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this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Science Memes
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You can't really grow the same crop in the same field season after season (without fertiliser), because they'll sap the specific nutrients they need from the soil. If you do that over and over eventually the soil wont have any food for that crop. Growing something different each season that takes different nutrients from the soil lets it recover the other ones. I don't know how it recovers on its own, circle of life stuff probably. Modern farming can cheat by artificially replenishing the nutrients with fertiliser.
It also makes it stronger against disease.
The problem is that even with crop rotation much of our soil is still nearly depleted. Most farmers aren’t doing enough varied rotation or rest cycles or regenerative farming since anything other than the same 2-3 crops isn’t profitable for them
Soil requires fertilizer regardless, every harvest you export nutrients out of the soil that need to be replenished. The main purpose of crop rotation is to avoid proliferetion of diseases and pests.
some crops replenish nutrients, e.g. legumes directly fixing nitrogen from the air.
just because capitalist industrial agriculture is addicted to fossil fuel fertilizers doesn't mean it's the only way to farm.
Yes they do, still it's not sufficient enough to replenish what is needed. Agriculture is an open loop system, it requires external inputs to continue to operate. Without external inputs, agriculture turns into minery.
Cover crops can help a bit in soil that's not seem significant agricultural use yet... by biologically mining and aerating the soil (ie. plants with deep and hardy tap roots can break through some plow pan and clay to extract mineral nutrients beneath).
Like you say, external inputs and care are needed to amend the soil to grow useful food crops. If they weren't, we'd still be foraging, without need to settle areas and dedicate energy to agriculture.
There has to be a balance, we need to understand that as long as we export harvests out of the field we need to import nutrients into the field. We can't expect plants to naturally replenish the nutrients that we unnaturally extract.
Also we need to understand that when we introduce heavy machinery into a field, we need heavy machinery to break compaction. Plants and soil organisms simply cannot naturally break the compaction caused by our unnaturally heavy machinery that is heavily concentrated in the small contact area of a tire.
Some of these dogmatic beliefs lead to "regenerative" farmers being more extractivists than the industrial farmers they demonize.
Absolutely. I'm happy to see more people on the same page here. Conservation of Mass is a law that we have to abide by.
On compaction, I have read on some cultivars of root grass crops being capable of penetrating plow pan and freeing up the soil underneath but I have not yet read any studies that empirically validate this. And, even if the data proves it, the proposed process is NOT fast and requires assistance from seasonal freeze/thaw cycles to help mechanically crack the compacted layer. So, not likely useful for remediation of fields needed to grow food in the short to mid term.
Never thought about it that way, so if farmers (at this point probably mostly international big farming corporations) would just rotate their crops, they would not have to buy as much fertiliser, destroy the environment and probably a tonne of other disgusting stuff that comes with mono-cultures, like the excessive need for fertilisers? Yeah, that checks out 🥵 ("It's too much work! Other crops don't sell!")
Farmers have been rotating crops for hundreds of years man. Corporate farms rotate crops too. Step down off that soapbox for a moment.
The whole joke is that the person in the image would have made fun of the idea in ancient times, killing the food supply of early civilization and setting us all back by thousands of years.
Yeah, the point of the joke is that crop rotation has been practiced for literally thousands of years. It was an agricultural invention which gave ancient cultures significantly higher crop yields, enabling a huge number of societal, cultural and scientific developments. The joke is based on the idea that before crop rotation was discovered, some people might have considered it a silly idea, delaying the developments enabled by the significantly increased crop yields.
They do rotate, for example soybean -> corn because soybeans add nitrogen to the ground which corn needs a lot of
Also mixing crops (or non-farmable plants) has big benefits, but it's currently cheaper to use chemically-derived fertilisers and go the monoculture route.
If only a government could artificially change the artificial incentives, without worrying about the votes they get from the minority who farm and are citizens.