farmers will rotate crops because they leech and release different nutrients from/into 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.
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 lets 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.
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.
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!”)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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