"Natural" alternatives like vinegar can be just as harmful to the soil & environment as commercial herbicides, and other methods can be economically unfeasible.
Unfortunately, to sustain the growth of population and increasing consumer "appetite", herbicides are the only way (at this time).
Nobody, including those who live in rural areas like I do, WANT to use herbicides (they aren't cheap) - it's just the only way to stay in business. There is no scaleable alternative at this time.
It mentioned that when they (don't remember who "they" was either) studied the productivity of rice production somewhere in Asia they found that traditionally worked land was much less productive than industrial-style rice agriculture. BUT - and there was a huge "but": They studied only rice, and that is how they came to that conclusion. Turned out they completely ignored that the traditional method produced not just rice but a long list of other stuff too. So yes, it was "inefficient in producing "just rice".
Nature is a huge complex system. How about instead of continuing on a path that surely is not just sub-optimal, but probably even dangerous because it is counter to how nature works and you have to brute-force your way to "success" we give up the idea of gigantic monocultures, and instead go for complexity? That means fields that don't actually look like fields. Where lots of very different kinds of plants all grow together.
Yes, that won't work with our current machinery, and not with current knowledge. But I think that you can create biological systems that are far more productive than anything we can get from monocultures, plus none of the dangers. That requires huge amounts of research, experiments - and IT!! Because all that knowledge is too complex to give to every farmer. We need to put that knowledge into systems that then are easy to use.
I think trying to force our way to food victory won't work, over time you have to add more and more fixes for all the shortcomings that slowly accumulate in that system, from soil quality to side effects such as the wide distribution of poisons.
With enough knowledge we might truly create the Garden of Eden on earth: We let nature do all the work (#) and only go in to grab our food. Like it used to be in hunter/gatherer times, but now managed by us based on the vast amounts of knowledge and "magic tools" (that contain lots of that accumulated knowledge and free the user from having to know even a fraction of it) we created so that it scales to the billions of people. It will also help us when we think about terraforming new planets :-)
(#) Nature has trillions and trillions of little machines powered by sun energy working in unison. This is not far-fetched. We already know quite a bit about biological systems, and we have successfully created reasonably complex and large biological systems in some areas.
Some decades ago a disease started spreading amongst cocoa crops, and no solution was known. It still menaces crops today.
Turns out cocoa is less sensible to disease if you grow it inside the forest vs as monoculture, but because of the shade and density the production is smaller.
Pre-industrialization corn and wheat yielded something like 10-20 bushels per acre. I have a book from the turn of the century I keep for the cover titled "How to Grow 100 Bushel Corn in Poor Soil" (spoiler: guano), and now corn harvests are something like 180 bushels an acre and wheat something like 60.
There's a lot of reasons for this (mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, selective breeding and genetic engineering) but the short story is when you talk "traditional" versus "modern" agriculture, you're talking an order of magnitude productivity increases on a per-acre basis, along with another order-of-magnitude increase on the acres worked per farmer.
Except they're infested with glyphosate. Yum!
Modern yield: 170 bu/ac.
The increase in past 80 years has been amazing.
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtren...
Taking a systems view is a good thing, but I think you're assuming we're not already doing that. But I think it's unlikely that a systems approach to farming is going to look like letting nature do the work; without cultivation, plants are not going to be food.
What a quality reply. Next, a lecture that everything is a "chemical"? I took (university) biochemistry, thank you very much.
> but I think you're assuming we're not already doing that.
We are not. Proof: Monocultures that require lots of stored sun energy and lots of fertilizers (even more stored ancient sun energy) and lots of pesticides (even more energy, plus incalculable side effects).
> without cultivation, plants are not going to be food.
How about you read what I wrote? I mean, all of it, not just a few words that triggered you to lecture me as if I had said something on a child level. HN has interesting discussions, let's keep the level up a bit. If you read into my comment that I propose to let nature run all on its own, like some state park or nature preserve, than you did not really read much of it. If I have to explain what I wrote to someone who didn't read it I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time and comment space.
I'm not sure if this is the source you had in mind, but Seeing Like a State offers a similar story from Tanzania.
Colonists attempted to move local farmers from polycultures to "more efficient" monoculture farming, and the results were absolutely disastrous. Polycultures helped prevent erosion and soil depletion, tall sun plants covered short shade plants, and mixed crop types spread both farm labor and crop production across more of the year.
The counterargument, such as it is, is that we've committed so vastly to intensive, fertilized monocultures that we can no longer produce comparable amounts of anything using traditional methods. Which I think is probably true, but as destroy the soil and aquifers of the Midwest it looks like the modern technique isn't particularly workable either.
* Stockman Grass Farmer, a publication for smart graziers who get complexity that Joel now edits
* Acres USA, similar but for the broader topic of holistic/ecological farming
* Permaculture-oriented farmers such as Mark Shepard
My yard goes green months before the Bermuda grass monoculture lawns in the neighborhood, and I have personally observed four different species of bees feeding in it, along with the Polistes carolina paper wasps, and the occasional Trypoxylon politum mud-pipe wasps. All of them are very docile, and we've never had any stings, despite frequent nest-building activity within 3m of our front door.
Pollinators are important. There are a lot of people out there that let their yards grow plants other than glass for the express purpose of feeding pollinators between spring emergence and the flowering of commercially important crops, including the buzz pollinators like bumblebees.
And we continually have to butt heads with HOA buttheads for whom "not grass" equals "weed". Those aren't "weeds"; they're "volunteers". If you can't identify it and find it on the state's official list of noxious and invasive species, go away and come back when you can.
I think someone tried a guerilla application of herbicide a couple of years ago, because everything died. I'm glad it all came back. I simply don't understand the level of control-freakishness that would motivate a person to spray herbicide on someone else's yard. It makes me want to intentionally seed some dandelions. Dandelions seem to send that kind of person into fits, for some reason unknown to me.
Ha ha, no.
Maybe Canada is land of the free?
So, no vegetable garden for me. Unless I go to the trouble to put in an isolated raised bed with fresh soil imported from a safe source.
I wasn't aware that it could -- on its own, depending upon design -- provide significant filtration of such contaminants, although I am considering how it could also help divert rainwater to the side property lines, aiding its flow past the house to the front yard and sewer.
However, the best place for the garden -- best sun, and out of the way of other activity -- would still catch a lot of runoff.
You can get some more context on what I'm describing from this article, though it sounds like your swale might be shallower. https://permaculturenews.org/2015/07/24/how-to-build-a-swale...
If you do it, you might consider filling yours with wood chips for appearance, easy maintenance, extra filtration, and to encourage soil building.
Most homeowners in the US are also not impacted by any laws or HOA rules mandating they have perfectly manicured lawns, either. This seems to be something limited to upscale suburbia particularly in the west, where the arid conditions require you to actually care for your lawn if you want grass.
http://www.roundup.ca/_uploads/documents/28486_Ultra2_All%20...
PRECAUTIONS
KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.
HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED.
HARMFUL IF INHALED.