(x-post of my very long answer to a question someone asked me a month and a half ago)
fractalpaladin asked: do you have any recommendations for people trying to learn more about how societies organize around agriculture? tumblr seems to think Permaculture is the Solution to Everything, and yeah it's nice-sounding, but if i want to have a decent handle on the actual scale of problems vs solutions, where would a good starting place be?
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siderea pointed me to this epic-length tweet thread from Sarah Taber on twitter, about agrarian romanticism in Star Trek here, thank you threadreader
Here is where I admit to having only a passing knowledge of Star Trek, so I can't judge that side of things, but I do think the future agricultural policy questions are interesting.
I mostly agree with most of what she says, like "why is there still monoculture corn in Iowa?" and "How can the Picards get away with inefficient irrigation on a vinyard?" and "how, exactly, are you organizing land ownership and management because this seems less tech-utopia-future-y and more neo-feudalist weird shit?"
First off, dude, slash-and-burn is not the preferred nomenclature.
…but really though. Better terms: shifting cultivation, swidden agriculture, long-fallow systems…probably some others I don’t know about
Second off, cultivated/wild is not a binary. “Wild” land preeetty much doesn’t exist in places where humans can live. Where humans live, they manage the land around them in ways that change that land: burning it, grazing animals on it, cutting down trees for timber and firewood, harvesting wild fruits and nuts and stuff – “wilderness” kind of goes in the same category as “noble savage.”
So. Here’s what shifting cultivation looks like. I’m going to use the example of a village in Mali, because I am uh, extremely familiar with the area.
( insert xkcd COMPILING! comic here as explanation of why this happened today )
( a story about soil, or, if you will, my agronomic testimony )
Heretical Agronomy
Sep. 10th, 2019 05:21 pmThere aren't a lot of hot-button controversial issues in agronomy--partly because the guys (mostly) who work on how to get 300 bushels/acre of corn in Iowa don't really hang out with the permaculture set, but also because, well, it's farming.
The exception?
Conservation Agriculture. ( ye gods this got long )
