• ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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      6 months ago

      All plants require different levels nutrients to grow. If the same plant is grown repeatedly in the same soil then the soil will run out of the nutrients that plant needs and growing that plant becomes difficult. By rotating through plants with different nutrient requirements, the soil can maintain a sustainable balance of nutrients.

      We now use the scientific method to argue ideas, but in the past ideas could just be laughed at if people thought they sounded dumb. People laughed at ideas like the sun being the center of the solar system and doctors needing to wash their hands before surgery. Refusal to accept these ideas held humanity back from technological advancement.

    • Person264@lemmings.world
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      6 months ago

      You can’t really grow the same crop in the same field season after season (without fertiliser), because they’ll sap the specific nutrients they need from the soil. If you do that over and over eventually the soil wont have any food for that crop. Growing something different each season that takes different nutrients from the soil lets it recover the other ones. I don’t know how it recovers on its own, circle of life stuff probably. Modern farming can cheat by artificially replenishing the nutrients with fertiliser.

      • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        The problem is that even with crop rotation much of our soil is still nearly depleted. Most farmers aren’t doing enough varied rotation or rest cycles or regenerative farming since anything other than the same 2-3 crops isn’t profitable for them

      • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
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        6 months ago

        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!”)

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          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.

          • wandermind@sopuli.xyz
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            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.

        • onion@feddit.de
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          6 months ago

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

        • Coasting0942@reddthat.com
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          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.

        • Deebster@programming.dev
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          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.

    • SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      As others have said, a monoculture will drain those specific nutrients.

      Beans are kinda special being a nitrogen fixer. Lot of plants will drain nitrogen so we fertilize as supplement.

      Plant beans, squash, and corn together and you won’t need to rotate your fields and the plants will form a sort of symbiosis working together.

    • Darth_Reagan [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      6 months ago

      farmers will rotate crops because they leech and release different nutrients from the soil. its common to follow up certain crops with beans because they release nitrogen or something into the soil. i’m sure someone else has a better understanding of how it works.

    • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      6 months ago

      In addition to what Darth_Reagan said, it’s for pest control as well. By keeping a plant in the field for more than one season, you provide a food source for pests whose parents went there to feed the previous one. Some diseases only impact certain crops and can stick around in the dead matter only to attack your vulnerable new plants.

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      She is playing the part of the dumb antagonist saying Jeff is stupid for rotating his crops.

      Somehow the dumb antagonist is 5000 years old. Humanity can be dumb lol.

      • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        She’s playing a collective of dumb antagonists, and Jeff may or may not be a collective of progressive thinking/experimenting people who were ignored throughout history despite their efforts.