Hacker News Reader

Comment by dry_soup | Hacker News Reader

> Native American Indians used a technique borrowed from South American Indians where they refused to do monoculture, instead they grew 3 to 4 crops in the same field.

Are you talking about crop rotation or growing multiple crops in the same field at the same time?

View on HN

Same field, same time. This allows each crop to share different proportions of the soil nutriments, but also help each other because you reduce the pest load as pest do not target the same way the different crops.

This is the same principle we have in mixed forestry (where I have more experience).

They did that, but modern science has checked it out, and found the crops competing with each other means all crops are harmed. Crop rotation - where you grow a different crop every year is a much better answer.

I would be interested in your publications because doing a simple search[0] and reviewing a couple of papers provide me with more positives than negatives.

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/search?qs=mixed%20cropping

I could have sworn wikipidea had information on that years ago. It has been removed now if so. I can no longer find my sources.

Presumably:

* https://inthesetimes.com/article/regrow-native-american-agri...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)

The latter. They're probably referring to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com