Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

We need to have trees mixed with diverse crops. Trees will provide nutrients for the crops through a network of micro fungus which are living in biodiversity with the trees roots. Trees will naturally also cool the close surroundings so that it does not get too warm needed due to global warming.

Already a lot of fields in Europe are not active due too over production of crops. We should probably mix trees and farmland and open up some of those closed fields. Trees will take some capacity of the land but that can be replaced by opening up closed areas.

“ Roots take in water, and nutrients, from the soil. Without help from fungus for better uptake of nutrients, trees would be small or would die. Most trees have a favorite species of fungus that they associate with for this purpose.” Source: https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree

Now say that you mix crops and trees then you probably can find trees and crops which mix well together. The crop will side load get a boost of nutrients from the trees fungus.

Citation please. In my fields the worst yield is near the trees. Why? Because the trees suck up all the water and nutrients. This is for corn, soybeans, wheat, and milo.

https://www.iaea.org/publications/8181/management-of-agrofor...

The abstract seems to validate both the parent comment's claims and your experience:

> The studies show that the integration of trees and crops can increase resource use efficiency, but careful management and a system design tailored to local climatic and soil conditions are required if competition and consequent reduction in crop yields are to be avoided.

The key is crop diversity because brassica plants (cabbage, broccoli, brussel sprouts, etc) are not helped by mycorhizal fungi at all, and in abundance it might even be detrimental to them. Some mycorhizal fungi types will destroy some species of plants in order to benefit their species of choice, going so far as to tap directly into other plant roots to use them as nutrition.

One issues with trees is that they block sunlight. Thus if the type of crop you are growing needs a lot of sunlight, you are going to have problems.

Furthermore, since the amount of photosynthesis is dependent on the amount of sunlight, it is likely that your staple crops would be the ones that required a lot of sunlight, since those are usually calorie dense.

It depends on the crop, but many crops don't suffer much, some even do better from the additional shade and shelter.

That doesn't seem like a particularly compelling answer. By varying the crop, you can grow things virtually anywhere. In practice though, people want to grow the things they're familiar with. Shade presents a problem with at least three of most important crop families: grasses, pulses, and nightshades. Their wild ancestors preferred sunny, warm environments without a lot of shade.

And some of those will do fine in mild shade, this is far from full canopy cover.

I'm imagining something along the order of wide-spaced modern orchards, which have tree spacing of ~20-40ft. I wouldn't exactly call those "mild shade".

I just don't see any benefits beyond companion planting with a groundcover crop like cucurbits, which would be far easier to mechanize.

This article is about countries bordering on the Sahara using trees to help nurture back desert no good for growing anything back to healthy farm land. There's a notion there of too much sun light preventing growth because it dries out the land and kills off what remains of the soil turning all of it into desert unable to retain any water; UV radiation is not great for microbial life. Using trees to restore water balance and regulate temperatures, seems like it works.

We have similar processes going on in industrial farming in North America and Europe where we have been slowly depleting and giving up on what used to be healthy farm land. E.g. large parts of Spain are very arid but that wasn't always the case. Likewise parts of Italy and France are drying out because of intensive farming. It's less of an issue in more Northern parts of Europe but even there, decades of monoculture have created problems.

The message here is simple: it's a revertible process and it's a relatively quick process that doesn't necessarily involve much more than a bit of pruning, nurturing, and being mindful of the way nature works locally. It seems most of the complexity and cost is related to creating the right incentives, removing bureaucratic obstacles, and educating people a bit. Scaling this up seems like it's worthwhile. In most places where this could work, people have very little left to lose and a lot to gain.

If Africans in the middle of nowhere, far away from modern infrastructure can pull this off in some of the harshest environments in the world with little or no means, others can do that too. E.g. the Mid west and Texas come to mind in the US. Or the plains of Spain, which used to have forest and now looks more like the Sahara.

The mid west is improving their soils. No till and cover crops make the soil better. Different climates demand different farming to improve .

You're going to design your farm according to your context and the needs of your crops.

For example, a farm in the UK may follow the Wakelyns approach: https://vimeo.com/256082580 Alleys oriented to maximise the sun for the crops they're intending to grow. With tree species selected for various reasons, e.g. their size and if they fix nitrogen.

In the Sahara, maybe you want shade. Many growers intentionally use shade nets to reduce evaporation and heat stress. It depends on your context and your aims.

I expect there's some degree of trade off. Lose a portion of productivity of your annual staple crops, in exchange for the benefits of mixing perennial crops with annuals. Depending on your situation you may be able to control much of this when designing the farm.

This is actually an area I plan to invest time in after moving back to the US next year. Specifically, on automation-enhanced sustainable microfarming.

Crop diversity is a pretty key part of that, as is appropriate fungal and insect management.

Avoiding chemical pesticides is hard by the way -- in my current (tiny) garden, it's been the only way I was able to keep the aphids and mites from absolutely destroying my jalapeños. Ladybugs would be preferable, but are incredibly hard to come by here.

Home and/or municipal composting adds another level to this, and it'd be great to get to the point where a large percentage of packaging was directly compostable. That'll be tricky -- you don't want the packaging to break down until after the lifetime of the food inside it -- but likely doable as manufacturing advances.

> Home and/or municipal composting adds another level to this, and it'd be great to get to the point where a large percentage of packaging was directly compostable. That'll be tricky -- you don't want the packaging to break down until after the lifetime of the food inside it -- but likely doable as manufacturing advances.

I think we should change our expectations for food shopping/packaging and shelf life. If we move away from an expectation for year-round availability, and crazy long shelf life, we can do away with all of the shipping, warehousing and packaging that is derived from that demand. In regards to carbon, packaging is non-trivial, but I think it is second to the shipping involved.

> If we move away from an expectation for year-round availability

So, here's a question: do you think you could convince people to give up smartphones?

Because I think it'd be about the same level of difficulty.

People really, really, really don't like to surrender convenience or comfort.

I realize you aren't advocating this -- you have great intentions -- but crazy long shelf lives keep a lot of people from starving.

I'm interested in the micro-farming idea primarily because (a) I like the idea of adding more redundancy into the food supply; (b) because fresh food tastes amazing; and (c) because it's an interesting problem to solve. But I'd rather see that we roll the clock forward, and develop better technology to enable both year-round availability and healthy ultra-long-life foods, while at the same time deploying indefinitely sustainable agricultural practices.

We are definitely on the same page regarding the likelihood of people giving up their comforts of their own accord, I am just an optimist first and a pragmatist second!

In practice however, you may see carbon taxes change the way people consume international goods as prices on food would most certainly go up. Bananas in Australia are a good example, occasionally they fluctuate in price and you can see consumers aren't willing to wear the higer costs. Maybe it wouldn't be a disaster if Australians could only eat local fruits for example, I think it would ruffle the status quo but pretty quickly people would adapt.

I feel like a carbon tax on shipping would level the playing field toward local microfarming as well, and I would love to see agrofarming become a part of big country landscapes. Both the US and Australia are characterized by a vast majority of land being a patchwork quilt of cleared fields. I would love to see that change in my life time.

I would expect the wasteage to outstrip the packaging and shipping contributions. Increased waste also calls for increased production and conversion from wild habitats.

I am not saying don't preserve food though, rather cut out the activities that make us need to preserve it so long. For example, shipping food internationally in cooled shipping containers. It seems pretty excessive, in some cases frivolous. Like shipping out of season fruits to Australia so we don't miss out year round.

I think I wouldn't have this opinion if shipping were carbon nuetral mind you.

Trees don't provide nutrients to crops through fungus, if anything it is the opposite.

They encourage mycorrhizae growth, which is probably what they mean by “fungus”.

Yes but the mycorrhizae from trees usually can't infect crops

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