I read years ago that the local Indians, instead of farming or conventional gardening, would create gardens with the desired plants all mixed together (including trees and bushes). This would create an ecosystem of interdependent crops which would provide food year round.
They're largely abandoned and forgotten, but one can find them having gone wild in various places. They're marked by a marked diversity of flora.
Three Sister is a common technique. At least in my region for First Nations people (as we say here). Three Sisters is corn/maize, squash, pole beans (climbing).
Squash leaves are big so shade the roots of the corn, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil, the corn stalks give the beans something to climb on.
Then there is the food types each providing different nutrition.
I always wonder how common it was. You hear it mentioned anytime agriculture stuff gets brought up, but I wonder if it was a small group of people doing this and then everyone acting like all natives did it, or if it was actually widespread as people make it out to be.
In my region the local First Nations people, Mi'Kmaq, teach it to students in local schools. One school made a garden and planted the corn, beans, squash. So at least here it's been talked about. I think they are, rightly, proud of the technique and implementing it. So I would say at least in this region of Mi'Kmaq (south eastern Canada) it was known about and used.
This was often supplemented by burying a fish or other animal near/in where the Three Sisters were planted, providing ample nutrients for less perishable foodstuffs to grow.
I think lobsters was a big part of that. The lobsters used to be in the waters near shorelines supposedly. Even recently i.e. early 1900s before lobster was popular I've heard farmers would gather them on beaches and use them for fertilizer. I live on an island so it's a common thing here to have farms near beaches.
Simple monoculture fields were appropriate for 20th-century mechanical equipment. I wonder if these kinds of higher-complexity arrangements could be automated with modern robotics and computer vision.
I doubt such an organic process could be fully automated - but why would you, given there's plenty of people around? It isn't going to be cheaper I'm sure.
Anyway, there's been experiments with biodiversity that is compatible with machinery by alternating rows of plants. This reduced e.g. the proliferation of pests between rows.
> I would hope that wages will rise across the world, making manual labor intensive processes obsolete. This would be a good thing.
I don't know if this fully makes sense. If wages were to rise manual labor would thrive too. While some people enjoy working in offices same is true of manual labor, some people really do enjoy manual labor (excluding dangerous or demeaning jobs), and of course where it makes sense with tools to make it more efficient.
The only way to raise living standards is to become more productive. Manual or not manual is not really the point. The point is output per hour worked.
Producing far less per hour worked than what is possible is either low paid work or a hobby.
A bit of truth in both your statements. Productivity increases are usually due to investments in equipment and training, and employers are keen to recoup this cost.
So the employees have to demand a share in increased wages. This may not happen. It is absolutely not automatic. No employer turns over increased profits to the employee (well not usually.)
So what has happened during our lifetime is that jobs have been exported to lower wage markets, since the employer reasons that they can invest in higher productivity in a cheaper job market and pocket the difference.
Wage increases are fundamentally automatic, because there is a limited pool of labor and higher productivity means companies have more goods/services with which to bid on that labor.
In the last three decades of the 19th century in the US, wages doubled despite union membership being at historically low levels. The rise in wages was driven by the same process seen globally in every country that has experienced rapidly growing per capita GDP. As companies produce more per worker and compete for a limited pool of labor, they bid higher for workers. This results in greater value, in terms of goods/services, offered to the average worker, which, in monetary terms, translates to higher inflation-adjusted wages.
I was simply explaining why wages rise automatically, not making any comment on government price floors. But since you ask: there should be no government price floors or caps. The price paid should be based on mutually voluntary agreements.
I think farmers are wary of relying on tech like that and ending up depending on some FaaS, or at least the independent ones that aren't just some huge corporation.
I'm from an agricultural region (though more ranching than crop farming). This is absolutely the case. Everyone got fucked over by John Deere and is now extremely wary of such things.
A friend of mine in Brazil abandoned working in tech to start farming using these methods.
He grows many different crops intermixed with native vegetation, it's been about 12-15 years and the progress is astounding, all while helping to recover a little bit of the Atlantic Rainforest of São Paulo.
There's no doubt that industrial ag makes it possible to feed the world. But 10 acres can feed a neighborhood and we have plenty of spare labor. 19th century industrial scale was super labor intensive compared to today.
Just as you might have a mixture of crops, why not have a mixture of methods? What if you had to do 10 hours a week at the "unemployment farm" to qualify for unemployment benefits?
I don't imagine it would put any dent in the need for giant ag producers. But it could fuel a lot of experimentation.
I understand it more as "it turns out composting tons of organic material makes the soil more fertile"
Which is far from a breaking news. I'm just curious about how composting this much agrumes didn't unbalance the soil's pH, but that they don't mention it at all in the article.
It sounds like upsetting the ph balance was a key reason it worked so well. The article mentioned that displacing the invasive grass was part of the reason it worked so well.
Eh, sorta. Biodynamic farming in the form promoted by Rudolf Steiner is kinda semi-mystical and involves astrology, lunar phases and manipulating the 'cosmic forces of the soil' by doing things like burying quartz inside a cow horn.
But biodynamic farming does also emphasise the kind of cohesive view of your crops as an interacting system that you'd find in modern permaculture. It's just that biodynamic implies a bunch of other spirituality stuff that you wouldn't normally consider part of permaculture.
Heh. Sounds like something that works by accident.
In that vein, I'm reminded of the old tradition of consulting oracles to make decisions when hunting or before a battle. If we see an even number of crows we do this, else we do that, things like that. The reason this worked was because the oracle was acting as a random number generator, and being unpredictable can have advantages in such situations (a lesson from game theory).
Well, not entirely by accident - things like companion planting were very much observable as advantageous for pest control or nutrient efficiency. Think like how carrots and garlic both like being next to radishes, and while carrots thrive with being near peas, garlic suffers. It's quite actionable stuff whether you're deciding the layout and planting sequence of a small kitchen garden or a large plot of land.
I am unsure exactly how much of the biology was understood at the time, but it also wasn't entirely drawn out of thin air. A lot of it was just drawing a bunch of known good practices together as a cohesive design philosophy for how to run a farm.
Spirituality stuff was very in vogue at the time, so it's hard to say if it would have even gotten popular without the cosmic forces type stuff. Even if it was a dubious contribution to the actual mechanics :)
In my experience it doesn't beat doing row monocrops in my backyard. It just turned into a big mess of plants shading each other, competing for nutrients, impossible to weed, etc. Never again. I'm native and I thought I would try it. Now I wonder how much of it is true and how much is romanticizing an idea that is a meme and sounds good.
"This story is an exaggeration which has been further glamorized by plant sellers and periodicals that cater to advertisers of natural or organic seeds and other products. In reality the practice was not widespread. The Farmer’s Almanac is rarely a source of factual information." - Richard
"Three sisters is a very inefficient way to grow corn. It is not the way many Amerindian tribes grew their corn as shown by the fields of corn grown by the 5 tribes of the Iroquois. It was used by some tribes, but only if they had corn, beans, and squash adapted to the growing method." - Fusion_power
Fusion_power usually knows what he is talking about, I recognize his name from Tomatoville where he is one of the best scientific posters and farmers around.
>Now I wonder how much of it is true and how much is romanticizing an idea that is a meme and sounds good.
I've long assumed that that's what is happening. Also, you can't just throw all three seeds in a hole and call it done, you have to start the corn and then later start the squash and then later start the beans. It's a whole process. It probably works in specific conditions, but in general normal yearly crop rotation to replenish nutrients with things grown in correctly spaced rows and such is likely to work better and be more labor efficient.
The three sisters approach made it easier to grow crops as the climbing beans didn't need you to create something for the beans to climb. However it reduces your yields by a lot of all crops (the corn shaded the squash, the beans hurt the corn plant) and so it was a bad idea unless land is cheap and labor is expensive.
That isn't to say the idea is always bad, in some cases it can be good. You need to be careful as what seems good might have significant downsides that are hidden.
Exactly. Depending on the whatifs, balancing labor & op-ex vs yield might pencil out differently.
I'm very encouraged that we're discussing more than just maximizing yield. A luxury that the Green Revolution brought us. Huh, I hadn't thought of "permaculture" as a post-Green Revolution worldview before.
They're largely abandoned and forgotten, but one can find them having gone wild in various places. They're marked by a marked diversity of flora.