#Agricultural Crops Losses

[milkdongcomics]

National Honey Bee Day 2024 國際蜜蜂日 SICK BEE in "HEY HUMAN, SEE WHAT YOU DO!?" PRE-ORDER: https://rb.gy/hy0eqi Instagram:  milkdongcomics Facebook:  Milk DoNg Comics

[thoughtlessarse]

Romania is suffering from the effects of one of the worst heatwaves in the country’s history. In July, temperatures exceeded 40C and that extreme heat is still causing issues for many, not least farmers, especially those who grow sunflowers and corn. July’s heatwave destroyed the majority of many of these farmers’ crops. Now they say they are expecting losses of around 90%. "If in a good year, let's say, we made somewhere around 2500-3000 kilograms per hectare this year we hope to reach 1000 kilograms, although from what we can see here, we will certainly not reach that,” Dumitru Bita, a farmer from the village of Castranova, told Euronews. His village is in Dolj County, Oltenia, in the south of Romania. Farmers in Oltenia were forced to start harvesting sunflowers three weeks earlier than in previous years. The plants can no longer be left in the fields because they are drying out due to the drought. In fact, some farmers have seen their crops completely compromised.

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Northwest Europe has had months of rain that has impacted crop growth, and Eastern Europe has been suffering drought also impacting crops. Prices will be going up. Again.

[farmerstrend]

The Role of Market Linkages In Kenya’s Agricultural Exports

Discover how Kenya’s agriculture industry is transforming through export diversification, climate-smart farming, and strategic partnerships, driving growth and boosting farmers’ livelihoods. Explore the rise of high-value agricultural exports like avocados and berries from Kenya, and learn how technology and infrastructure improvements are reshaping the sector. Learn about the challenges and…

[reasonsforhope]

"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."

-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024

[probablyasocialecologist]

RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau has shown for the first time, in a joint study with BOKU University, that permaculture brings about a significant improvement in biodiversity, soil quality and carbon storage. In view of the challenges of climate change and species extinction, this type of agriculture proved to be a real alternative to conventional cultivation—and reconcile environmental protection and high yields. Permaculture uses natural cycles and ecosystems as blueprint. Food is produced in an agricultural ecosystem that is as self-regulating, natural and diverse as possible. For example, livestock farming is integrated into the cultivation of crops or the diversity of beneficial organisms is promoted in order to avoid the use of mineral fertilizers or pesticides. In a study, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, researchers from RPTU and BOKU have now, for the first time, comprehensively investigated the effects of this planning and management concept on the environment.

[...]

"Permaculture appears to be a much more ecologically sustainable alternative to industrial agriculture," said Julius Reiff . At the same time, the yields from permaculture are comparable to those of industrial agriculture, as the researchers' not yet published data shows. "In view of the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, the observed improvements would represent a real turnaround when applied to larger areas," says ecosystem analysis expert Martin Entling from RPTU.

4 July 2024

[fursasaida]

In just one month, approximately 462 hectares (4.6 million m²) of woodland, "notably pines and oaks, as well as around 20 hectares of centuries-old olive groves," have been destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, said Georges Mitri, Director of the Land and Natural Resources Programme at Balamand University. Since the escalation of tensions between Hezbollah and the Israeli army on Oct. 8, the latter has used white phosphorus to set fire to forests and fields in border areas. The 1980 Geneva Convention, which Israel has not signed, prohibits the use of white phosphorous on civilians and in civilian areas due to its devastating effects on humans, animals and the environment.

[...]

Amid the ongoing economic crisis, the attacks targeting olive groves ahead of harvest season have a major negative impact on the local economy in the area. "Traditionally, people gather around the olive trees, harvest their crops, press their oil together... A big part of their lives is being lost," lamented Younes. “The olive trees being burned are centuries old," he pointed out. “If we were to replant them today, how long would it be before these fields became productive?” Giving an estimate of the economic losses attributed to the daily fires in the South, Mitri put the figure at nearly 20 million dollars. In the long term, Younes is particularly concerned about the environmental impact of the phosphorus bombs. "We have no choice but to wait until the end of hostilities before assessing the situation on the ground," he said. In Younes’ view, the greater the rate of absorption of phosphorus into the soil and water, the greater the risk of dramatic long-term consequences on Lebanon’s environment.

I'll add here that southern Lebanon has never fully recovered from 2006. There are still unexploded cluster bombs in the ground, killing and maiming people. There is still chemical contamination. The economic impact on agriculture has never been fully recouped. The cancer rates are still elevated and unaddressed. The labor structure and which crops are grown changed after 2006 and have never reverted. I remember weeping watching the bombing of Gaza in 2021 as I was in the middle of writing a paper about the long term legacies of the July War in Lebanon, with these additional long-term violences of the bombing at the forefront of my mind along with the immediate deaths and tragedies. This is a horrifying compounding of an existing injury, at a time when Lebanon is in economic free fall and (as the article also explains) in the middle of fire season, and with firefighters unable to do much because the area is. being bombed.

[mylittleoc-fuse-n-ships]

I am once again obsessed with @skyscrapergods concept of alicorn ascension.

Just thinking about the rest of the mane six as immortal massive deities.

Applejack, goddess of orchards and agriculture, spreading good harvest of each crop as she walks, turning the seasons with her hooffalls

Fluttershy, goddess of the wild lands and animals everywhere. Wherever she steps, biomes explode into being. Her tears can heal the most grievous of wounds. Her mere presence is what drives the mating seasons of various beasts (as an act of preservation and conservation)

Pinkie Pie, goddess of mirth and joy. Where she walks there is no sadness. She also brings comfort to the grieving with soft reminders of happy memories with their loved ones, not taking their sense of loss from them but merely reminding them of the joy that causes the grief to be so profound, and in so doing, easing it.

Rainbow Dash, goddess of storms and weather. She does not walk the earth but rather the reaches of the sky. The most fickle of the goddesses, the weather changes with her mood as much as for the needs of ponies, and just like she can provide rains in a drought, she can bring storms to calm seas.

And Rarity, most unlike all the rest, goddess of gemstones and craft. She slumbers deep beneath the earth. Her dreams form veins of precious stone and metal, and her nightmares form earthquakes and cave-ins. Her spirit runs through the night, accompanying Princess Luna to provide dreams of inspiration to all those who create with their hands.

(Honestly, I'd love to make a sub-AU of your AU with your permission, credit to you ofc, skyscrapergods. I'm genuinely so obsessed with the concept.)

[goodassmotherliker]

All day, I have been doing my best to avoid manipulations regarding the consequences of russians blowing up Kahovka HPP Bridge, but as the catastrophe unfolds, grim understanding kicks in. Many elderly people and people with mobility issues were not able to evacuate before the water flooded their houses. We won't know the extent of the losses until or if the water recedes. Same with domestic animals, animals from the zoo, and rare wildlife species. Thousands of people in the South of Ukraine are losing their homes and being displaced as I am writing this in Kyiv.

Meanwhile, the water washes away mines planted by russian soldiers, and they detonate uncontrollably, floating in the current. Also, russians continue to shell the region to hinder the evacuation efforts of Ukrainian authorities.

Fertile lands are being lost to the flood. This is a huge blow to Ukrainian agriculture and a direct threat not only to ourselves but also to the livelihoods of many countries in the Global South dependent on Ukrainian crops.

The Southern regions of Ukraine are about to face technical and drinking water shortages. Some parts are controlled by Ukraine and may count on humanitarian support. Others are currently under russian occupation, i.e., completely on their own in the face of devastating, life-threatening tragedy.

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is currently occupied by russians, is likely to lose a lot of water used for its cooling systems. russians have also been intimidating and torturing its staff, who stayed there to avert nuclear catastrophe amid the occupation.

This is hell. We can only hope to save as many lives as possible. No country would inflict something so monstrous on itself. Please do not be fooled by the so-called ambiguity promoted by russian propaganda and some Western media. Kahovka HPP Bridge has been mined by russians for months and overlooked by the allies of Ukraine despite frequent warnings by our authorities.

This is a russian doing. This is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. This is an act of terror and ecocide sponsored by the russian people.

[mindblowingscience]

Scientists have discovered that the most widely-used class of antifungals in the world causes pathogens to self-destruct. The University of Exeter-led research could help improve ways to protect food security and human lives. Fungal diseases account for the loss of up to a quarter of the world's crops. They also pose a risk to humans and can be fatal for those with weakened immune systems. Our strongest weapons against fungal plant diseases are azole fungicides. These chemical products account for up to a quarter of the world agricultural fungicide market, worth more than $3.8 billion per year. Antifungal azoles are also widely used as a treatment against pathogenic fungi which can be fatal to humans, which adds to their importance in our attempt to control fungal disease.

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[milkdongcomics]

World Bee Day 2024 世界蜜蜂日 ANIMAN - SICK BEE HEY HUMAN, SEE WHAT YOU DO!? Pre-order: https://a.co/d/6SrfkMf Instagram:  milkdongcomics Facebook:  Milk DoNg Comics

[beguines]

The siege over Gaza includes the damming of groundwater for the benefit of the Israeli settlements surrounding Gaza. On the Israeli controlled side are miles of field crops—strawberries, melons, herbs, and cabbages—irrigated by state-of-the-art watering systems and benefiting from the majority of aquifer waters. To the eyes of the colonizer, looking from across the fences, Palestinian lands seem like dead lands. It wasn't always like that, from the time of the British Mandate to the turn of the twenty-first century, as this book makes clear, despite displacement and occupation, the area was plentiful with orange groves, fruit orchards, and sustenance fields. All this is now gone. East of the siege lines, the landscape immediately turns dry. It includes a hundreds-of-meters-wide liminal zone in which the mere presence of any agriculture at all is based on nothing but the ingenuity of its Palestinian farmers, cultivating with little available water.

The desertification of the perimeter of Gaza is part of the mechanism of its control. Israel routinely sends its bulldozers over the fence to uproot crops and destroy plantation and green houses. As a Forensic Architecture investigation initiated and coordinated by Shourideh Molavi strongly demonstrated, Israel continuously expanded the military no-go area—or "buffer zone". Its use of aerial crop-dusters to spray a toxic plant-killing herbicide mobilized the wind to carry toxic clouds into Gaza territory, destroying agricultural lands hundreds of meters away. Bulldozers on land and toxic clouds in the air, transformed a once lush and agriculturally active border zone into parched ground, cleared of vegetation, a colonial-made desert.

This "desertification" provided the Israeli military with uninterrupted lines of sight and fire into Gaza, leaving Palestinian civilians, including farmers, youth and families, exposed to Israeli sniper fire. In this hundreds-meter-thick buffer zone, more than two hundred Palestinian demonstrators were shot and killed in the 2018–19 demonstrations of The Great March of Return and thousands more maimed.

The desertification of Gaza is presented as a retroactive proof for a core element of Zionist ideology—one that imagined Jews as having returned to a desolate, neglected "dead land," and having revived it. This is the core of the Zionist meteorological imaginary of "making the desert bloom." The Nakba, the loss of a Palestinian homeland starting 1947, is made out of a sequence of acts, massacres, enforced displacements, land dispossession, settlement, and the ongoing daily violence meant to repress the desire for liberation and the hope of return. The Nakba has also a lesser-known environmental dimension, the complete transformation of the environment, the weather, the soil, the loss of the indigenous climate, the vegetation, the skies. The Nakba is a process of colonially imposed climate change.

Eyal Weizman, from the foreword to Shourideh C. Molavi's Environmental Warfare in Gaza: Colonial Violence and New Landscapes of Resistance

[farmerstrend]

Comparative Analysis of Blights: Early Blight, Late Blight, and Gummy Stem Blight

In the field of plant pathology, the ability to differentiate between different diseases is essential for efficient crop management. This article examines the traits that differentiate Early Blight, Late Blight, and Gummy Stem Blight. Early Blight Early Blight, caused by the fungus Alternaria solani, is a common disease that affects a wide range of plants, particularly those in the Solanaceae…

[centrally-unplanned]

Gonna make this a quick one since I just don’t have the spoons for a really big effort post: Pre-CCP 20th Century China Did Not Have Feudal or Slave-like Land Tenancy Systems

Obviously what counts as “slave-like” is going to be subjective, but I think it's common, for *ahem* reasons, for people to believe that in the 1930’s Chinese agriculture was dominated by massive-scale, absentee landlords who held the large majority of peasant workers in a virtual chokehold and dictated all terms of labor.

That is not how Chinese land ownership & agricultural systems worked. I am going to pull from Chinese Agriculture in the 1930s: Investigations into John Lossing Buck’s Rediscovered ‘Land Utilization in China’ Microdata, which is some of the best ground-level data you can get on how land use functioned, in practice, in China during the "Nanjing Decade" before WW2 ruins all data collection. It looks at a series of north-central provinces, which gives you the money table of this:

On average, 4/5ths of Chinese peasants owned land, and primarily farmed land that they owned. Tenancy was, by huge margins, the minority practice. I really don’t need to say more than this, but I'm going to because there is a deeper point I want to make. And it's fair to say that while this is representative of Northern China, Southern China did have higher tenancy rates - not crazy higher, but higher.

So let's look at those part-owner farmers; sounds bad right? Like they own part of their land, but it's not enough? Well, sometimes, but sometimes not:

A huge class (about ~1/3rd) of those part-owners were farming too much land, not too little; they were enterprising households renting land to expand their businesses. They would often engage in diversified production, like cash crops on the rented land and staple crops on their owned land. Many of them would actually leave some of their owned land fallow, because it wasn’t worth the time to farm!

Meanwhile the small part-owners and the landless tenant farmers would rent out land to earn a living…sometimes. Because that wasn’t the only way to make a living - trades existed. From our data, if you are a small part-owner, you got a substantial chunk of your income from non-farm labor; if you owned no land you got the majority of your income from non-farm labor:

(Notice how that includes child labor by default, welcome to pre-modernism!)

So the amount of people actually doing full-tenancy agriculture for a living is…pretty small, less than 10% for sure. But what did it look like for those who do? The tenancy rates can be pretty steep - 50/50 splits were very common. But that is deceiving actually; this would be called “share rent”, but other systems, such as cash rents, bulk crop rents, long-term leases with combined payment structures, etc, also existed and were plentiful - and most of those had lower rent rates. However, share rent did two things; one, it hedged against risk; in the case of a crop failure you weren't out anything as the tenant, a form of insurance. And two, it implied reciprocal obligations - the land owner was providing the seed, normally the tools as well, and other inputs like fertilizer.

Whether someone chose one type of tenancy agreement or the other was based on balancing their own labor availability, other wage opportunities, the type of crop being grown, and so on. From the data we have, negotiations were common around these types of agreements; a lot of land that was share rent one year would be cash rent another, because the tenants and market conditions shifted to encourage one or the other form.

I’m doing a little trick here, by throwing all these things at you. Remember the point at the top? “Was this system like slavery?” What defines slavery? To me, its a lack of options - that is the bedrock of a slave system. Labor that you are compelled by law to do, with no claim on the output of that work. And as I hit you with eight tiers of land ownership and tenancy agreements and multi-source household incomes, as you see that the median person renting out land to a tenant farmer was himself a farmer as a profession and by no means some noble in the city, what I hope becomes apparent is that the Chinese agricultural system was a fully liquid market based on choice and expected returns. By no means am I saying that it was a nice way to live; it was an awful way to live. But nowhere in this system was state coercion the bedrock of the labor system. China’s agricultural system was in fact one of the most free, commercial, and contract-based systems on the planet in the pre-modern era, that was a big source of why China as a society was so wealthy. It was a massive, moving market of opportunities for wages, loans, land ownership, tenancy agreements, haggled contracts, everyone trying in their own way to make the living that they could.

It's a system that left many poor, and to be clear injustices, robberies, corruption, oh for sure were legion. Particularly during the Warlord Era mass armies might just sweep in and confiscate all your hard currency and fresh crops. But, even ignoring that the whole ‘poverty’ thing is 90% tech level and there was no amount of redistribution that was going to improve that very much, what is more important is that the pre-modern world was *not* equally bad in all places. The American South was also pretty poor, but richer than China in the 19th century. And being a slave in the American South was WAY worse than being a peasant in China during times of peace - because Confederate society built systems to remove choice, to short-circuit the ebb and flow of the open system to enshrine their elite ‘permanently’ at the top. If you lived in feudal Russia it was a good deal worse, with huge amounts of your yearly labor compelled by the state onto estates held by those who owned them unimpeachably by virtue of their birthright (though you were a good deal richer just due to basic agriculture productivity & population density, bit of a tradeoff there).

If you simply throw around the word “slavery” to describe every pre-modern agricultural system because it was poor and shitty, that back-doors a massive amount of apologia for past social systems that were actively worse than the benchmarks of the time. Which is something the CCP did; their diagnosis of China’s problem for the rural poor of needing massive land redistribution was wrong! It was just wrong, it was not the issue they were having. It was not why rural China was often poor and miserable. It could help, sure, I myself would support some compensated land redistribution in the post-war era as a welfare idea for a fiscally-strapped state. But that was gonna do 1% of the heavy lifting here in making the rural poor's lives better. And I don’t think we should continue to the job of spreading the CCP's propaganda for them.

There ya go @chiefaccelerator, who alas I was not permitted to compel via state force into writing this for me, you Qing Dynasty lazy peasant.

[reasonsforhope]

"The transformation of ancestral lands into intensive monoculture plantations has led to the destruction of Guatemala’s native forests and traditional practices, as well as loss of livelihoods and damage to local health and the environment.

A network of more than 40 Indigenous and local communities and farmer associations are developing agroecology schools across the country to promote the recovery of ancestral practices, educate communities on agroecology and teach them how to build their own local economies.

Based on the traditional “campesino a campesino” (from farmer to farmer) method, the organization says it has improved the livelihoods of 33,000 families who use only organic farming techniques and collectively protect 74,000 hectares (182,858 acres) of forest across Guatemala.

Every Friday at 7:30 a.m., María Isabel Aguilar sells her organic produce in an artisanal market in Totonicapán, a city located in the western highlands of Guatemala. Presented on a handwoven multicolor blanket, her broccoli, cabbage, potatoes and fruits are neatly organized into handmade baskets.

Aguilar is in a cohort of campesinos, or small-scale farmers, who took part in farmer-led agroecology schools in her community. As a way out of the cycle of hunger and poverty, she learned ecological principles of sowing, soil conservation, seed storage, propagation and other agroecological practices that have provided her with greater autonomy, self-sufficiency and improved health.

“We learned how to develop insecticides to fend off pests,” she said. The process, she explained, involves a purely organic cocktail of garlic, chile, horsetail and other weeds and leaves, depending on what type of insecticide is needed. “You want to put this all together and let it settle for several days before applying it, and then the pests won’t come.”

“We also learned how to prepare fertilizer that helps improve the health of our plants,” she added. “Using leaves from trees or medicinal plants we have in our gardens, we apply this to our crops and trees so they give us good fruit.”

The expansion of large-scale agriculture has transformed Guatemala’s ancestral lands into intensive monoculture plantations, leading to the destruction of forests and traditional practices. The use of harmful chemical fertilizers, including glyphosate, which is prohibited in many countries, has destroyed some livelihoods and resulted in serious health and environmental damage.

To combat these trends, organizations across the country have been building a practice called campesino a campesino (from farmer to farmer) to revive the ancient traditions of peasant families in Guatemala. Through the implementation of agroecology schools in communities, they have helped Indigenous and local communities tackle modern-day rural development issues by exchanging wisdom, experiences and resources with other farmers participating in the program.

Keeping ancestral traditions alive

The agroecology schools are organized by a network of more than 40 Indigenous and local communities and farmer associations operating under the Utz Che’ Community Forestry Association. Since 2006, they have spread across several departments, including Totonicapán, Quiché, Quetzaltenango, Sololá and Huehuetenango, representing about 200,000 people — 90% of them Indigenous.

“An important part of this process is the economic autonomy and productive capacity installed in the communities,” said Ilse De León Gramajo, project coordinator at Utz Che’. “How we generate this capacity and knowledge is through the schools and the exchange of experiences that are facilitated by the network.”

Utz Che’, which means “good tree” in the K’iche’ Mayan language, identifies communities in need of support and sends a representative to set up the schools. Around 30-35 people participate in each school, including women and men of all ages. The aim is to facilitate co-learning rather than invite an “expert” to lead the classes.

The purpose of these schools is to help farmers identify problems and opportunities, propose possible solutions and receive technical support that can later be shared with other farmers.

The participants decide what they want to learn. Together, they exchange knowledge and experiment with different solutions to thorny problems. If no one in the class knows how to deal with a certain issue, Utz Che’ will invite someone from another community to come in and teach...

Part of what Utz Che’ does is document ancestral practices to disseminate among schools. Over time, the group has compiled a list of basics that it considers to be fundamental to all the farming communities, most of which respond to the needs and requests that have surfaced in the schools.

Agroecology schools transform lives

Claudia Irene Calderón, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is an expert in agroecology and sustainable food systems in Guatemala. She said she believes the co-creation of knowledge is “key to balance the decision-making power that corporations have, which focus on profit maximization and not on climate change mitigation and adaptation.”

“The recovery and, I would add, revalorization of ancestral practices is essential to diversify fields and diets and to enhance planetary health,” she said. “Recognizing the value of ancestral practices that are rooted in communality and that foster solidarity and mutual aid is instrumental to strengthen the social fabric of Indigenous and small-scale farmers in Guatemala.”

Through the implementation of agroecology schools across the country, Utz Che’ says it has improved the livelihoods of 33,000 families. In total, these farmers also report that they collectively protect 74,000 hectares (182,858 acres) of forest across Guatemala by fighting fires, monitoring illegal logging and practicing reforestation.

In 2022, Utz Che’ surveyed 32 women who had taken part in the agroecology school. All the women had become fully responsible for the production, distribution and commercialization of their products, which was taught to them in agroecology schools. Today, they sell their produce at the artisanal market in Totonicapán.

The findings, which highlight the many ways the schools helped them improve their knowledge, also demonstrate the power and potential of these schools to increase opportunities and strengthen the independence of women producers across the country...

The schools are centered around the idea that people are responsible for protecting their natural resources and, through the revitalization of ancestral practices, can help safeguard the environment and strengthen livelihoods."

-via Mongabay News, July 7, 2023

[headspace-hotel]

Many people, especially USAmericans, are very resistant to knowing the plants and living according to the ways of the plants. They lash out with a mix of arrogance and fear: "Don't you know what bad things would happen if we lived a different way? There is a REASON for living this way. Would you have us go Back—backward to the time without vaccines or antibiotics????"

Ah, yes, the two immutable categories that all proposals for change fit into: Backward Change and Forward Change! Either we must invent a a futuristic, entirely new solution with SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY that further industrializes and increases the productivity of our world, or we must give up vaccines and antibiotics and become starving illiterate medieval peasants.

Every human practice anywhere on Earth that has declined, stopped, or become displaced by another practice, was clearly objectively worse than whatever replaced it. You see, the only possible reason a way of life could decline or disappear is that it sucked and had it coming anyway!!! Pre-industrial human history is worthless except as a cautionary tale about how miserable we would all be without *checks notes* factories, fossil fuels and colonialism. Obviously!

Anyway, who do you think benefits from the idea that pesticide-dependent, corporate-controlled industrialized monoculture farming liberates us all from spending our short, painful lives as filthy, miserable peasants toiling in the fields?

First of all, I think it's silly to act like farming is a uniquely awful way to live. I can't believe I have to say this, but the awful part of being a medieval peasant was the oppression and poverty, not the fact that harvesting wheat is a lot of work and cows are stinky. Same goes for farm labor in the modern USA: the bad part is that most people working farms are undocumented migrant workers that are getting treated like garbage and who can't complain about it because their boss will rat them out to ICE.

Work is just work. Any work has dignity when the people doing it are paid properly and not being abused. Abuse and human trafficking is rampant in agriculture, but industrialization and consolidation of small farms into gigantic corporate owned farms sure as hell isn't making it better.

Is working on a farm somehow more miserable than working in a factory, a fast food restaurant, or a retail store? Give me a break. "At least I'm not doing physical labor in the sun," you say, at your job where you're forced to stand on concrete for 8 hours and develop chronic pain by age 24.

When you read about small farmers going out of business because of huge corporations, none of them are going "Yay! Now that Giant Corporation has swallowed up all the farms in the area, we can all enjoy the luxurious privileges of the industrial era, like working RETAIL!" What you do see a lot of is farmers bitterly grieving the loss of their way of life.

And also, the fact is, sustainable forms of polyculture farming that create a functional ecosystem made up of many different useful and edible plants are actually way MORE efficient at producing food than a monoculture. The reason we don't do it as much, is that it can't be industrialized where everything is harvested with machines.

Some places folks are starting to get the idea and planting two crops together in alternating rows, letting the mutualistic relationship between plants boost the yields of both, but indigenous people in many parts of the world have been doing this stuff basically forever. I read about a style of agroforestry from Central America that has TWENTY crops all together on the same field.

Our modern system of farming is necessary for feeding the world? Bullshit! Our technology is very powerful and useful, but our harmful monocultures, dangerous pesticides, and wasteful usage of land and resources are making the system very inefficient and severely degrading nature's ability to provide for us.

What is needed, is a SYNTHESIS of the power and insights of technology and science, with the ancient wisdom and knowledge gained by closely and carefully observing Nature. We do not need to reject one, to embrace the other! They should be friends!

Our system thinks land is only used for one thing at a time. Even our science often thinks this way. A corn field has the purpose of producing corn, and no other purpose, so all other plants in the corn must be killed, and it must be a monoculture of only corn.

But this means that the symbiosis between different plants that help each other is destroyed, so we must pollute the earth with fertilizers that wash into bodies of water and cause eutrophication, where algae explode in number and turn the water to green goo. Nature always has variety and diversity with many plants sharing the same space. It supports much more animal life (we are animals!) this way. The Three Sisters" are the perfect example of mutualism between plants being used in an agricultural environment. The planting of corn, beans, and squash together has been traditionally used clear across the North American continent.

And in North America, the weeds we have here are mostly edible plants too. Some of them were even domesticated themselves! Imagine a garden where every weed that pops up is also an edible or otherwise useful crop, and therefore a welcomed friend! So when weeds like Amaranth and Sunflower pop up in your field, that should not be a cause for alarm, but rather the system of symbiosis working as it should.

A field of one single crop is limited in how much it can produce, because one crop fits into a single niche in what should be a whole ecosystem, and worse, it requires artificial inputs to make up for what the rest of the plant community would normally provide. The field with twenty crops does not produce the same amount as the monoculture field divided in twenty ways, but instead produces much more while being a habitat for wild animals, because each plant has its own niche.

[alpaca-clouds]

"Save the Bees" is not enough

Yo, Solarpunks. Let us talk bees. And yes, everyone else, too. Like, yeah, bees.

See, whenever we are talking about insects dying, people will go "save the bees". And whenever I hear "save the bees", I will just go and say: "You don't get it, do you?"

People like bees. Because bees make honey, right? Yeah, only they don't. No, really. The honey bee is just one species of bees, while other bee species do in fact not make honey. Which is why we domesticated the honey bee, but not those other species. Duh. Because one was useful to us, while the others were not. As such we love the honey bee, but do not care about the other insects that are dying off.

Meme culture tells me, that you have probably seen Bee Movie. And I will now shock you. The movie lies to you! ("No!" - "YES!") And with that I do not mean, that actual bees are unable to speak. Or the fact that most bees are female (if we really wanna impose genders on bees). No, with that I mean the big thing that happens in the finale of the movie of all plants and what not dying off.

For those, who somehow have not seen that 90 minute meme: In the movie the honey bees sue the humans for stealing their honey. They win. Have their own honey and stop working. (Boy, lots to unpack there, eh?) and because of it all the flowers and crops die.

Well, here is the thing: Honey bees are actually not that important as polinators. Like, sure, they polinate a lot of crops and flowers, but... normally they are not the big pollinators, even though we kinda make them to, by shipping all those honey bees around. Other bee species pollinate a lot of plants, too. And so do other animals, like bats and birds for example. And that is without going into the less liked animals that pollinate, like flys. And then we also have all those self-pollinating crops and flowers, as well as air polinating plants.

Let me make one thing clear: You should care about bees. All the bees. (Because hint, the honey bees have the least of a problem.) But you should also care about the other insects that are dying off. Not only because of the pollination, but also because insects play a bigger role than just pollination.

Insects, for example, are important as prey animals for lots of birds and smaller animals. Just as some insects might actually play a role in dealing with natural waste. So, the dying off of insects is a bigger problem of "plants don't get pollinated".

So, why do the insects die?

Yes, part of the reason is habitat loss. You know, your lawn is a fucking desert to most insects. They not only need a bigger variety of plants around (not just flowers), but maybe also some old wood to borrow into and some loose earth on the ground. Stuff like that.

Insects usually also do not deal very well with the climate change. Be it with the growing heat or with the more erratic weather patterns of draught and then just quick and sudden rainfall, that does not linger.

And, of course, there is also the fact that we use a lot of anti-insect pesticides in agriculture. Which does not only hit those pests, but basically any other insect around.

And then... there is the invasive species. We kinda spread a lot of invasive insect species around, that also kill a ton of the local insect species.

So... What can you do? Well, if you have a garden, you can make it more insect friendly. Duh. You also can leave out some water for insects and birds. They all need it.

But most of all: Become politically active. Make sure that pesticides are used less. It is maybe the most important.