Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though.

• ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Modern farming techniques consider sustainability, the larger problem is countries using traditional methods that are extremely harmful like burning forests.

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  • Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨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.

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    • Bertuccio@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      corn

      On indirect consumption, corn is largely used to feed cattle, make high fructose corn syrup, and other products that are not directly eaten as corn.

      This makes corn insanely inefficient as a food source.

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      • Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        There is a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma which is a great read on this.

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      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        But for now my PLA 3D printer filament is still cheap! Yay? =\ lol…why is everything so broken…

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    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Those fertilizers in turn are mainly made from Oil,

      Fertilizer is not made from oil. Oil/gas is used to power the factory but that doesn’t make the farming unsustainable.

      Because if you use the criteria of where we get our energy from, home gardening isn’t sustainable either because your house is powered by oil/gas.

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      • Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy (see this related article)

        There is also “natural” fertilizer made from organic mass left over from other activities which would otherwise go to waste, but that’s insufficient for large scale intensive farming (composting is fine for your community garden or even for supplementing low intensity agriculture, but not for the intensive industrial farming growing things like hybrid corn).

        Finally, the use of techniques like crop rotation which lets letting fields lie fallow so that natural nitrate fixation occurs and the soil recovers do not make the soil rich enough in nitrates to support hybrid corn growing because, as I mentioned, the plant density is too high to be supported by natural soil alone without further addition of fertilizers.

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  • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨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…

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  • CountryBreakfast@lemmygrad.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is complete bullshit. Unhinged stupidity.

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  • Croquette@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨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.

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