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 let’s 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.
Comment on Beans
grubberfly@mander.xyz 2 years ago
cam someone spoon-feed me this meme? i don’t get it.
Person264@lemmings.world 2 years ago
Gnugit@aussie.zone 2 years ago
It also makes it stronger against disease.
jlow@beehaw.org 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years ago
They do rotate, for example soybean -> corn because soybeans add nitrogen to the ground which corn needs a lot of
Deebster@programming.dev 2 years 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.
Coasting0942@reddthat.com 2 years 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.
JJROKCZ@lemmy.world 2 years 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
bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 2 years ago
Soil requires fertilizer regardless, every harvest you export nutrients out of the soil that need to be replenished. The main purpose of crop rotation is to avoid proliferetion of diseases and pests.
triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml 2 years ago
some crops replenish nutrients, e.g. legumes directly fixing nitrogen from the air.
just because capitalist industrial agriculture is addicted to fossil fuel fertilizers doesn’t mean it’s the only way to farm.
bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 2 years ago
Yes they do, still it’s not sufficient enough to replenish what is needed. Agriculture is an open loop system, it requires external inputs to continue to operate. Without external inputs, agriculture turns into minery.
MehBlah@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Unobservant idiots will always try to hold progress back.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 2 years ago
“Science progresses at the march of funerals” as they say
SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 2 years ago
Plants compete between them for resources, sorry but its idealistic nonsense to claim that they work together.
skulblaka@startrek.website 1 year ago
Plants consume, produce, and “fix” (make usable) different resources, hence the wild success of crop rotation for the last 8,000 years.
Darth_Reagan@hexbear.net 2 years 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@hexbear.net 2 years 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 2 years 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.
chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 years 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.
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 2 years 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.
exocrinous@startrek.website 2 years ago
Hey, we still laugh at scientists who propose good ideas
Deebster@programming.dev 2 years ago
What’s that quote - something like “science progresses one funeral at a time”? Even scientists have their favourite theories that they’ll defend in the face of logic and evidence.
Yondoza@sh.itjust.works 2 years ago
Humans gotta human!
reattach@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Good explanation. Crop rotation also decreases plant diseases and insect damage.
Anticorp@lemmy.world 2 years ago
People didn’t just laugh at those ideas, they actively punished the people who proposed them.
embed_me@programming.dev 2 years ago
Execution is punishment? 🧐
Anticorp@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Would you consider it a reward?
Neon@lemmy.world 2 years ago
WHAT?
xantoxis@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Because change is costly and therefore a risk. When it seems that resources are scarce, risks are dangerous, and it can seem rational to destroy ideas that cost more resources, lest your imagined model of society collapse for lack of resources as the idea takes over.
It’s always conservatism, in other words.
JJROKCZ@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Because many considered and change to be an affront to Gods will. So they killed free-thinkers to prove God infallible
Anticorp@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Because they challenged the notion that mankind is the center of and purpose for the universe.
Woovie@lemmy.world 2 years ago
I feel like this is something that would happened at one of my past shitty jobs or in a crappy friend group.
Xephonian@retrolemmy.com 2 years ago
Used to before the whole covid scam anyway. Now it’s “trust the science” which of course is an oxymoron. The whole point of science is that we don’t trust it, we verify it. And that wasn’t allowed.