Science Memes

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submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Never thought about it that way, so if farmers (at this point probably mostly international big farming corporations) would just rotate their crops, they would not have to buy as much fertiliser, destroy the environment and probably a tonne of other disgusting stuff that comes with mono-cultures, like the excessive need for fertilisers? Yeah, that checks out 🥵 ("It's too much work! Other crops don't sell!")

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

would just

Farmers have been rotating crops for hundreds of years man. Corporate farms rotate crops too. Step down off that soapbox for a moment.

The whole joke is that the person in the image would have made fun of the idea in ancient times, killing the food supply of early civilization and setting us all back by thousands of years.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

Yeah, the point of the joke is that crop rotation has been practiced for literally thousands of years. It was an agricultural invention which gave ancient cultures significantly higher crop yields, enabling a huge number of societal, cultural and scientific developments. The joke is based on the idea that before crop rotation was discovered, some people might have considered it a silly idea, delaying the developments enabled by the significantly increased crop yields.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago

They do rotate, for example soybean -> corn because soybeans add nitrogen to the ground which corn needs a lot of

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Also mixing crops (or non-farmable plants) has big benefits, but it's currently cheaper to use chemically-derived fertilisers and go the monoculture route.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

If only a government could artificially change the artificial incentives, without worrying about the votes they get from the minority who farm and are citizens.