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Just so you understand... (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 20 points 3 weeks ago* (9 children)

Monoculture farming is pretty much the only thing that's keeping billions upon billions from starvation and is pretty much the foundation of society.

There's also not that much wrong with it. You can absolutely do modern farming sustainably, it's just many don't. So, like all companies, farmers need to be forced to do the right thing.

Also, the Netherlands is basically a giant floodplane, and wetre all fine. It's not our fault other places have a skill issue.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    the Netherlands is basically a giant floodplane, and wetre all fine.

    ...so far.

    What with climate change, larger storms, and sea level rise, though ... might get a bit more spicy in the times to come.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago

    Well, turns out that you can actually prepare for that, since we know it's coming. Upgrading the flood defenses started decades ago.

    River floods are much more risky than sealevel rise, since Germany is lagging hugely with providing water retention for the rivers, and getting people to move out of the way is kinda complex in such a densely populated country.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    While some of the feats of large scale agriculture seem impressive, the fossil fuel industry and those who sell the machinery seem to have inflated the numbers quite a lot.

    Biodiverse landscapes grow a higher density of food with fewer pesticides and herbicides, and better soil health and water retention in the long term. The problem: you need those pesky people to maintain and harvest complex biodiverse systems, and they want livable wages! Best call them savages and uncivilized, drive them away in the name of progess and force everyone to use your machines, fertilizer, pesticides, machinery and fuels.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

    The problem: you need those pesky people to maintain and harvest complex biodiverse systems, and they want livable wages! Best call them savages and uncivilized, drive them away in the name of progess and force everyone to use your machines, fertilizer, pesticides, machinery and fuels.

    Yeah, you can pretty much only do polyculture by hand, that's true. Are you suggesting we go back to unmechanized farming?

    That would be super great for the planet, as it would cause the deaths by starvation of roughly 90% of the population, with the majority of the remaining humans forced into subsistence farming.

    Neither corpses not subsistence farmers would cause much pollution. It might be somewhat hard to get volunteers for it though.

    On the other hand, you can absolutely maintain a biodiverse landscape AND use mechanized monoculture fields. You just need to give nature time and space too, and that's something most farmers refuse to do. Which is why they should be forced to. I don't see why a factory gets banned from destroying biodiversity, but it's fine when farmers do it.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    give nature time and space

    That's what a biodiverse landscape does? I didn't say unmechanized - but there's a difference between running giant machines over 200ha of the same and running a small tractor over a 2ha field. For the landscape it makes all the difference: having 2ha of one thing, then a hedge (that can contain edible fruits and berries), then something else, maybe have pasture with nut and chestnut on it, instead of just pasture.

    Even in a small vegetable garden planting different plants together is so much easier. Higher plants give shade to smaller ones, aromatic ones protect pest-endangered ones ... recreating an actual ecosystem is the real deal.

    Todays' rural areas are empty of people. They were bought out by those people who consented to being enslaved by the machine and fuel complex. The ones who were forced to leave had to become wage slaves in the cities. The ones who run the system now don't even want to touch the soil anymore! They just send a fucking drone to analyze where to dump how much of their chemicals. It's not a sustainable way of managing soil and water.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago

    That's what a biodiverse landscape does? I didn't say unmechanized - but there's a difference between running giant machines over 200ha of the same and running a small tractor over a 2ha field. For the landscape it makes all the difference: having 2ha of one thing, then a hedge (that can contain edible fruits and berries), then something else, maybe have pasture with nut and chestnut on it, instead of just pasture.

    I agree entirely, with pretty much everything you posted, but that's still monoculture. One crop per field, only much more ecologically friendly.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago*

    There’s also not that much wrong with it. You can absolutely do modern farming sustainably, it’s just many don’t.

    uh, i like the example of the Kansas aquifer. It's basically a whole lot of water that has been stored deep underground for thousands of years.

    It is slowly being depleted. The reason is the center-pivot irrigation farming that produces food, and depletes water. The water is basically non-renewable on human timescales.

    It will probably take another 100 years at the current extraction rate until the aquifer is completely dried up. So, it's not sustainable.

    And yet i'm fine with this. Because we probably won't be around in 100 years anymore to actually worry about the water supply in the midwest. human population will shrink and we'll be able to live within the renewable bounds by then. So, it is unsustainable (since we cannot do this forever), but also we won't need to do this forever. So it's fine enough.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 child)

    But hey, we all are going hard right in the Benelux, so in a decade you guys will probably have to pay some private equity company a monthly subscription for them to hold the dikes closed for you lol. Or maybe they will just be so fucked and non-maintained through privatization that the will all fail anyway because it isn't profitable enough

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