“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…
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 month 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.
Bertuccio@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
There is a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma which is a great read on this.
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 1 month ago
But for now my PLA 3D printer filament is still cheap! Yay? =\ lol…why is everything so broken…
Kingofthezyx@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Greed
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 month 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.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That’s exactly what I said! Fertilizer is not made from oil. The factory is powered by oil. Just like your home where you garden is powered by oil.