>Three Sister is a common technique.

I always wonder how common it was. You hear it mentioned anytime agriculture stuff gets brought up, but I wonder if it was a small group of people doing this and then everyone acting like all natives did it, or if it was actually widespread as people make it out to be.

This was often supplemented by burying a fish or other animal near/in where the Three Sisters were planted, providing ample nutrients for less perishable foodstuffs to grow.

Yup, but on a tiny scale - 1 square meter instead of 1 hectare at a time: https://farm.bot

It's a converted CNC router machine with cameras and water and weeding attachments.

Though I'm sure you can mount a big version on a wheeled vehicle that drives around tending the farm.

I doubt such an organic process could be fully automated - but why would you, given there's plenty of people around? It isn't going to be cheaper I'm sure.

Anyway, there's been experiments with biodiversity that is compatible with machinery by alternating rows of plants. This reduced e.g. the proliferation of pests between rows.

That idea sounds excellent and combines old and new ideas in an unexpected way. Hacker News can facilitate wonderful syntheses sometimes.

That sounds amazing.

IMHO gardening/farming/forestry is "hacking". Especially when coupled with tech like robots, chemistry, monitoring, forecasting, etc.

Please share any and all links you may stumble across.

Can you share where?

Or The Miyawaki Method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0d7Hox5J4M

There’s def a bit in Mann’s 1491.

There's no doubt that industrial ag makes it possible to feed the world. But 10 acres can feed a neighborhood and we have plenty of spare labor. 19th century industrial scale was super labor intensive compared to today.

Just as you might have a mixture of crops, why not have a mixture of methods? What if you had to do 10 hours a week at the "unemployment farm" to qualify for unemployment benefits?

I don't imagine it would put any dent in the need for giant ag producers. But it could fuel a lot of experimentation.

Robotics and computer vision perhaps?

I understand it more as "it turns out composting tons of organic material makes the soil more fertile"

Which is far from a breaking news. I'm just curious about how composting this much agrumes didn't unbalance the soil's pH, but that they don't mention it at all in the article.

Eh, sorta. Biodynamic farming in the form promoted by Rudolf Steiner is kinda semi-mystical and involves astrology, lunar phases and manipulating the 'cosmic forces of the soil' by doing things like burying quartz inside a cow horn.

But biodynamic farming does also emphasise the kind of cohesive view of your crops as an interacting system that you'd find in modern permaculture. It's just that biodynamic implies a bunch of other spirituality stuff that you wouldn't normally consider part of permaculture.

In my experience it doesn't beat doing row monocrops in my backyard. It just turned into a big mess of plants shading each other, competing for nutrients, impossible to weed, etc. Never again. I'm native and I thought I would try it. Now I wonder how much of it is true and how much is romanticizing an idea that is a meme and sounds good.

https://growingfruit.org/t/3-sisters-the-original-survival-f...

"This story is an exaggeration which has been further glamorized by plant sellers and periodicals that cater to advertisers of natural or organic seeds and other products. In reality the practice was not widespread. The Farmer’s Almanac is rarely a source of factual information." - Richard

"Three sisters is a very inefficient way to grow corn. It is not the way many Amerindian tribes grew their corn as shown by the fields of corn grown by the 5 tribes of the Iroquois. It was used by some tribes, but only if they had corn, beans, and squash adapted to the growing method." - Fusion_power

Fusion_power usually knows what he is talking about, I recognize his name from Tomatoville where he is one of the best scientific posters and farmers around.

The three sisters approach made it easier to grow crops as the climbing beans didn't need you to create something for the beans to climb. However it reduces your yields by a lot of all crops (the corn shaded the squash, the beans hurt the corn plant) and so it was a bad idea unless land is cheap and labor is expensive.

That isn't to say the idea is always bad, in some cases it can be good. You need to be careful as what seems good might have significant downsides that are hidden.

Indeed. There's upsides to this beyond the convenience of location, too -- for example, planting basil alongside tomatoes helps repel pests.

This is the thing that frustrates me so much about this sort of discussion:

Just because something is legal, it doesn't mean it is ethical.

We keep dismissing ethics as any consideration from business conduct.

It is legal to ignore any and all environmental costs that have not yet been made illegal, so are corporations duty bound to ignore any obvious deleterious consequences as long as there is money to make today? Something feels very wrong about this approach.

I'm not sure I follow your train of thought. What sort of repercussions are you alluding to?

Situations like this are exactly why trucks carry containers. You don’t want to reuse the containers for those two things but you can absolutely reuse the trucks.

The trucks cost on the order of six figures, the containers an order of magnitude less.

Perhaps but we could be smarter about human liquid waste. Human urine is nutrient-rich and is effectively nitrogen-rich liquid fertilizer.

Wanna help your garden soil in the off-season? Pee in a bottle and dump it in the garden.

You're welcome.

You can compost sewage and ship dirt back in dump trucks though

"Septic Tanks Pumped. Swimming Pools Filled. Not Same Truck."

There doesn't need to be infinite growth potential for there to be potential for massive expansion of civilization.

The energy that is being wasted every single second from the sun emitting its rays out into empty space is many orders of magnitude greater than what humanity collectively uses, and all of that energy could be harvested and even saved if civilization expands to colonize the entire solar system. Until it does that, the vast majority of the energy outputted by the sun is going to waste. So slowing growth is generally extremely wasteful.

And yet they and their ilk dominate (and thus drive most of the progress in) their respective areas. It's almost like not pre-deciding you're doomed and instead just getting on with it is the secret to getting anywhere.

> the company would be allowed to dump its discarded orange peel at no cost on degraded land in the park.

> The juice company agreed to the deal, and some 12,000 tonnes of waste orange peel carried by a convoy of 1,000 truckloads was unceremoniously dumped on virtually lifeless soils at the site.

I guess they weren't doing this cattle feed deal back then, since evidently it was more economical for them to find a free dumping ground? Maybe they produce too much of it: 12000 tonnes, that's the cargo capacity of ninety 747s...

I wonder about the practicality of complementing that stage of the decomposition with a free-range poultry operation. Bringing in chickens, the birds eat the larvae, and generate more fertilizer along the way.

Yeah, the land was moving for a while.

I'm really surprised there aren't a bunch of secondary by-products created from the peels. Obviously there is always going to be some waste, but you'd think they'd extract all the oils and stuff first.

> once I figured out how to stop the rodents

Any tips?

Fig trees are incredibly fast growing. They can grow 15 feet in a single year

Keep in mind that banyan trees (those massive trees that can basically be a small forest in of themselves) are figs as well. Figs grow incredibly fast and often go from a bunch of vines all fighting to climb for sunlight into a giant fused mass that is a fig tree.

The rainforest adapts -very- quickly to regrowth and second growth making way for the much older and much slower growing trees. I fear you underestimate the power of earths biology, especially in the rainforest areas.

Tomatoes like a fairly neutral ph of ~6.5. A better example is blueberries with mid-4’s.

It is recommended against putting them into your composite.

Also chemically: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allelopathy

Assuming and making up numbers for pesticide XYZ degrades in 6 months.

First what is degrades is that 100% or 50%? Is that based on just because it’s no longer effective? Does your statement change if considering dumping huge amounts in a highly concentrated area? Does that concentrate what small percentage remains after 6 months, 6 years etc and does that change the conditions of decay for the stuff at the bottom of the pile, middle, top?

Just seems like dumping a 1000 trucks worth of something might introduce some new factors into the equation. But yeah, I’d be more worried about living near or down stream of a rotting orange sludge landfill that’s pulsating with fly larvae I guess in the end than the pesticides, not that people who tend to live near these dump sites really have a choice one way or another.

Thanks, I wasn't happy with the title either, for what is otherwise a decent article. TFA's title exceeded the HN limit, so I've done what I can.