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what

@waltson-alpha

its stuff i find cool and
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Please reblog and add your nationality in the tags along with what you answered! I'm very curious about this; and it's not to shame anybody, so don't be rude!

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If you don't do the reblog part it's not very good as a study 😭

Hey tumblr bots I’m gay! Gay! Gay I say! If you want to trick me into giving you all my Internet access you should at least send me the gay boy bots

People see that agricultural technology in the 20th century basically eliminated non-human-caused famines (correct) and conclude that current agricultural practices are ideal and that improving them is impossible (devastatingly stupid)

The US agricultural system is in crisis right now because common agricultural weeds are developing resistance to basically all safe herbicides. "Roundup Ready" corn is already obsolete in some states.

I'm reading a book called Where There are Mountains by Donald Edward Davis and some of this guy's takes on Native American practices feel really simplistic, and he says a lot of things that have me like, "Hey. I bet you could just ask a Cherokee person."

But he mentions that early settlers thought Native Americans were lazy because they didn't weed their fields, and outlines how that is wrong because the common "weed" species were themselves semi-domesticated and used as supplemental food sources.

Amaranth (a genus with several species) is one of the worst agricultural weeds in the Midwest, and huge amounts of money and pesticides are spent trying to contain it.

It also happens to be edible, and grain from it may have been the main source of calories for some pre-columbian civilizations.

THEY WON THE WAR ON WEEDS. BY RECRUITING THE WEEDS.

This past year, when we first tilled our vegetable garden, literally thousands of Amaranth plants popped up. An absolute WALL of them. We couldn't weed the garden fast enough to keep them down.

But this was the year I started hardcore delving into learning about nature, and, okay, several things:

  • Amaranth is the first plant in the ecological succession process. It thrives in the most devastated, empty environments but the mycorrhizal fungi hate it, so it disappears in places that don't get tilled or disturbed.
  • The Japanese beetles usually skeletonize our bean plants. This year, when the Amaranth got out of control, they were all over the amaranth and mostly left the rest of the garden alone.
  • This shit pops up by the thousands in any tilled patch of soil, and is almost unkillable. The more the soil sucks, the more the Amaranth thrives.
  • And you're telling me it's edible?
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This is one of the most potent paths to madness because it's basically an infinitely nested rabbithole of how unbelievably fuckstupid industrial agriculture is. By the time you reach the end of the path you can no longer form coherent sentences and you're frothing at the mouth an you just wanna shake a corn baron until all the stupid falls out. Some of the greatest ecological damage on the planet is being done because the dumb motherfuckers in charge of all the farming don't know jackshit about plants.