Comment on I watched several videos on a Combine Harvester's inner workings and I still don't understand how this thing works.

Plaidboy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

From my perspective this “pinnacle of human ingenuity” is actually a farse, because it relies on a monoculture and is therefore unsustainable in the long term.

Don’t get me wrong, the engineering is cool and I understand how important the mass production of food has been up to this point in human history, but there is another side of the story. The advent of machinery like this is part of why modern farmers use so many pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers - a monoculture depletes the soil of its nutrients and decreases natural pest control, necessitating the use of chemicals. The use of those chemicals has in turn driven huge ecosystem changes that we are only just beginning to understand the impact of (such as mass pollinator die-offs, changes to soil microbiology, pollution of fresh water sources, pollution of cropland soil, and more) as well as impacting humans in ways we don’t understand since some of those chemicals make their way into our bodies.

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