Do you have any evidence/resources to back that up? I am not trying to start a fight, just interested to learn more, my first intuition being that crop rotated mono culture would be better for economies of scale as equipment tends to be highly specialized
Would start by looking up how plants interact with each other and with mycelial networks—monocropping deprives the farm of an important support network, and the soil and plants’ subsequent underperformance leads to unsustainable use of pesticides, additional water supply etc. to compensate. Monocropping to simplify the field layout and crop gathering makes plenty of intuitive sense, as does cutting down all your trees so you can plant more crops. It’s also not a good long-term plan to treat these unfathomably complex systems that have evolved over millennia as something we’re going to improve using our intuition.
Do you have any evidence/resources to back that up? I am not trying to start a fight, just interested to learn more, my first intuition being that crop rotated mono culture would be better for economies of scale as equipment tends to be highly specialized
Would start by looking up how plants interact with each other and with mycelial networks—monocropping deprives the farm of an important support network, and the soil and plants’ subsequent underperformance leads to unsustainable use of pesticides, additional water supply etc. to compensate. Monocropping to simplify the field layout and crop gathering makes plenty of intuitive sense, as does cutting down all your trees so you can plant more crops. It’s also not a good long-term plan to treat these unfathomably complex systems that have evolved over millennia as something we’re going to improve using our intuition.