars colony out another century and focused on improving the planet we have, that would be OK. These goals aren't necessarily mutually exclusive--a Mars colony would likely take a tiny fraction of Earth's combined economic output over the next 80 years--but there's a lot of things we would do to make things more sustainable that will be more expensive in terms of label price. We aren't fully incorporating the true cost of things on the current label price, so of course those will go up when they properly reflect reality.
Crop rotation isn't that, though. It's a good idea for efficient use of agricultural land over the long term.