-28 karma · joined November 11, 2018
That doesn't work because liberals are unable to understand and empathize with conservative views. They lack the same fundamental values, and so they are unable to see conservative views as being within a set of values that are different from their own. Instead they see conservative views as being contrary to values, period. Liberals being asked to answer a survey the way they think a conservative would will answer agree/disagree questions like "one of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal" with disagree, but actual conservatives say agree. On the other hand, conservatives are able to accurately answer the same survey as a liberal would. Moderates are able to answer accurately as either a liberal or a conservative.
https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva...
And that is relevant how?
>Try growing tomato.
You try. Literally nothing you said except 45-60 days is correct. And literally none of it is relevant to the discussion. What on earth does tomatoes taking 60 days to start producing fruit have to do with no-till or weeds? Pro-tip: my garden is full of tomatoes. It is not tilled, plowed, weeded, fertilized, irrigated, or sprayed with anything. Pruning tomatoes lowers the yield per plant, it only increases the yield per sq foot, which is why only greenhouse producers do it.
>Compared to tomato production tilling is a low effort.
So because you have a garden and you waste lots of time gardening poorly, that means it makes sense to waste even more time doing more unnecessary labor to lower your yields? Tilling is labor, saying "I do lots of even dumber things" doesn't change this.
>In Europe only like 4% farmland is zero-till.
So those 4% are magic and defying the laws of physics? Or those 96% are dumbasses?
>Zero-till can only be used for very specific crops.
Nonsense. Name a single crop that you think can not be grown no-till and I will show you someone growing it no-till.
The above farm is 20 times that size and switched over specifically because it is more profitable, that's the point. Maybe instead of insisting that reality isn't real you just watch the video? We're talking about real farms, not piddly hobbyist nonsense. If I were underestimating farmers, we wouldn't be having this discussion. But since most farmers are old, stuck in their ways and borderline illiterate, lots of them keep doing the same bad things that we've known are bad for over 70 years.
>Cucumber/tomato/potato/radish and are not native to Europe. Not only that but most of the vegetables you eat is heavily modified by selective breeding to increase yield.
None of those things are relevant at all. The genetic difference between crop species and their wild ancestors is tiny, and in fact most crop species out-compete their wild ancestors when sowed together.
>Weeds, on the other hand, are aggressive plants that optimize for survival.
All plants are optimized for survival. That's a meaningless statement. The question is survival WHERE? Wolves are optimized for survival, yet if you toss one in the middle of the ocean it doesn't actually survive. Corn is optimized for survival, but if you toss it in a barren dead patch of dirt, it struggles to grow. Corn evolved to form symbiotic relationships with fungi, which your tillage has exterminated. There are plants that evolved to grow in barren dead dirt. They do well there. You call them weeds, and pretend the ecosystem doesn't matter, weeds are just magically better no matter what. Yet if you have a healthy soil with plenty of undisturbed fungi, the corn out-competes the weeds.
Take the wild ancestor of any crop you are pretending can't compete and do a test with it. They compete fine in a healthy soil with a balanced microbiology, just like their modern crop varieties do. But if the rhizosphere is gone, the only plants that can grow well are those adapted to dead barren dirt, whose entire ecological niche is to colonize such areas and gradually restore them to healthy ecosystems. So on tilled dirt, they get out-competed by weeds just like the modern crop varieties do. Again, if you simply watched the video I linked before which you said you watched, you would already have had a microbiologist explain this for you with nice diagrams and everything. Ecological succession is real. The species which thrive in barren dirt are not the same as the species that thrive in old growth forests. Are pine trees not optimized for survival? Then why do they get out-competed by weeds if I plant them in tilled dead dirt? Have we modified them by selective breeding to increase yield? This is trivially easy to test for yourself if you don't believe scientists and their silly evidence.
>Weeds grow because you need have certain spacing between your crops. You either need to use chemicals or labour and tilling to ensure high yield.
No, you leave the residue and it blocks 95% of weed seed germination. If you haven't heard of mulch, you're not even attempting to be a farmer. You are just blindly going through the motions of what your great grandparents did.
>You will till to prepare for sowing.
No I do not.
>Even "no-till" farmers will till to some extent.
No we do not. The coulters on the planter simply open the soil for the seed to be deposited. Seriously, go look at a no-till planter before pretending they don't exist. You are thinking of strip tilling, which is a form of conservation tillage. No-till is not conservation tillage, it is no tillage.
>Because you are not a farmer
Yes I am. For someone who seems to have obtained all his knowledge of farming from farm simulator 2015, it seems silly to call the person pointing to scientists, farmers and university agricultural departments "not a farmer".
>Tilling is a very quick procedure that is not labour intensive
How do you think that driving equipment, literally the only labor done on a farm, is not labor? This isn't the 1800s, all farming involves is driving slowly for hours at a time, unless you have a self-driving tractor in which case it involves playing games on your phone. Tillage is literally the slowest and most fuel burning procedure in many primitive farming operations. Only for some crops is harvesting worse. But hey what do I know, I am totally not a farmer right? I bet people who study this for a living in the biggest farming area on the planet will say something else right? Oops, they say I am right. I guess it because they are not a farmer too! https://store.extension.iastate.edu/product/4047
>By labour, I mean manually removing weeds before they spill seeds or outgrow crops
Are you high? How can you say I am not a farmer when you think people walk around 5000 acres of fields pulling weeds by hand? Driving a tractor is labor. Literally the only labor done on a farm in decades.
>For many vegetable/fruits, manual weeding is still essential.
Maybe somewhere in eastern Europe where they are still living in the 1820s, but in the 21st century literally no farms do any manual weeding. Vegetable "farms" are called market gardens, and they use mexicans to pick the vegetables, not to weed.
What are you talking about? We're doing it using the increased atmospheric CO2. Slash and burn is what is destroying the planet, and it has terrible long term productivity. That's why they have to keep slashing and burning.
>There's still a lot of wilderness left, and I think we're approaching maximum land under cultivation.
The acres currently under cultivation is entirely irrelevant. If I burn down 100 acres of rainforest every year and cultivate it, its always 100 acres of cultivated land. But I am destroying 100 acres of wilderness every year. The land that is now a barren wasteland still matters, even though I am no longer cultivating it.
>What they're breathlessly recommending is exactly what we've been doing for over half a century now (really, about two centuries) - improving yield.
Except we're not doing that, which is the point. We accidentally did that with CO2 emissions, but we're reaching the limits of what increased atmospheric CO2 can do. Once CO2 is no longer the limiting factor for growth, no amount of extra CO2 will help. Agricultural science is not interested in producing more food with less, it is interested in producing more profit.
Not according to him he didn't. Read his books, he was very clear about everything he did. He grew vegetables to eat, in a completely different area, it had nothing to do with the grain field.
>Also white clover to fix nitrogen
Nitrogen is a non-issue precisely because you can pull it out of the air for free. You said you want a variety of plants to pull nutrients from the ground. Clover pulling nitrogen from the air is not support for that idea.
>Rice is a summer crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop as well, which you use for nutrient migration.
But he didn't do that, he used it for a crop. He did rice and wheat, like I said. Both were crops, he sold the harvests. He did it for decades without any decline in yields. The idea that you need a "diverse polyculture" of plants as the current fad calls it is completely unsupported by evidence. They just need a healthy ecosystem to grow in, not necessarily different plants.
>Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I like (my friend's fields are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well in more temperate climes
The techniques and ideas work fine, but you can't blindly copy his setup as it was. You don't have the season for two crops, so you don't do rice and wheat. You just do wheat. Marc Bonfils has grown winter wheat every year in the same field for over a decade with no inputs, no rotation, and yields increased each year as the soil was restored. If you are in a cold enough climate it might even make sense to compost your straw in the spring in order to warm your soil up earlier, but I am not sure about that yet, I'll be testing it this spring.
"the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power."
Software developers have a tendency to try to claim artist status because what they do is almost entirely meaningless and a waste of time. The exchange of time for money is too transparent so they are unfulfilled and try to imbue their work with meaning. If you want to make art, do it, it can be a hobby. Yet another useless website created to shove more ads in people's faces is not art.
Weeds are early colonizing species, frequently foreign invasives, not natives. They do not always outperform crop species, as demonstrated by the millions of acres where they are outcompeted by the crops. You create barren lifeless dirt, precisely the niche early colonizing species evolved to fill. Of course they fill it. Just because you create your own problem, doesn't mean the rest of us suffer from that problem too.
You do not want to till for other reasons, literally the entire purpose of tilling is to hinder plant growth. The fact that it hinders crop growth as well as weed growth seems to be lost on many people. There's a reason the majority of farms in the US and Canada are already no-till.
The people currently doing your job better than you are pretty compelling evidence. https://hooktube.com/watch?v=UEOVLpZrvvU
You do not need fertilizers because the dirt is made of those very minerals. You have literally tons of phosphorus sitting under your crop, but you have killed the microorganisms responsible for converting it to plant available forms.
Monocultures do not create conditions for diseases and bugs. This has been researched to death. If alternating strips of corn and soybeans lowered disease and pest rates that's what everyone would do. It doesn't help at all. The problem is not the plants, it is the soil.
I have no idea what your last point is even supposed to mean. Tilling is labor. "I don't have unlimited labor so I will use my limited labor on a process that increases my costs and lowers my yields" is pretty hard to make sense of.
The evidence is not on your side.
>Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution.
Uh, the solution to do what the article suggests. Grow more food on less land so that population growth doesn't come at the expense of the last shreds of wilderness on the planet. How does one get to the point where you think "growing more food is hitler!!1" is a reasonable response?
Exactly, we live in a world with machines. Making it easier, not harder.
>I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.
The calories produced per acre is higher, not lower. We need less land, not more. Why do you think it is inefficient?
>That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.
That's a modern myth. We have detailed records of rural life in the 1500s. People worked fewer hours than they do now.
>By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?
Yes. It only takes one person doing it to prove your claim that is impossible is false.
>What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant
No it is not, it is the entire point.
> It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land
It takes less than half an acre of land to feed a person growing food for yourself.
>Your anecdote does not overrule physics.
Please point me to the law of physics which states plants don't grow if stale2002 doesn't want them to.
No it is not. Current RNI is 1.06% and projections do not suggest it getting down to replacement levels in the next 50 years unless mortality increases substantially.
>Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally.
By destroying vast portions of the natural world and wiping out thousands of species and even putting the future survival of our own species at risk. The "angst" is entirely valid. Destroying the planet to prop up obscenely inflated population levels for absolutely no benefit is horrifyingly evil. The expected population growth in Africa is enough to finish destroying every last spec of natural ecosystem on the planet that is capable of being used for food production. Yes, we absolutely need to address this problem.
I think the biointensive system Jeavons promotes gives you a pretty good starting place, but it does promote a bit of needless work. Skip the composting and just use the compost crops as a mulch. There's no need to build piles and turn them and then spread the compost, you can just let it compost in place on the garden where it will end up. You can skip growing the compost crops too if you have trees to collect leaves from in the fall. And save your back and skip the double digging, or any digging at all for that matter. All it does is set you back in your first couple of years for no reason.
No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds?
>If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.
If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.
>The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
Nothing. Large animals that live long lives are inefficient by their very nature. The bigger an animal is, the more of its energy consumption goes to maintenance rather than growth. And the longer it lives before reaching slaughter weight, the more that inefficiency compounds. If you somehow turned cattle into 5 pound animals that mature in 6 weeks, they would be efficient, but they also wouldn't really qualify as cattle any more and their meat would likely be noticeably different than beef.
That doesn't appear to be needed. The plants don't have the ability at all, the microorganisms they attract and feed do it. You can build fertility while growing a single crop year after year, Fukuoka did rice and wheat every year for decades on the same land just fine. As long as you keep the microorganisms fed and don't insist on a program of routinely killing them, they'll break down the minerals that the plants need and make them available.
>Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it.
No you don't. When it happens in an anaerobic environment you get end products that hinder plant growth instead of helping it. This is the main reason soil compaction is a problem, you get pooled water in the ground creating anaerobic conditions which kill off all the good bacteria and fungi.