[ilostmyshoes]

What they don't seem to be talking about is learning from indigenous farming communities who use things like diversity in crops and rotation to keep soil quality high. These problems were solved decades ago, just not by the industrial farming community

[tengbretson]

It's like everyone who's ever watched a YouTube video about planting a 3 sisters garden has an opinion for the people actually staking their livelihood on this now.

[codingdave]

It is more about that fact that people talking about sustainable food production do not share many goals with commodity farmers exchanging corn and soybeans for as much cash as possible.

[algoatecorn]

No kidding, and furthermore it's as if they don't take a second to consider scalability, yield, commodity-market efficiency, and labor-force.

[refurb]

"I've never farmed in my life, but I'm pretty sure I know more than the guy who has been doing it for decades and whose entire livelihood is based on it."

[ilostmyshoes]

Or they've read up on anthropology, this is common knowledge in the field

[kortilla]

Pretending indigenous communities “solved” this is a farce. If we switched to their methods 90% of the population would need to die because they don’t scale.

[AlotOfReading]

Not a good look to strawman things like this when you have sibling comments elsewhere in this thread saying the discussion needs more nuance.

I actually did napkin math awhile back comparing a particular 16th century indigenous agricultural yields with 20th century American agriculture [0]. The indigenous system came out favorably until the second half of the 20th century despite the limitations of hand tools and natural fertilizer. There's still a gap between that and current yields, but I think it's fair to point out that most advocates of these systems are actually arguing for a synthesis with modern technologies that allow them to scale rather than a complete rejection of modernity.

[0] https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l4do8a/aztec_cor...

[willcipriano]

What percentage of indigenous people were involved in farming? 100%? It's less than 3% today.

[hedgehog]

Like the rest of industrial age development, farm automation has historically been built around treating everything uniformly (even distribution of seeds bred for easy harvest in evenly spaced rows evenly fertilizied with no rocks etc etc). Moving away from that introduces all kinds of complexity, mechanical problems, data problems, etc, which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of potentially better ways to do things. It's happening though.

[lotsofpulp]

It introduces trying to sell your crops for 5x what your competitor is and no buyer is going to pay 5x for “sustainable” produce.

[randomdata]

We do. Perhaps you may not recognize our lingo. For example, around here we humorously refer to wheat as 'poverty grass' because there is no money in growing it but recognize it as a necessity to keep in the rotation for the ecological health benefits it provides.

[Scoundreller]

There’s money in growing it, but usually where nothing else profitably grows, which is a lot of places.

Hugely mechanized though which makes it work when you have enough crop land. But yeah, $/hectare yield is going to be low.

[peteradio]

Crop rotation is a standard practice. Sugar beats cannot be grown year after year on the same plot.

[tnel77]

Crop rotation seems to be pretty widespread. I remember as a kid learning about it and knowing I’d see different crops each year to help the soil for future harvests.

[sleton38234234]

Crop diversity is great. And you also need lots of organic matter to go on top of the soil: to build life in the soil. that's much better than trying to duct tape the matter with fertilizer.

[mattpallissard]

> Crop diversity is great.

Crop rotation has been standard practice my entire life. One of the many kickers though is soybeans are the fallback crop for really wet springs. Many crops need to be planted by a certain date or the growing season will be too short. Soybeans can "make up for lost time", so to speak. If your first planting gets flooded, or if it's too wet to get any crop in, you can wait until it's dry and toss in some soy to recoup some of the cost. Thing is soybeans use a lot of nitrogen.

> And you also need lots of organic matter

Manure spreaders are still a thing.