That’s a complete mischaracterization. Intensive mono cropping is time and labor intensive because you have to factor in inevitable losses in crop yield (due to blight, pests, etc.) plus the labor costs of harvesting a single crop that all matures at once.
The costs of soil nutrition are also exacerbated because monocropping extracts nutrients from the soil with very little return (there’s a lot of hubbub about rotational cropping with clover and things like that, but it’s not a long-term solution, especially when you’re bleeding money for having a field go fallow)
Building up soil diversity is 100% about working with nature to build crop and soil diversity, and letting natural processes accumulate to produce optimal growing conditions. The issue is it’s not very scaleable, and so grumpy Westerners and urbanites toss it aside because they don’t want to actually grow the food, they just want to feel good about buying it
Yeah. The problem with capitalism is that if you’re not willing to fuck things up for short-to-medium term benefit before moving onto the next thing, you’ll go out of business to someone who is.
Yes, but without fossil fuel inputs humanity couldn’t sustain 8 billion people, renewable energy or not.
My point is that humanity is heading into a foundational tree chipper. Don’t you think we’re already seeing signs of unraveling?
Of course humanity can survive on renewable energy, that’s how we built the Pyramids, but those civilizations didn’t have 8 billion people shopping on Aliexpress or spray cheese on nachos to watch the football game.
I also agree with you that it’s unraveling. But that’s why’d I’d rather try to adapt now and face the reality than pretend I can have Amazon Prime and not participate in killing life on Earth.
Oh, agree. But how many people do you think we can sustain your way globally in the coming decades? We are projected to reach 10 billion by 2050 by some estimates.
That’s a complete mischaracterization. Intensive mono cropping is time and labor intensive because you have to factor in inevitable losses in crop yield (due to blight, pests, etc.) plus the labor costs of harvesting a single crop that all matures at once. The costs of soil nutrition are also exacerbated because monocropping extracts nutrients from the soil with very little return (there’s a lot of hubbub about rotational cropping with clover and things like that, but it’s not a long-term solution, especially when you’re bleeding money for having a field go fallow)
Building up soil diversity is 100% about working with nature to build crop and soil diversity, and letting natural processes accumulate to produce optimal growing conditions. The issue is it’s not very scaleable, and so grumpy Westerners and urbanites toss it aside because they don’t want to actually grow the food, they just want to feel good about buying it
Yeah. The problem with capitalism is that if you’re not willing to fuck things up for short-to-medium term benefit before moving onto the next thing, you’ll go out of business to someone who is.
Yes, but without fossil fuel inputs humanity couldn’t sustain 8 billion people, renewable energy or not.
My point is that humanity is heading into a foundational tree chipper. Don’t you think we’re already seeing signs of unraveling?
Of course humanity can survive on renewable energy, that’s how we built the Pyramids, but those civilizations didn’t have 8 billion people shopping on Aliexpress or spray cheese on nachos to watch the football game.
I also agree with you that it’s unraveling. But that’s why’d I’d rather try to adapt now and face the reality than pretend I can have Amazon Prime and not participate in killing life on Earth.
Oh, agree. But how many people do you think we can sustain your way globally in the coming decades? We are projected to reach 10 billion by 2050 by some estimates.