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Comment by b800h | Hacker News Reader

This is the principle behind biodynamic farming, right?

I understand it more as "it turns out composting tons of organic material makes the soil more fertile"

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 sounds like upsetting the ph balance was a key reason it worked so well. The article mentioned that displacing the invasive grass was part of the reason it worked so well.

in fairness dumping tons of anything should disrupt the grass.

Eh, sorta. Biodynamic farming in the form promoted by Rudolf Steiner is kinda semi-mystical and involves astrology, lunar phases and manipulating the 'cosmic forces of the soil' by doing things like burying quartz inside a cow horn.

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.

Heh. Sounds like something that works by accident.

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).

And when you need to put your thumb on the scale, cross your eyes to see an extra crow.

Well, not entirely by accident - things like companion planting were very much observable as advantageous for pest control or nutrient efficiency. Think like how carrots and garlic both like being next to radishes, and while carrots thrive with being near peas, garlic suffers. It's quite actionable stuff whether you're deciding the layout and planting sequence of a small kitchen garden or a large plot of land.

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 :)

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