Dumped orange peel transformed a barren pasture (2017)
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
They're largely abandoned and forgotten, but one can find them having gone wild in various places. They're marked by a marked diversity of flora.
Sometimes this is what is meant by permaculture.
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 that vein, I'm reminded of the old tradition of consulting oracles to make decisions when hunting or before a battle. If we see an even number of crows we do this, else we do that, things like that. The reason this worked was because the oracle was acting as a random number generator, and being unpredictable can have advantages in such situations (a lesson from game theory).
I am unsure exactly how much of the biology was understood at the time, but it also wasn't entirely drawn out of thin air. A lot of it was just drawing a bunch of known good practices together as a cohesive design philosophy for how to run a farm.
Spirituality stuff was very in vogue at the time, so it's hard to say if it would have even gotten popular without the cosmic forces type stuff. Even if it was a dubious contribution to the actual mechanics :)
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.
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.
He grows many different crops intermixed with native vegetation, it's been about 12-15 years and the progress is astounding, all while helping to recover a little bit of the Atlantic Rainforest of São Paulo.
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.
It is of course harder to do on industrial scale, but it probably beats doing row monocrops on your backyard.
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.
I'm very encouraged that we're discussing more than just maximizing yield. A luxury that the Green Revolution brought us. Huh, I hadn't thought of "permaculture" as a post-Green Revolution worldview before.
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.
I've long assumed that that's what is happening. Also, you can't just throw all three seeds in a hole and call it done, you have to start the corn and then later start the squash and then later start the beans. It's a whole process. It probably works in specific conditions, but in general normal yearly crop rotation to replenish nutrients with things grown in correctly spaced rows and such is likely to work better and be more labor efficient.
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.
So the employees have to demand a share in increased wages. This may not happen. It is absolutely not automatic. No employer turns over increased profits to the employee (well not usually.)
So what has happened during our lifetime is that jobs have been exported to lower wage markets, since the employer reasons that they can invest in higher productivity in a cheaper job market and pocket the difference.
In the last three decades of the 19th century in the US, wages doubled despite union membership being at historically low levels. The rise in wages was driven by the same process seen globally in every country that has experienced rapidly growing per capita GDP. As companies produce more per worker and compete for a limited pool of labor, they bid higher for workers. This results in greater value, in terms of goods/services, offered to the average worker, which, in monetary terms, translates to higher inflation-adjusted wages.
Then tell me, what's the history of the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, compared to cost of living?
I don't know if this fully makes sense. If wages were to rise manual labor would thrive too. While some people enjoy working in offices same is true of manual labor, some people really do enjoy manual labor (excluding dangerous or demeaning jobs), and of course where it makes sense with tools to make it more efficient.
Producing far less per hour worked than what is possible is either low paid work or a hobby.
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 suppose I should first just get a planter and do some regular growing first and then I'll be better positioned and understand its benefits.
Squash leaves are big so shade the roots of the corn, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil, the corn stalks give the beans something to climb on.
Then there is the food types each providing different nutrition.
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.
Sounds like corporate jealousy on the part of the competitor. I wonder if the supreme court decision has set a precedent preventing future projects like this from going ahead. I don't think anyone would describe the land after 15 years as being "defiled" – quite the opposite.
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.
Saw a talk about circular economies once. One of the things that stuck in my mind was, "If mankind has any chance of a permanent occupation of earth, the current meaning of the word 'waste' will have to fade away."
The trucks cost on the order of six figures, the containers an order of magnitude less.
Wanna help your garden soil in the off-season? Pee in a bottle and dump it in the garden.
You're welcome.
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.
The results were impressive, but I imagine there were months of rotting orange peels. Which is probably not ideal neighbors, but fine in otherwise barren, uninhabited land.
>"Kind of passing through this gross stage in between of kind of sludgy stuff filled with fly larvae."
There are also startups that take in organic waste and use it to breed soldier fly larvae, which they then harvest and sell as protein for animal food etc.
>As for what happens to all the rinds from that mountain of oranges Tropicana processes, the nutrition in them (and apparently there is a lot) eventually comes back to us in the form of hamburgers. Tropicana and other processors dry the rinds, chop them up, and sell them for cattle feed.
> 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...
Just goes to show that it's all about the system.
https://thetrek.co/pacific-crest-trail/how-much-trash-gets-l...
> When comparing the site to a nearby control area that hadn't been treated with orange peels, Treuer's team found their experimental compost heap yielded richer soil, more tree biomass, and a broader diversity of tree species – including a fig tree so huge it would take three people wrapping their arms around the trunk to cover the circumference.
> As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.
> "That's the million dollar question that we don't yet have the answer to," Treuer told Popular Science.
In the end our local council started collecting food waste which was a lot less hassle for us and we could include bones. We get to collect free compost once a year.
Any tips?
Alternately, a "hot" compost setup generally is not amiable to rodents or other mammals.
Prior to that we had a bin with a door at the bottom but the rodents always gnawed away at the door and got in.
No way that grew in 16 years…
Do they produce fruit or are they just related to the fruiting ones?
https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI...
https://www.upworthy.com/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-peels...
I've never followed that rule personally and my compost system works really well. I get some black soldier fly larvae and other vermiculture in the early stages. In case you're wondering the black soldier flies aren't annoying like houseflies and typically steer clear of homes and humans. I usually only see a few BSFs around the compost and sometimes a lot of larvae, but it's seasonal.
Managing a system that takes a whole bunch of scrap and turns it into something useful, in a largely autonomous way, tickles the same part of my brain that gets satisfaction from writing a custom script to automate away some annoying but useful task.
That's an understatement. every hard core gardener knows organic matter is the key to wonderful soil which is the key to wonderful produce. We want as much of it as possible (to turn into compost). Personally, I keep all my orange peels, all my fruit refuse/kitchen scraps, every last oak leaf that drops on my property and thensome (suprisingly no one wants them!). I compost pretty much every last drop organic matter that comes onto our property.
Stuff like this seems like such a win-win it would be sad if it didn't lead to some changes now.
Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is: Maybe it wasn't only the orange peels. Perhaps there were other factors that contributed to the turn around. And given that this was a one-off they need to reproduce this experiment again, ideally two more times.
Once is not a pattern. Even twice isn't a pattern. Three times? Now we can begin to identify and consider there might be a causation-worthy pattern.
To often we want a single causation, and more often than not it's not that simple.
Chloripyriphos (sp?) are probably the longest lasting one and they don’t use them in any first world country and they’re half-life is something like 60 days
The days of ddt are passed
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.
Seems irrelevant, presumably they wash them before juicing them.