this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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You can't really grow the same crop in the same field season after season (without fertiliser), because they'll sap the specific nutrients they need from the soil. If you do that over and over eventually the soil wont have any food for that crop. Growing something different each season that takes different nutrients from the soil lets it recover the other ones. I don't know how it recovers on its own, circle of life stuff probably. Modern farming can cheat by artificially replenishing the nutrients with fertiliser.
It also makes it stronger against disease.
Never thought about it that way, so if farmers (at this point probably mostly international big farming corporations) would just rotate their crops, they would not have to buy as much fertiliser, destroy the environment and probably a tonne of other disgusting stuff that comes with mono-cultures, like the excessive need for fertilisers? Yeah, that checks out 🥵 ("It's too much work! Other crops don't sell!")
Farmers have been rotating crops for hundreds of years man. Corporate farms rotate crops too. Step down off that soapbox for a moment.
The whole joke is that the person in the image would have made fun of the idea in ancient times, killing the food supply of early civilization and setting us all back by thousands of years.
Yeah, the point of the joke is that crop rotation has been practiced for literally thousands of years. It was an agricultural invention which gave ancient cultures significantly higher crop yields, enabling a huge number of societal, cultural and scientific developments. The joke is based on the idea that before crop rotation was discovered, some people might have considered it a silly idea, delaying the developments enabled by the significantly increased crop yields.
They do rotate, for example soybean -> corn because soybeans add nitrogen to the ground which corn needs a lot of
Also mixing crops (or non-farmable plants) has big benefits, but it's currently cheaper to use chemically-derived fertilisers and go the monoculture route.
If only a government could artificially change the artificial incentives, without worrying about the votes they get from the minority who farm and are citizens.