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The fruit of a strawberry tree is nothing like a strawberry. The skin is made of small, fibrous scales which stick to the tongue and insinuate themselves into every crevice of one's mouth. The flesh is shot through with dozens of hard pips, its texture is mealy like cream of wheat, and the flavor is bland with a hint of sweetness. A strawberry has a very distinctive shape, but the strawberry tree's fruit is a droll spheroid. These enticing looking fruits must be useful for something, right? Well, be careful -- fermenting them produces a lot of wood alcohol, so it requires careful distillation to be safe. To top it off, the strawberry is not properly a berry, but if I'm reading things right, the fruit of a strawberry tree is. About the only thing they have in common is their red color, but thanks to internationalized agriculture, proper strawberries have almost entirely lost that characteristic in favor of a year-round supply.

But if you like those, you should try the berries of haw and ash. They're similar in texture, lack of flavor, and seediness, but their mouthfeel is significantly improved by the lack of scales.

Ah, you mean the Arbutus unedo. Yeah, the fruits are completely different. You can't compare the strawberry with these fruits. When not yet full ripe, the fruits are brightly yellow-orange, not a reddish-white of strawberries.

However the honey from them is absolutely special and delicious. The honey is bitter. I fell in love with the honey from the strawberry trees in Corsica.

> agriculture as it has been practiced is about the dumbest way to grow food

> imagine a park or botanical garden where every species is edible.

Make it happen! If the way we’ve been doing things is dumb then there is a massive market opportunity. Save the world, become the first trillionaire.

Gabe Brown makes money. His neighbor ignores him. What can you do?

It does seem like folks are catching on though. Business can be slow to adapt, especially in agriculture, but farmers are pragmatic. Brown's talks seem well-attended.

control is more important than technique, in most cases, and then winners reinforce that

I'm not sure I get what you're saying.

The idea that the validity of an idea is measured by how much money you can make by implementing it is /why/ our current system is flawed.

Money represents value. It's the lowest common denominator when talking about whether or not an idea is worth doing. It's hard to quantify altruism.

e.g. An idea to plant a garden with entirely toxic plants is just as valid, but not as valuable.

I think ideas like "money represent value" are tru-ish enough approximations from a distance but comments like this show just how easy it is to slip into seeing them as definitions or absolute truth.

Useful models are still models after all.

I'm not sure why you think I was defining 'money is value','value is money' or some other absolute truth. I did not say such a thing.

Money does represent value of some kind, right? Whether that's time, labor, or [fill-in-the-blank]. It's a tool to represent generic value.

I'm interested to hear what you think a better unit of measurement might be for determining whether or not an idea is 'valid' or worth doing. Can you elaborate?

I suspect there's trade-offs that aren't being thoroughly considered in this equation. That's the case in every full-on 'everything we're doing is wrong, and there's a perfect solution' claim.

Nope, in this case it's just science. Specifically ecology.

It turns out that when we understand what the plants and animals are doing in detail (through science) we can arrange them in time and space in ways that are vastly more efficient than what we've been doing these last ~12k years.

Think about it, if it wasn't so that would mean that our ancestors discovered optimal farming in antiquity, eh?

Just think: we used to burn chaff rather than composting it. It turns out that that is not a good idea. It's that sort of thing that I'm thinking of when I call ag "the dumbest way" to grow food.

> Think about it, if it wasn't so that would mean that our ancestors discovered optimal farming in antiquity, eh?

Farming has undergone several fundamental changes throughout history after that though, notably in medieval times and then everything industrialization brought

Farming has undergone several fundamental changes

Can you name some that can't be reduced to "but on a [insert new machine]"? The only one I can think of is artificial fertilizer, which isn't a sustainable practice in the long run either.

Bosh-Haber process increased food supply several times in less than a decade. There was no starvation in a developed country ever since it got adopted on mass scale. It happened less than 100 years ago.

Compared to that every other revolution in farming was insignificant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

US Corn Grain Yield Trends Since 1866: https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US...

It may take years for new practices to be widespread and accepted, but I assure you, if you can make that chart continue to go up, ~every grain farmer in the US will happily be on board.

There is a certain world-view and a romanticizing to farming, but at the end of the day, farmers are businessmen who just want to grow as much food as possible, as cheaply as possible. They may grumble as much as a software developer when forced to learn new tools, and they won't drop everything for an unproven promise, but they'll happily abandon their old ways in favor of new ones once they're proven.

Crop rotation replacing leaving fields fallow was a huge leap, as was the first really heavily selected strain of wheat.

> It turns out that when we understand what the plants and animals are doing in detail (through science) we can arrange them in time and space in ways that are vastly more efficient than what we've been doing these last ~12k years.

This assumes both systems are optimizing for the same thing.

Excellent point!

We know that evolution is optimizing for continuation or duration (technically "evolution" isn't a thing, it's a non-volitional chemical tautology with no purpose or intrinsic meaning so "it" cannot optimize, however, in practice, life is optimizing for more and continued life, overcoming radiation, impacts, and it's own consequences (like the advent of oxygen and aerobic metabolism)) so what is the other system optimizing for?

(As an aside, is "life is optimizing for more and continued life" a definition for "life"?)

The difference is between hobbyist agriculture and commercial agriculture. In the latter, consistency, pests and disease become more complex issues to deal with. IMHO there are a lot of analogies to software engineering. Small projects can engage in practices that don't scale, like skipping QA, not adequately testing, inconsistent coding standards.

In large farms, seeds are mass produced, engineered, and go through a QA and testing process to prevent certain diseases. There are many good reasons, BTW, why farms don't grow perennials and engage in mono-cropping, or use herbicides and genetically engineered crops instead of no-till. The trade-off in abandoning these practices almost always involves sacrificing yields and the mechanization of labor.

Orchards of fruit/nut trees are both commercial agriculture, and centered around perennials. Are industrial orchards less productive than industrial farms?

Or how about vineyards?

The limit there is likely that no one has figured out how to make an annual fruit or nut tree.

Thinking about the cost per calorie of apples versus oats, to pick an example that works for me, I would say the answer is very much yes. And ultimately, from the plant's perspective productivity should be a question of efficiently storing energy.

> In the latter, consistency, pests and disease become more complex issues to deal with.

> There are many good reasons, BTW, why farms don't grow perennials and engage in mono-cropping, or use herbicides and genetically engineered crops instead of no-till.

But sometimes the pests and disease are caused by these same practices, right? Like, I'm aware the Cavendish banana we all eat is very susceptible to a fungal disease that is slowly spreading around the world. Because we produce so much of a single variety, where all plants are clones, a single disease can be highly disruptive. If production was evenly distributed over many varieties, and if plantations had banana plants separated by other useful crops, the whole system might be more resilient.

I have a lot of respect and even awe for modern agriculture. It's incredible what we've done.

> The trade-off in abandoning these practices almost always involves sacrificing yields and the mechanization of labor.

The problem (that cannot be escaped) is longevity. Any system of agriculture that does not increase over time soil fertility and volume/mass is doomed.

Systems of agriculture that deplete [various measures of biological health] over time are akin to mining. Once the underlying resources are exhausted the story ends (the resources in question could be water, or biodiversity, or climate stability, etc...)

Even if we compensate with technology, we are substituting our managed system for a automatic system that has been (meta-)stable for billions of years. We should proceed carefully. The billions of people who owe their lives to the Haber-Bosch process (and other innovations) may come to rue it if we crash due to environmental destruction. By some scientific estimates this is the decade when our biomass and the biomass of our agriculture outweighs naturally occurring biomass. For better or worse the world has become our farm.

That's why Gabe Brown (et. al.) seems so important to me: he is integrating modern practices with new (scientifically-validated) regenerative practices and his farm is both profitable and healthier year after year.

There is a well-maintained “food forest” near my home which is a real pleasure to stroll through and pick berries from occasionally. There’s an incredible mulberry tree, thickets of autumn olives, plums, wild greens of all varieties, sea buckthorn, figs, medlar, and more.

It takes volunteers real work to keep it tame enough for a city, but they’ve done it for as long as I’ve lived here and it’s a really beautiful spot.

How do they keep birds from eating the fruit? In my personal but limited experience, birds tend to eat certain kinds of fruit long before it ripens enough for human consumption.

The birds do eat some, but that's fine. The birds in this city don't appear to have any shortage of food. Some plums or berries will be ruined or taken, but mostly the garden manages itself just fine. Same as you'll find wild berries in huge numbers – many have already been eaten by wild animals, but there's still plenty left too.

One perk of this style of gardening is that, for various reasons, pest moderation seems to happen automatically. No pesticides are required, the garden is watered by humans only a handful of times in summer, and no fertilizers besides city compost are used. Everything is lush and happy. Insects are everywhere, and perhaps birds are eating those instead of berries. It's hard to say exactly how each biome functions, but this one is very productive and animals aren't a problem for it.

> [...] most annuals that we use for crops have perennial versions. [...]

> One take-away is that agriculture as it has been practiced is about the dumbest way to grow food. [...]

One very useful technique in modern agriculture is crop rotation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation

You grow each year a different crops, because they have different fertilizer requirements (and some even fix Nitrogen) and also helps to reduce some plagues. It's also possible to plant different crops in succession, so you get multiple harvests in the same year.

For these, a perennial version is bad.

> There's a thing called a "strawberry tree" that is exactly what it sounds like: a tree that grows strawberry-like fruit. It goes on and on.

Cool reference that I hadn't heard of before, so I just looked this up. The fruits of this tree look absolutely nothing like strawberries (more like lychees, IMHO), so I don't think this is a good example for what you're describing.

They look very similar (though probably larger) to mock strawberries (which are not really strawberries either.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentilla_indica

Incidentally: from a botanical perspective, strawberries are not berries. Nor do they even taste like straw!

Botanically, practically nothing we call a berry is a berry except blue-. And practically every other fruit is a berry. The word is a wastebasket.

Today I learned that papaya is closely related to cabbage.

> Botanically, practically nothing we call a berry is a berry except blue-.

cran-, elder-, lingon-, among others.

(Also, the fruit of the strawberry tree, unlike either strawberries or mock strawberries.)

I'm not sure it's connected to the origin of the word, but when I saw straw laid down in strawberry fields like this [1] I thought the name comes from that custom. I believe (still, I could be wrong) that the straw is put there to prevent weeds from getting sunlight.

[1] https://i0.wp.com/oaeblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Ger...

There are multiple theories as to where the name strawberry comes from, but that one is known to be wrong, because the name dates back to before they were cultivated. The one I find most plausible is that it comes from "strewn berry". Similarly, gooseberries never had anything to do with geese, the name is supposed to come from a Dutch or French or German or Japanese word, none of which sound much like gooseberry.

How strange. Growing up in sweden we used to put wild strawberries on straws of grass. It's a simple way to hold multiple berries without some kind of container and without risking crushing them. A quick google search for "smultron på strå" turns up loads of pictures so it seems to be quite a common occurrence. I've never really considered that the word strawberry could have a different origin.

Speaking of which, the Raspberry Jam Tree, also called Jam Wattle, of western Australia, does not grow raspberry jam, but smells like it when cut with a saw.

No plant nursery will sell you a Raspberry Jam Tree, but you can buy seeds on Etsy: "Acacia acuminata".

They are interesting also because the leaves (which aren't leaves, but "phyllodes") and bark have a high concentration of interesting tryptamine alkaloids.

There are many other fascinating details about A. acuminata. Millions of fenceposts in Australia more than a century old (and more every year!) are made of its wood.

If they taste like strawberries is all that would matter to me. Then again I'm one of those people that will often mix what's on the plate and don't really care a whit about "presentation" when it comes to food. My gf hates me for that. Growing up poor in the south will often lead to inclinations such as that.

Tomatoes with some added sugar also taste like strawberries.

Sadly, they taste nothing like strawberries. They're a little sweet, though, and can be used as a filler if one takes good care to strain out the seeds & skin.

They're very common in the bay area as street trees. The fruits are decent, but indeed don't look or taste anything like strawberries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbutus_unedo

Wow that’s a strawberry tree? I always assumed it was some kind of persimmon judging by the taste and astringency when unripe.

And is a distant cousin of blueberries in fact.

Sorry, I got it wrong. I was thinking of a perennial version of Chenopodium capitatum ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitum_capitatum ) not Arbutus unedo.

I know about regenerative agro and I find it amazing as well.

I just want to point out that the way modern agriculture came to be is not dumb at all, the thing is that its focused on maximizing yield above other things. 7 billion people eat something (almost) everyday, I find it quite impressive that the infrastructure to support that, exists.

I hope the world could be stopped (as it happened, more or less, with COVID) in order to fix some of these problems, but in the case of food, it's going to be hard to ask people to stop eating for a while.

> how we can grow food and increase fertility and volume of soil by incorporating more species and doing less work

It still loses in profit per investment to modern industrialized farming, so (almost) nobody cares. If you want people to care - tax soil degradation.

Turns out with artificial fertilizers and modern technology neither work nor soil degradation is as important as quick adaptation to market forces and economies of scale.

Just an aside - I have the perennial walking-stick kale growing at my place. I climb on my roof to to harvest it. It grows enormous leaves too.

Ach, I'm a little jelly (jealous.) :) That's so cool!

How old is it? How is the taste? Is the cane woody or is it more like bamboo or something else? Does it flower?

Yeah, I’ve seen some plants, when looking to buy, where they are described as annuals, or perennials if in the right climate.

Strawberry tree has the color in a similar shape, don't expect the real flavor or texture of a real strawberry.

Sometimes annuals are just handy to use the land in a more efficient way. You can obtain three crops in two years in the same land with annual species