This is one of the things I find funny about modern day self sufficient communes. Subsistence farming is awful, industrialized farming is less awful, but still far more work than most are willing to ever do.
Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though.
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Surplusable farming is literally the basis on which all civilization is built
Like the whole point of the way things work for us now is that you don’t have to be a farmer or a hunter or a gatherer to be able to have access to a consistent source of food.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
The issue is that the current farming techniques are not sustainable.
The fertilizers and pesticides used are burning the land, polluting the underground water pools and killing a bunch of animals and insects.
The agriculture needs to change to something sustainable.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Modern farming techniques consider sustainability, the larger problem is countries using traditional methods that are extremely harmful like burning forests.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The industrial farming of corn in the US requires using hybrid corn strains to reach the yields it has, which in turn requires the use of fertilizers because the natural soils is incapable of sustaining the density of corn plants that hybrid varieties achive.
Those fertilizers in turn are mainly made from oil, which is a non-renewable resource, making the whole thing unsustainible. It’s is possible to make the fertilizers sustainably, it’s just much more expensive so that’s not done.
A lot of the reason why the US is so deeply involved (including outright military invasions) in the Middle East from where most of the oil comes is because in the US oil it’s not just a critical resource for Transportation and Energy, it’s also a critical resource for food.
racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
“Modern farming techniques consider sustainability”
Yeah sure. They consider sustainability in that the current generation of poisons they use haven’t been proven unsustainable YET. When they are proven unsustainable, they’ll move to the next generation, that hasn’t been proven YET…
Also systemically annihilating everything except that one crop you want to grow makes your farmland an ecological desert, that doesn’t sound very sustainable either.
Unless you’re of the conviction that farmland shouldn’t be in any way part of nature, and we should concentrate on just growing crops there and every other kind of life there should be discouraged, and by doing that as dense as possible we keep more space for actual nature.
Though i think farming that leaves meaningful room for (some) nature to coexist with it doesn’t do that much worse in yield to make the modern ‘kill everything’ approach worth it. But we’ll see what the future brings i guess.
But just being like ‘modern farming techniques consider sustainability’ seems pretty naive to me…
CountryBreakfast@lemmygrad.ml 7 months ago
This is complete bullshit. Unhinged stupidity.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Modern agriculture uses ammonia pellets that more than half will evaporate by the time it enters the soil and it seeps into aquifers and rivers.
There is nothing sustainable with modern agriculture.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 7 months ago
In theory, some of those communes are cool. Way less wasteful than suburban living arrangements.
But I do worry about those communes, honestly. The demographics they attract are easy to abuse: aging conspiracy theorists with low education. If the commune owns the land, or even worse if an individual owns the land, then those people could be forced to leave and become homeless. Even if they did own property in the commune, it might be able to act as an HOA or local township and start charging them until they can claim the property that way.
Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 7 months ago
The Agricultural Revolution was a trap
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Q: what does a subsistence farmer do when something goes wrong?
A: they die.
freebee@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
There’s still different approaches to it though. The default industrial gigantic monocultures with massive aquifer drilling is for sure missing a few delayed, less visible costs in the equation. “Improve industrial farming, adjust it back to a more normal scale and add some diversity between the fields and rotate crops!” just isn’t a very catchy slogan I guess.
ashok36@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Also the fact that one bad year in your tiny part of the world means you and everyone you know die slow agonizing deaths. Fun!
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
This is also a major point of livestock. If you have more produce than you can eat, feed the excess to some animals and they will keep those calories fresh and delicious over the winter.
Shard@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Adding on to that, its not just the surplus produce. Its all the rest of the produce that’s unusable by us humans.
When we grow something like corn, we’re only growing it for the kernels that we can consume. We can’t physiologically make use of the stalks, stems and leaves, but an animal like the goat? They’ll chew up anything green and turn that into usable calories we humans can make use of.
JJROKCZ@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Doesn’t even need to be green, just any sort of plant or really any sort of organic matter. Eating goats that have lived off of old trash is probably not the best idea though
Aceticon@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Which neatly raises the point of how modern large monoculture does a lot less of that kind of use of agricultural products unusuable by humans.
Absolutelly, the whole of a cow slaughtered in a slaughterhouse is famously used (down to the hoves) and nothing thrown out, however you don’t see goats being raised on the unusable parts of a corn plant (whilst wheat straw is actually used as feed, for corn the silage for cattle made from it uses the whole plant including kernels not just the left-over unusable by humans parts).
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Explains the name perhaps
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
This is part of the reason why early farming was so inefficient. Have a plot up the hill, have one in the valley, grow multiple crops, etc etc.
That’s not done to have more food, that’s done so you don’t die when something bad happens.