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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes this is what is meant by permaculture.
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.
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.
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.