I recently came across the videos of Oregon State horticulturalist Andrew Millison, who is an amazingly clear presenter about permaculture: https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos
I had some time several months ago and happened to look through a copy of Lo—TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism instead of reading on my phone. It has some good sections about the styles of permaculture you mentioned. But it is more of a collection of short chapters on each technique rather than a deep dive into any one.
Interestingly enough, the century XX saw a tremendous shift of agriculture from northern, wet lands to southern, sunny land. You could drain your aquifer but you could not add extra sun up north.
I wonder if the trends reverses as aquifers are done with, and agriculture in places like US's original 13 colonies or middle Russian lands or Prussia or northern France becomes trendy again.
If global warming is real and weather will change, it's possible that some shifts. Cold places will become warmer.
It's also important to think about predictability. Issue with many lands is unpredictable weather. You put your grains in the soil, month later you've got -2C and grains are dead. I feel that global warming will not help here, but rather will make things worse: weather will be less predictable, even if average temperature goes up, local extremums will occur often.
I don't think this is entirely true. I know in Canada we grow wheat, soy, rapeseed and rye in the Prairies, which has a harder time with traditional yellow human corn.
And wheat is a very important staple. We feed a lot of the world!
So while there is some fallow land, this exists everywhere, and I don't think repurposing will help.
Home gardeners seem like a pretty good option here. For more regular vegetables, this is already a thing that exists with seed libraries and exchanges, and programs that preserve heirloom varietals and sell the seeds to gardeners. Buying these seeds is basically just a way to help pay for the continued cultivation by the breeder (unfortunately, unless you really know what you are doing and are quite careful, preserving a specific variety on your own in a home garden is difficult-verging-on-impossible, despite what 1000 online guides to "seed saving" will tell you).
The harder thing is the grains, since those typically require so much more work to get from the plant to the plate. I've looked into growing my own wheat before (I already have a large garden and have enough space that I could theoretically grow enough wheat to cover a substantial portion of my annual flour use), but the small scale/DIY options for threshing, sorting, grinding, and sifting are just not quite practical (for the level of effort I'm willing to put in, which I'm quite sure is higher than most home gardeners).
If a small scale solution to harvesting and processing wheat can be made relatively cheap and simple, I'd bet you could get home gardeners to support the continued cultivation of these varieties in the same way that they frequently support heirloom tomatoes etc.
Again, to be very clear, the gardeners themselves are (mostly) not doing the preserving. The plants home gardeners grow are a dead-end genetically (usually not being preserved at all, and even when they are, almost certainly representing mixes of several different varieties), but buy purchasing seeds from the larger scale growers, they are paying to support the continued cultivation of those varieties.
I've harvested 25lbs of wheat berries from a boulevard in my city. I then threshed, winnowed it myself. I still have some of the flour and berries left and use it to make bread.
I did my threshing using a lawn mower on a big tarp. This actually worked fairly well. Were I to do it again I would probably want a more repeatable setup. Ive seen some good strategies on youtube.
The winnowing I did with a leaf blower, and worked pretty well, I think I would use this strategy again, but I suspect if you were going to do it more often it would be very easy to build something that would help mechanically.
I have a friend with a little home flour mill which took a while but was perfect for turning it into flour. If you were to do it fresh when you wanted to make bread these little mills are fantastic.
There's a book I highly recommend reading called Small Scale Grain Raising [1] that has a lot of good tips, and ways to do this kinda stuff.
In this book they recommend using a leaf shredder or wood chipper which would be incredibly effective.
I'd be interested to hear about the bucket thresher. Most of the DIY options I found when I was looking where larger with custom flail mechanisms and bike-chain drives etc. Honestly, building the thresher itself seemed like kind of a cool project on it's own, but it was just more effort than I was willing to put in. But a 5 gallon bucket option that runs of a drill sounds much more my speed.
How much did you process? What is the maximum amount you think you would have been willing to process with that method?
I did about 3 pounds at once, but could have done more. Maybe 5 pounds. It goes fast, so you can do multiple smaller batches more quickly than the bigger batch.
I made a round out of plywood to put in the bottom of the bucket, drilled a hole in the center, and put a steel pipe end cap in it. I put a ball bearing in the end cap. Then a threaded rod up through the top resting on the bearing. I cut a round of plywood for the top of the bucket, chamfered to fit snugly. I drilled a hole in the center of that and put a pillow block on it to fit the threaded rod. On the bottom of the rod I put two pieces of flat stock about 1/2 from the bottom and about one inch above that one, just held on with nuts. That's pretty much it. There are lots of YouTube of variations on that design. Runs with a corded drill. Cordless might work for very small batches.
There are open design plans for homestead scale hand fed threshing and winnowing/seed cleaning machines. Put them in series. Sheeves of wheat in one end, clean grain on the other. Well worth the time to build if you are cleaning that quantity of grain.
I would suggest that the edge of a typical busy boulevard features 10-30 thousand vehicles per day, whose brake and tire particles in particular end up in the soil around the road. Typical farm fields might see 30,000 trips over the span of what, 100 or 1000 years? It's not in any way comparable to an urban roadway.
It was erosion control after some new road work. I sorta suspect they did bring in new dirt for it as well. I do only use it in small amounts.
Not really gonna make a difference over time in terms of pollution/heavy metals. But it was still a worthwhile project.
I can't see it's possible to grow a useful amount of wheat for a single family without a decent sized plot and a large amount of labour. Most modern varieties rely on a lot of fertiliser as well. Wheat is more or less useless for the home gardener and has been for 200 years.
Can we create a new plant that (1) tastes good (2) is not a genetic dead end (3) is easily spread to other farms by squirrels and birds (4) low maintainence, and put an end to this DRM?
I mean it would be kind of nice if there existed a forest full of food that nobody had to maintain.
> they are paying to support the continued cultivation of those varieties
The plants are living beings, if they are allowed to behave like living beings without being crippled, perhaps the varieties will continue to exist naturally without said support.
I meant dead end in the sense that their genes aren't going anywhere. 90+% of home gardeners don't save seeds, and the few that do are almost certainly not preserving the strains they think they are since, most gardeners grow multiple varieties at the same time that are all getting cross pollinated. It was not meant to imply anything about the viability of the strain they are growing, many of which are fantastic heirlooms that have been around for generations.
I keep and grow as much seed as possible. It is the only way to adapt plants to your local environment and farming methods and needs. I get plants that are much easier to grow, then breed for taste or other features. Thats how the heirlooms were created.
If you are growing grains and harvesting by hand eat the seeds from shorter plants. Taller plants are easier to handle. And give more straw for animal bedding. Taller grains have been mostly bred out of the seed stock. Machines are more efficient on shorter plants.
Yes, I didn't mean to say it was impossible. Merely that the vast majority of home gardeners aren't doing it. If you have enough space to grow enough of something to keep a decent genetic pool going (which already excludes the vast majority of home gardeners), then it is certainly possible to either/or preserve a given strain or adapt a plant to your very specific micro conditions.
Most home gardeners can much more easily support the maintenance of old strains by buying heirloom seeds from breeders.
However, if one has the space, time, skills, and interest to do what you are doing, then by all means go ahead.
As long as we can still order seed new genes can be introduced, in a small plot, at any time. My goal is to easily grow good food. I really don't care how old the line is or what it is named. That just doesn't matter when growing for food. If you are buying seed for a specific variety that is already a narrowed gene line. If the saved seeds are producing for you it doesn't really matter how narrow the gene pool is. You actually want to narrow the gene pool that is what adapting is.
All you really need space for is allowing plants to reach full maturity. Some plants, like carrots or radishes, get huge if left to seed. One fruit from most plants will give you more seed than you likely planted. Each seed in a fruit is a unique individual that was fertilized by a different pollen. Even with self fertilization the seeds will not be genetically identical.
> I keep and grow as much seed as possible. It is the only way to adapt plants to your local environment and farming methods and needs. I get plants that are much easier to grow, then breed for taste or other features. Thats how the heirlooms were created.
Do you actively select and breed the plants you grow, or does the selection happen "by itself" since only plants that are somehow adapted to local condition reach maturity?
Both. I started doing this because my area was populated after industrial farming started. Local adaptation slowed drastically after it was possible to ship food such long distances. Prior to that every food grower kept seed and brought them to new environments. I came to realize that all my seed comes from at least 8 degrees closer to the equator than me that are generally warmer, have a longer summer and are certainly dryer.
Starting with a new plant I will buy a few varieties whose descriptions suit my fancy. Then plant as many seeds as I have space for. Adapting plants is a numbers game. Some won't germinate, some will grow slowly, some will become diseased and some will be eaten by pests. None of those are suited for the local environment. Thin the planting to allow the strongest growers room. It should be obvious which ones to keep. Once you have the plants that started from seed best its time to start selecting for other traits. Traits depend on the plant but for food you should be selecting mostly for taste at first. For example, I am crossing one pea variety selected for wirey strong vines and purple pods and a couple others for taste. This is my third year with those and I am getting sweeter pods on wirey vines but the vines aren't quite as strong or tall. So, I planted some of the original wirey vine seeds to try pushing the line that way more.
Some trait selection is unintentional. The plants are going to adapt to you as well. They will adapt to how you plant, harvest, and save the seed. With my grains some of the plants are too short to harvest with a sickle comfortably. Those go in the eat or feed to chickens pile. Some also don't separate from the plants when I thresh by hand. Also to the chickens. What I am left with are seeds that were easier to process just by not being super careful to get everything. With biennials or clonal root crops you will also unintentionally select for plants that store well as you have to keep the roots over winter to plant them in the spring.
I started saving seed about 5 years ago so nothing has really stabilized into something that could be considered a new variety. But, I have seen the steps closer to my goals.
Purchased seeds are a narrow part of that plants gene pool. If they are open pollinated they were bred until most of the produced seeds make the same looking and tasting plant in a specific environment. Really, if you are gardening, you should learn how to save seeds unless you have a seed grower near you. If you save seeds you will also have more seed than you know what to do with.
I'm not saying anyone should, but in the context of preserving particular strains and particular genetic diversity (which is what this article is about), if you are breeding willy nilly (which there is nothing wrong with, and can, as the other commenter mentioned, help you select for your very particular micro-conditions), you almost certainly aren't preserving whatever strain it is you started with.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems like promoting genetic diversity and maintaining the purity of specific strains are contradictory goals. Wouldn't you want a lot of cross-pollination to maximize overall genetic variation and generate lots of new varieties?
There is the perfect situation and then there is the best realistic situation. The perfect situation for maintaining and expanding genetic diversity is probably going back to every region growing it's own particular strain of a given vegetable, with people in those regions mostly breeding and maintaining their own strains. In the really old days, pretty much everyone in a small region was growing the same variety (ish) and was saving their seeds and the combined gardens of the community (village, what have you) were more than large enough to be a self sustaining population, while also being the right combination of homogeneous (to maintain good traits), and large enough to have enough diversity to allow for new traits and hopefully even protect against disease or changing conditions.
But that's not really realistic anymore. If someone like the other poster, who has the space (both to maintain a large enough population as well as the distance from other gardeners who might be growing modern strains), the time, and the interest, they can indeed be doing the "best" thing from a genetic diversity perspective (as long as they make sure that their strain doesn't die with them). But those people are very, very rare. So the next-best option is to try and maintain the current genetic diversity we have, in a persistent way (as opposed to a static way in seed banks), by having breeders breed as many different varieties as possible. They will hopefully be following the dual mandate of maintaining unique traits while also allowing adaptation to changing conditions.
Your average gardener, even if they wanted to, can't maintain any real genetic diversity because A) they don't have the space for a viable population and B) their genetics will constantly be contaminated by their neighbor growing Early Girl or something. So making sure that the already extant genetic diversity doesn't dissapear by supporting heirloom breeding is not the "optimal" solution to genetic diversity, but it is, in my opinion, the best "realistic" solution.
> The plants are living beings, if they are allowed to behave like living beings without being crippled, perhaps the varieties will continue to exist naturally without said support.
Alas, there are too many humans for that. So, either you support the plants, or one of us has to give - plants or humans. Humans aren't known for giving in, which means slim odds for unsupported plants.
Yeah, this tendency of ours (and life in general- look how invasive species can flourish without much predation) to take what we can has gotten us in trouble now that we have so many resources available to us.
Unpopular and I'm not sure how unethical, and likely dead on arrival in congress, but rrgulating the extraction of resources, including and especially petroleum, is one way. Needs to go hand in hand with culture shift to be effective, though; enough of us have to realize the harm we're doing and opt for a better (as in, more respectful of the future of diverse life on earth) way to live.
If there are hundreds of thousands of plant varieties in that massive seed bank in Svalbard, and only 150 plants are cultivated for consumption today, how the heck is eating a more diverse range of plants supposed to replace seed banks? Is it that everyone on earth is going to eat 1000x more plants than we do now, or is it that there will be 1000x more farms, each making 1/1000th as much money?
I know the author is not arguing to tear down all the seed banks, they're saying we should keep plants alive by growing them. But I don't see how it pencils out. To me, this article makes the case for seed banks stronger by pointing out how that proposition is just impossible in reality.
If I understand correctly, it's that everyone will still eat < 100 plants, but they'll be different ones from everyone else. Maybe every grocery store won't have the exact same kinds of squash in it. Maybe we'll have more region-specific crops!
The example given about olive trees is illustrative, I think.
That's where the economics question comes in. How do you make a living as a farmer selling a very specific variety of squash, when there are now (let's say) 9000 varieties of squash on the market, and the same number of people out there buying squash?
The same way you make a living when there is 1 type of squash in the market and 9000 farmers planting it. Mostly through government subsidies sometimes supplemented by selling actual food eaten by actual people.
That’s perhaps overstating things, but remove biofuels and we would have an even larger surplus even as everyone gets fat from excess production. Western farming has no real need for increased efficiency unless we get rid of a lot of farmland.
Grapes, apples, and a few others get labels but I see a lot of generic items. Do you know the exact kind of carrots you’re buying in those little bags? Are your pumpkins just labeled pumpkins? How about blueberries etc etc.
how do you allocate which types of squash farmers will be able to plant? Knowing very little about farming, I do know that certain varieties have much more desirable traits than others. For example, yield, pest resistance, soil acceptance, etc. What if everyone just wants to grow the "good" kinds of squash? How do you allocate the winners and losers? How do you allocate who will get to eat the "good" squash?
My idea can't be wrong, it's the world that must change.
That about summarizes these types of articles. Solutions that do not require the world to change its behavior should be favored. Perhaps we could launch seed containers into low orbits such that they automatically and safely return to earth centuries in the future just in case.
The way the world is today, that's the result of earlier people who changed it.
Almost everything we have, from religion to politics to technology to morality to language to culture, etc. etc., all comes from people who intentionally changed things. Compare us to our ancestors 10,000 years ago, nomads emerging from the Paleolithic with only stone tools, no writing, etc.
Reactionary perspectives - the hot trend of the unwitting - seem to think that the world was what they grew up with, as some natural state. Someone dreamed, worked, sacrificed, persuaded, etc. to make it this way.
It's great news - we can do it; we can make a better world. You don't have to be Copernicus or Jefferson to do it. Our ancestors paved the way, put down lane markers and signs, gave us every tool we need. What are you waiting for?
The world has mostly been changed by those who went off and built something themselves or with a small group.
Let's not forget that the world's largest famine was only 60 some years ago and was due to someone persuading a country that food yield should be a lower priority. GMOs and factory farming are the tech that moved humanity forward, the tech that people dreamed, worked and sacrificed for. People no longer starve because some locusts ate all their crops or there wasn't enough rainfall, and that's a pretty big deal.
There's zero nuance in this article, it is heavily biased and has no consideration for the negative externalities such as the lower and less predictable yields, the increased difficulty in farming and processing all the different grains, the cost and risk that the farmers are taking on by planting them.
We almost caused a famine in Sri Lanka recently by pressuring the government into banning chemical fertilizers, causing an economic crash (not the only reason but a significant one). I'm all for progress, but how about we be careful with all the "dreams" that have a decent chance of causing mass starvation.
> Compare us to our ancestors 10,000 years ago, nomads emerging from the Paleolithic with only stone tools, no writing, etc.
Aren't we still those people?
Aren't stone tools, and tools made of wood, bone, and other plant & animal parts, enough? They don't require smelting (though I wouldn't be surprised if someone(s) 10,000 years ago got curious about the metal bits in their fire and traced it back to iron deposits in the sediment stuck to the wood gathered from a dry riverbed), and are far less environmentally damaging than a lot of the stuff we make these days.
Numerous other animals make and use tools, and plenty others don't seem to, and they get by okay- a meaningful life can be lived without the technological trappings we've cocooned ourselves in.
I take neither this phone nor reading and writing for granted; it's all wonderful and unnecessary technology. Who needs to read & write when you are part of a tight-knit, mutually-supportive community with a rich oral tradition going back millennia?
Other animals, and most of our ancestors, don't 'get by ok'. They live/lived short, painful, meaningless lives. Many/most die before reaching adulthood; they suffer disease, famine, war; they were illiterate and endured brutal physical labor, no freedom, a constant struggle to survive. Many people still suffer from most of those things.
We don't need every application of technology, but the rest is a fantasy.
This is likely not an answer. Small-scale sustenance farming is not enough to support humanity at scale. (Without ag-industry methods, we're about 4 billion people past the planets carrying capacity)
Also, if that small farm is something you dream about, I strongly suggest actually working on a farm for a while. It is surprisingly not fun. I know "I'm gonna have a farm" is a popular escapist things for many folks in tech - it is for me as well, the fantasy is great :) It's just good to know what that actually means, and then deciding if you really want to do that. (For me, it means I have three plants on my balcony to keep the dream, and skip the full experience because I know I wouldn't enjoy it)
While I agree its mostly escapist for tech workers who dream of building a farm, as someone who didn't just dream but am actively following it, I very much enjoy the hard work.
Maybe because I grew up on a farm and this is returning, but also because I do expect about 4 billion people to die in the coming climate decline? collapse? and would like to leave better more resilient bones (buildings, good soil, lumber trees, good game, maybe some tools, landrace seeds etc), the skeleton of a more sustainable life to those who come after.
Actually, I love farm work. I grew up in the country and did quite a bit of farm work when I was younger. It felt great to be outdoors, and not have the constant massive stress I now have as a knowledge worker with ADHD. But it pays poorly and is hard on your body.
> Also, if that small farm is something you dream about, I strongly suggest actually working on a farm for a while.
I've both done that, and I sit in an office chair 8 hours a day. Anyone who prefers the latter has a different set of maladaptive personality defects than I do.
> This is likely not an answer. Small-scale sustenance farming is not enough to support humanity at scale.
It's ok. No one really needs to think about that anymore. When fertility rates went sub-replacement, humanity became functionally extinct, at least in those regions. Everyone's planning a future for their species which it no longer has.
> I know "I'm gonna have a farm" is a popular escapist things for many folks in tech - it is for me as well, the fantasy is great
Not a fantasy. I'm a few weeks/months away from buying a combine. I have a particular model in mind (John Deere model 42), but the used market is a little difficult to deal with. I may end up paying a few thousand to have it shipped from out of state (or even Canada), but no one can tell me if it's narrow enough to fit on a flatbed trailer.
I have less of a clear idea about what tractor to pull it with, I really need something up around 100hp, something gen ii probably. A 4230 with a cab sounds nice, but it's like 9 gallons of diesel an hour. I'd grow sunflowers for the fuel, and I'm experimenting with a chloralkali machine for the soda lye (there are places not far away with salt springs, so I'm looking for real estate like that for salt). Currently assembling a larger machine I've got half-designed. Would use butanol instead of methanol.
Not sure I could survive in a place where all I can do and hope for is "a balcony with some houseplants". Sounds soul-crushing.
> When fertility rates went sub-replacement, humanity became functionally extinct, at least in those regions.
That is... also a way to look at it.
1) Migration is a thing, so unless total fertility is sub-replacement, "functionally extinct" is a tad bit premature. Turns out that across the world, we're still above replacement rate.
2) Fertility rates do change over time. E.g. the fact of group size temporarily inducing stress-related infertility until a population is below a certain level is well-known and understood. Here's a great experiment on it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11100725/
It's at least plausible that sub-replacement rates in humans are a similar self-regulation mechanism. I'd suggest that "functionally extinct" is maybe a bit of a premature judgment.
Yeh, the mathematically correct way. There are only about 4-5 generations of humans on the planet at any given point in time. Only the youngest of those can create the next generation. If each generation is getting smaller than the previous because the fertility rate's low, why would you expect population to stabilize?
> Migration is a thing, so unless total fertility is sub-replacement,
Outsourcing your fertility to countries with rapidly declining fertility probably isn't a long term (or short term) fix for the problem.
> "functionally extinct" is a tad bit premature.
In less than 25 years, it will be global. Unless you believe that in a handful of African countries that it will stay above 5 forever, even though it was twice that less than 80 years ago.
> the fact of group size temporarily inducing stress-related infertility until a population is below
So, you believe that all the little girls who exist today, who grow up as only children, who have no aunts or cousins, who see their school teachers childless, all their role models childless... they'll grow up themselves and say "Wow, I want 9 children of my own!"?
I think you're confusing the models here. The moose don't have low fertility, it's as high as ever, but the wolves eat so many offspring, or the food sources so sparse they starve.
In the stress-induced models like Calhoun's mice, population never recovers. The mice become extinct. Even though there's plenty of food, plenty of water, plenty of entertainment. Even after the population crashes, and there's no overcrowding, even then their fertility rates are so low that they just go extinct.
I have no doubt that unless you're in your 60s, you'll one day come to understand that I was correct. This is coming, and nothing other than underwhelming horror at the thought of me being correct explains why you choose to argue about it. HN is filled with people who understand how to predict trends with lines on a chart, and you know or could quickly verify which way fertility numbers are trending. Which direction it is that they can only trend, at this point. "Functionally extinct" is indeed the perfectly correct term for this. It's what you call a species that still has living extant specimens, but for which there is no realistic way for the species to survive in the long term. That's humans.
Super-simplified explanation: Three things matter for carrying capacity.
1) How many calories does a human need to survive?
2) How many calories can we squeeze out of an acre of arable land?
3) How many acres of arable land are there?
The first one is pretty much immutable.
The third one is maybe somewhat mutable, but to a very limited extent. We can squabble how much, but let's assume it's fairly immutable. Large changes would need energy amounts that are currently prohibitive.
That leaves calories per acre. And that's where ag-industrial methods had an impact that's absolutely bonkers[1].
As the graph shows, this is not a fixed number - that's why Malthus' predictions ultimately didn't come to pass - but you need ag-industry to squeeze out those numbers. (Without mechanized agriculture, massive production of artificial fertilizer, and Borlaug's dwarf wheat, Earth would have run into massive hunger by the end of the 80s - look for "Green Revolution" for lots of info on that)
And small scale subsistence farming (which is what most folks think of when the say "I want to grow food") cannot utilize all of those techniques.
That's also where the "4 billion" number comes from - we know how many calories/acre non-industrial farming generated, and it was at best enough calories for ~4 billion people. Optimistically.
Yeah, our population is in a petroleum-fueled boom and, as with all other species, it's okay that we go bust eventually. We could control that drawdown, or leave it to the wind.
Or try to claw our way towards technological solutions, which feels like we consider ourselves gods.
Or some combination; what technology can we reasonably keep through a population bust cycle?
What I'm saying is, he's either proposing that every farm grows 1000x as many types of plants as they do today, or that a massive number of small farms (let us say 100 times as many as exist today) each grow a huge variety of plants (let's say 10 times as many types as they do today).
But, crucially, these small farms could not grow the plants they chose to grow, instead they would have to grow an assortment of diverse species or cultivars, for no other reason than to support a living diversity. 99.9% of the plants you'd be growing would be plants that people decided a long time ago that they didn't want to eat, or use for any other purpose, because there was a better alternative.
Ignore the money part. That was me saying that, if consumption/purchasing of plants is more or less stable, then if you introduce 200,000 varieties of plants into the world, every plant would be sold a lot less. It would be more or less impossible to make a living as a farmer.
> or that a massive number of small farms (let us say 100 times as many as exist today) each grow a huge variety of plants (let's say 10 times as many types as they do today).
The Long Now Foundation's mission is "Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years —
a timespan we call the long now."
The leading zero is a way to trigger people to think about the next 10,000 years.
> Interesting. Gets you wondering what else you might not have heard of.
Consider how much of a rabbit hole YouTube can be and then imagine that the subsection of humanity that uses or is able to use YouTube is just a small part of it. A few topics and projects get a lot of attention but there are - I suppose - millions more with a dedicated fan base.
really depends how you read GP's comment. the tone is implied, or is it? read charitibly, y'know, sometimes I do wonder about the things I don't know. I have no idea beyond the surface about how my liver actually works, I don't know what it's like to give birth to a child, I don't know what it's like to go through chemotherapy or how that even actually works. The world is full of stuff I don't know and sometimes I stop a wonder about what I don't know that I don't know.
How far are we from just saving the genetic code digitally and then synthesizing the seeds by arranging a sequence of amino acids to instantiate viable nucleotides? Is this still science fiction?
Quite far. Not only do you need to synthesize the proper genomic sequence (barely possible), but it needs to be packed into a valid chromosome structure with a valid epigenome.
Then that needs to be placed into a cell with valid RNAs, compatible chloroplasts and mitochondria, compatible proteins in a compatible configuration, etc.
Creating all of that de novo for a plant is well beyond current capabilities.
This is why when we clone e.g. a sheep, we transfer a nucleus from the cell of one individual into the cell of a different individual. It is much easier to mix and match pieces of different cells from the same species, than to create those pieces from raw materials.
No, it's not. Seeds and even embryos are to DNA what a running piece of software (and especially, a Lisp/Smalltalk image) is to its source code: the latter stores only a fraction of the former.
And then consider that life is always built by other life, there is no bootstrapping from source code happening. Compare with Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust", and realize that the most important bits about life may not even be encoded in the DNA, but rather in the runtime state that's passed "out of band" from generation to generation.
> No, it's not. Seeds and even embryos are to DNA what a running piece of software (and especially, a Lisp/Smalltalk image) is to its source code: the latter stores only a fraction of the former.
Thank you for pointing out this similarity. While a piece of software is infinitely replicable - a simple git clone from GitHub would suffice -, the surrounding software ecosystem - compilers, interpreters, installers, linkers, operating systems - needs to be in place, as well as the hardware.
Sure, but you don't need to bootstrap the whole system to be able to clone a plant and reproduce it. We already can clone plants using single cells, the next step would be to synthesize the cell from raw ingredients.
yup this is the same conclusion people come to when they talk about long term data storage.
the only thing that actually stores data is people, and the only reason they store it is because they care about it and still use it, but also they must live in an environment, social, physical, and governmental, that enables them and allows them to care.
Corporations and supermarkets impose uniformity on what can be produced by farmers through patenting seeds and restricting purchases to those they consider acceptable to customers.
Instead of putting a significant proportion of the blame squarely where it belongs the author just beats about the bush.
“farmers have come to rely on a few varieties of olive…these trees, some of them over 2,000 years old, are succumbing to a bacterium, imported on ornamental coffee plants“
The global transport of random pants just to be pretty in our gardens is a major factor in the spread of infectious diseases and invasive species. We (EU) need to legislate to stop garden centers encouraging people to plant infected/invasive species in our gardens which then spreads to our important food crops. Especially as there’s an abundance of native species that will not only brighten your garden but also support our ecosystem?
This is an issue that the colonies of Europe dealt with 100’s of years ago as European settlers brought seeds and livestock to the Americans and Australia which got a foot hold in the new world and still to this day cause havoc.
It’s speculated that invasive plant species flourished Australia and the Americas because of the initial advantage of seed arriving on the hoofs of livestock. It took much longer and even to this day less voracious, for species of the New World to invade Europe.
An interesting cavet of human interference is the introduction of the Cane Toad to Australia in the 1930’s to combat an accidentally introduced beatle which was decimating the sugar cane harvest. It was only realised after the toad’s introduction that the beetle spent most of its life up high on the sugar cane while the toad living its life on the ground couldn’t reach it.
The toad to this day causes havoc to the native species of Australia and has spread rapidly with no natural predators.
Most interesting of all there is relatively recent evidence of Australias native fire ants adapting their behaviour and as a social species carry an entire toad back to their nest and consume it!
> The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking.
Seems that it's adding a zero to make you think of the future, and thinking over long periods of time. Looking at scales of thousands of years instead of tens or even hundreds.
A conclusion I reached while reading this article that I can't shake is Adolf Hitler was more forward-thinking, and compassionate, in a way, than Vladimir Putin.
To salvage this sow's ear: damnesian referred to the framing story of this article. Namely, that the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine threatened the world supply of wheat in general and specifically destroyed the Plant Genetic Resources Bank in Kharkiv. Grescoe contrasts this with the World War 2 invasion, which spared the research facility.
> Russian shells hit the Plant Genetic Resources Bank in Kharkiv. Founded in 01908, the gene bank preserved the seeds of 160,000 varieties of crops and plant seeds
Founded by Russian Empire, propped forward by the USSR.
Both of these entities see so much undeserved slander from Ukrainian state and the whole world, so that neither deserve to inherit it.
Have your own Mickey Mouse Decolonial seed bank, use that one.
Same story with Syria which was purposefully destroyed by the US/EU. They didn't dislodge Assad but they did loot and then lose the seed bank.
Come on, please don't take HN threads into flamewar, and especially not nationalistic flamewar. We've had to warn you about this more than once before. Eventually we have to ban such accounts and we've cut you a ton of slack already. I don't want to ban you, so please don't do this!
This is some next level muddled thinking, does the Russian propaganda talk about “slander” and former territories of the empire “deserving” to be destroyed for not wanting to be an imperial province anymore?
How the hell are you offended about people saying that Russia is following an imperialist policy? That’s a plain fact.
And you’re blaming the victims of that policy saying that they had it coming because they hate it!
A seed bank is not something that can be started from one day to another. It requires decades of continuous work from thousands of people, in this case most of them were Ukrainians.
And you would have it destroyed because you’ve decided they don’t deserve it.
Do you want anything that used to be a part of the Russian empire to be burned to the ground as punishment?
I don't view the creation of Russian Empire in a bad light - quite contrary, most other historical options would likely been worse, up and until 1917 at least. And as a Russian I believe that Russian Empire is a part of essential legacy of the humankind. Same with USSR despite its tragic and cruel history.
With the assumption that "imperialistic" policy is an inherently bad thing you should not be entitled to those seeds, which it seems you've stolen anyway.
With regards to burning stuff to the ground, I'd like to hear the Syria story first.
EU was doing civil war in Syria, by astroturfing, endorsing, arming and financing "democratic opposition". It's not even the case of me doing the thinking.
I’m sure you’re not doing the thinking. You’re copying the line of the Russian regime uncritically.
That cynical authoritarian regime which continues to have a country with a declining population, one of the largest wealth inequalities in the world, no human rights, assassinates political opposition whenever it feels like it and has an economy completely based on exploitation of natural resources.
The proud and brave Russians have somehow decided that this regime is what they will fight for because its their best bet for advancing humanity.
Meanwhile the EU bears the humanitarian cost of the Syrian civil war, because they’re interested in protecting human lives.
But in Russia the human lives don’t have value. All that Russia cares about and understands is having a sphere of influence and power projection. Because Soviet Union was great once, and that felt good.
There are plenty bad regimes on the planet. Iraq is going to jail homosexuals for 12 years now. KSA didn't allow women to drive. Most of your answer applies to KSA 100%.
It was you who turned Syria from autocracy into autocracy destroyed by a civil war. This was your crime. Why did you do that?
You're like that sad disadvantaged teenager who planned to mug an annoying neighbour but ended up murdering him when he resisted, and suddenly became a felon for life. Whereas Russia didn't do anything wrong in this specific case.
https://archive.ph/lmdjF