>The combined effects of the disruption of the Russian Revolution, which decreased the supply of wheat and other commodity crops, and World War I increased agricultural prices; this demand encouraged farmers to dramatically increase cultivation. For example, in the Llano Estacado of eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas, the area of farmland was doubled between 1900 and 1920, then tripled again between 1925 and 1930. The agricultural methods favored by farmers during this period created the conditions for large-scale erosion under certain environmental conditions.

"large scale erosion" innocuous words for God's ongoing plagues and apocalypses in response to selfishness and greedy exploiting his creation

>The widespread conversion of the land by deep plowing and other soil preparation methods to enable agriculture eliminated the native grasses which held the soil in place and helped retain moisture during dry periods. Furthermore, cotton farmers left fields bare during winter months, when winds in the High Plains are highest, and burned the stubble as a means to control weeds prior to planting, thereby depriving the soil of organic nutrients and surface vegetation.

bruh whats the deal with kulaks and lighting food on fire lol...typical demon praxis

>The dust clouds blew all the way to Chicago, where they deposited 12 million pounds (5,400 tonnes) of dust. Two days later, the same storm reached cities to the east, such as Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. That winter (1934–1935), red snow fell on New England.

Red Snow in Lovecraft country

>The economic effects persisted, in part, because of farmers' failure to switch to more appropriate crops for highly eroded areas. Because the amount of topsoil had been reduced, it would have been more productive to shift from crops and wheat to animals and hay. During the Depression and through at least the 1950s, there was limited relative adjustment of farmland away from activities that became less productive in more-eroded counties.

animals are of course essential to fertilizing soil, but its all about profit, not regenerating life

>Some of the failure to shift to more productive agricultural products may be related to ignorance about the benefits of changing land use. A second explanation is a lack of availability of credit, caused by the high rate of failure of banks in the Plains states. Because banks failed in the Dust Bowl region at a higher rate than elsewhere, farmers could not get the credit they needed to obtain capital to shift crop production. In addition, profit margins in either animals or hay were still minimal, and farmers had little incentive in the beginning to change their crops.

>>Capital-intensive agribusiness had transformed the scene; deep wells into the aquifer, intensive irrigation, the use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers, and giant harvesters were creating immense crops year after year whether it rained or not. According to the farmers he interviewed, technology had provided the perfect answer to old troubles, such of the bad days would not return. In Worster's view, by contrast, the scene demonstrated that America's capitalist high-tech farmers had learned nothing. They were continuing to work in an unsustainable way, devoting far cheaper subsidized energy to growing food than the energy could give back to its ultimate consumers.

high tech DSA redditors at /r/neoliberal: "degrowth wants to make us poor, my comrades are Walmart and Monsanto, who are trying to feed the global poor by replacing natural soil ecology with sterile nanotechnology. We no longer have a need for bees, we can just use bee-drones you fucking eco-Stalinist"

"did you see the latest meme from Aphids on Threads? So funny lol" - 12 year old Maoist farmer child who has joined forces with the pests against bourgeois capitalism because they were radicalized by a social media front group.

>So-called dairying ants have a mutualistic relationship with aphids, tending them for their honeydew and protecting them from predators.

he protecc, he snacc,

>Aphids are among the most destructive insect pests on cultivated plants in temperate regions. In addition to weakening the plant by sucking sap, they act as vectors for plant viruses and disfigure ornamental plants with deposits of honeydew and the subsequent growth of sooty moulds. Because of their ability to rapidly increase in numbers by asexual reproduction and telescopic development, they are a highly successful group of organisms from an ecological standpoint.

"nooo you can't weaken my commodities! Middle class Karens won't buy these vegetables if they don't look perfect!" haha honeydew goes drippp !bug-facts

>Control of aphids is not easy. Insecticides do not always produce reliable results, given resistance to several classes of insecticide and the fact that aphids often feed on the undersides of leaves. On a garden scale, water jets and soap sprays are quite effective. Natural enemies include predatory ladybugs, hoverfly larvae, parasitic wasps, aphid midge larvae, crab spiders, lacewing larvae, and entomopathogenic fungi. An integrated pest management strategy using biological pest control can work, but is difficult to achieve except in enclosed environments such as greenhouses.

"enclosed environments such as greenhouses" PRISON PLANET

starting at 118 minutes in

>my mom is a schemer...she heard of someone doing starting a farm one time

classic mom behavior lol

>we can't use a tractor, we're women!

Large tractors need strength, but you can get a small two wheel tractor which can be used by a single strong woman or two weaker ones. Women can build small farms

>real estate as we know is crazy, we sold it at a higher price even though all the blueberries are dead, so I don't understand what happened, we sold it for more than what we bought it for. She was like "I put my family through hell, it was good, but it worked out we made money". She should be slapped on the wrist instead of rewarded

the Marxist dialectic of use value vs exchange value under financialized real estate investing

>We don't know how to keep this alive, I'm gonna have to slit the throat of this cow as soon as we get it. You're pushing me to kill so many animals!

goats when they see their new owners are middle class Karens: :scared:

It’s been 33 years since an Iowa State University agronomist named Fred Blackmer thought he’d struck gold for Midwestern corn farmers. Using a fairly simple three-step method, Blackmer developed an analytical tool that could accurately tell farmers exactly how much fertilizer their fields needed to produce abundant harvests each season.

The analytics Blackmer perfected showed not only how much fertilizer the corn crops would need to meet production targets, but also exposed how much could be wasted. Blackmer ultimately determined that farmers were applying a staggering 500 million excess pounds of nitrogen each year, a practice that not only wasted farmers’ money but also wreaked havoc on the environment as the nitrogen not taken up by plants drained from farm fields to contaminate rivers, lakes and streams.

Despite what Blacker saw as obvious benefits to producers, not to mention the environment, his method failed to gain significant traction in farm country. Farmer allegiance to the excessive fertilizing practices pushed by the so-called “Big Ag” production industry and aligned academic institutions left Blackmer’s common sense approach on a shelf gathering dust. He died in 2006.

State and federal data now show that since 1990, nitrogen spread on fields in Iowa and nine other major U.S. corn-growing states has increased 26%, with more nitrogen than ever pouring off the land and into U.S. waters. Demand for corn is high, both to supply ethanol refineries and to feed industrial livestock operations that add to water contamination themselves through manure runoff, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In Iowa alone, according to state research, farmers apply about 2 billion pounds of commercial nitrogen annually to corn fields, and much of it is ending up in waterways that flow all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, worsening the conditions in a 6,500-square-mile “dead zone” where the waters are so oxygen-deprived that they can’t sustain marine life. Iowa contributes almost a third of the nitrogen scientists say causes the dead zone.

“Iowa is sort of ground zero for the interface between ag and environment,” said Matt Liebman, a former colleague of Fred Blackmer’s, who retired as a professor of agronomy at Iowa State University (ISU) in 2021.

“There’s a lot of money involved. The people who sell inputs and the people who process and distribute commodities, livestock and crops are very interested in making sure that the system is arranged so that money flows in particular ways,” Liebman said. “One side is real small and the other side is very well funded. It can get pretty ugly.”

In Iowa, as in other corn-growing states, many farmers often apply nitrogen in quantities not necessarily aligned with crop needs but in amounts designed to overload the soil in case heavy rains wash away needed nutrients. Farmers will apply fertilizer to fallow fields in fall when there is nothing growing, hoping the ground will absorb and hold on to the nutrients, and then spread fertilizer again on the same fields in the spring. The goal is to maximize yield – how much corn they can produce per acre.

A 2014 ISU farmer survey underscored how dependent growers are on over-applying fertilizer. “The perceived economic risks of under-application are high,” the survey reported. “These results likely reflect a reality that the practice of ‘insurance’ over-application is simply a part of staying in business.”

In contrast, Blackmer’s research showed that applying more fertilizer than plants needed had no effect on yield. “What we’ve found is that farmers can substantially reduce their average rates of fertilization and actually end up with higher yields,” he said in a 2002 interview with an Iowa media outlet.

Blackmer also recognized that over-fertilizing was causing an ecological calamity. “What we’re finding is some farmers can lose 70, 80 or 90% of what they put down. One of the most surprising things is many times these farmers don’t even know that they have lost it,” Blackmer added.

Blackmer’s “late spring nitrate test” was simple in concept. His test focused on one essential data point: the optimum amount of nitrogen in soil to grow the most corn. His science showed that optimum soil concentration is 20 to 25 parts per million.

Blackmer developed three steps to get there. First, he took soil samples from farm fields, which typically showed background nitrogen levels at under 10 parts per million. Second, he developed calculations to add fertilizer in precise amounts to increase soil nitrogen concentrations to the optimum level and sustain it to meet the farmers’ yield goal, whether it was 150, 200 or 250 bushels per acre.

Then he recruited farmers to apply a little bit of fertilizer at planting and a precisely measured volume of fertilizer at least 30 days later, when fast-growing plants were 6 to 12 inches tall. In most cases the test results indicated farmers should spread 60 pounds per acre to grow 150 bushels per acre, or as much as 80 pounds per acre to achieve 250 bushels per acre. Corn growers typically apply double that amount.

Among the farmers that experimented with Blackmer’s nitrate test was Larry Neppl, an Iowa corn grower, who saw first-hand that applying 60 pounds of nitrogen per acre on part of his crop translated to better production than applying double that amount.

“It told me we did not need that extra nitrogen,” Neppl said.

The amount of money wasted by farmers on unneeded fertilizer, at the current price of $1,100 per ton, is estimated at over $400 million annually.

But the over-fertilization of U.S. corn country is not only costly for farmers. The federal government has spent over $500 million since 1997 to reduce the expanse of the ocean dead zone that is fed in large part by the nitrogen contamination flowing from Iowa and the other Corn Belt states. States have spent billions of dollars more.

That same tide of nutrients is also expensive for local and state governments with fertilizer-related contamination affecting more than 7,000 drinking water wells in Iowa and an estimated 30,000 private wells in Minnesota, 42,000 in Wisconsin, and thousands more in Illinois, Nebraska, and Missouri. Corn Belt cities are forced to spend tens of millions of dollars and raise residential and business water rates to drill deeper wells or install and maintain nitrate removal and filtration systems to protect municipal drinking water.

There is also a cost to human health. The nitrates from the fertilizers also are implicated in the rising rates of cancer in the Corn Belt. In Nebraska, scientists have linked exposure to nitrates to a number of soft tissue malignancies. Nebraska has one of the highest rates of pediatric cancers in the U.S. Iowa announced in February that it now ranks second in the incidence of cancer, and is the only state where incidences increased from 2015 to 2019.

“The heart of what is causing all of this is a cropping system and an economy that is inherently polluting,” said Kamyar Enshayen, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa. “It’s not something a conscientious farmer can fix. We have all these incentives coming in to keep doing more of this.”

>millennial neoliberal subject

"like and subscribe to my brand for more content!" (the life goes out of their dead eyes as their camera turns off in their neon lit LED apartment)

Her wiki article is really funny to see how mad the soulless finance imperialist pundits are by sublime beauty:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianxi_Xiaoge

> Coda Media's Isobel Cockerell said Dianxi Xiaoge's presence and popularity on YouTube despite the censorship of YouTube in China indicates she has implicit government support

>>Coda Media received a grant of $180,130 from the US Government-backed National Endowment for Democracy

"noooo you can't just call every PMC NGO 'satanic CIA finance imperialism', actually I'm bringing democracy to every non-US client state!" !porky-scared-flipped

>Linda Qian, a University of Oxford doctoral candidate whose research is focused on "Chinese rural nostalgia" observed of Dianxi Xiaoge's Tibet video, "People get to see a different side of China that they didn't know. And they can be like, 'Oh it can actually be pretty beautiful. Oh, it's not just the oppressive CCP with surveillance everywhere. All this is actually a fairytale.'"

angry British PMC demons: "these beautiful Chinese farmer women are brainwashed by the CCP, this is state propaganda and its not ok".

Also PMC: "Wow! I love this soulless redditor kulak American farmer who looks like Edward Snowden! This is true freedom and not fascist propaganda by the ruling class. As a temporarily embarrassed landlord who can't exploit undocumented (literally Ukrainians!!! Tell me again about Russia destroying that country lol) laborers, this is my dream of freedom, to be a Thomas Jefferson slave rapist"

>Dianxi Xiaoge's videos showcase the calm, idyllic village life and feature her making videos of Yunnan cuisine using produce that she planted, harvested, and raised herself. Her male Alaskan Malamute named Dawang (Chinese: 大王; lit. 'Big King') follows her around in many videos. She ends her videos with a family meal of what she cooked. Urban dwellers have viewed her videos as a temporary refuge from the bustling, stressful city life.

Mods I demand you add the :Dawang: emoji.

This is just China's version of the old fashioned Shakespeare era Pastoral genre, but instead of being a sex addled bourgeois utopian response to enclosure and urban industrialism, it's a real place where working class people can take a weekend vacation to thanks to the state's development of mass transit like trains. So funny how British kulaks believe living in nature is a 'fairy tale', really telling on themselves and their ideology turning God's creation into a Mad God wasteland!

>It was challenging for her parents to make a living farming in the village, which led her to seek schooling and employment outside her province. Dianxi Xiaoge studied to become a police officer

Anarchists: "Smash the Stalinist state, abolish the police...it's not my responsibility as a Breadtuber to get anyone bread"

Ex-cop youtubers: (studying materialist science and doing the most basic Marxist praxis of learning and teaching others about material conditions, simply because they have skin in the game)

>though upon graduation in 2012 chose to join an Internet startup company in the marketing department. She planned to eventually buy a house in Chongqing and move her parents in so they would all have a better life. But she returned to her village in 2016 after her father had a heart attack. To make a living in Yunnan, Dianxi Xiaoge began selling local specialities online before capitalizing on the rise in 2016 of short videos when she started posting her own. She created her YouTube channel in 2018 and first went viral internationally after releasing a video where she made hamburgers for her grandparents who had never eaten them before.

Neoliberal subjectivity with Chinese characteristics

>Scholars have called her a cottagecore content creator

gamerchair PMC socialists: "Degrowth is Stalinist authoritarianism, people don't want to work outside"

also PMC: (writing the most laughable Pitchfork-ass 'art and culture' criticism because they are baffled by the ar genre of someone who touches grass with her family)

Literally Pitchfork:

>There’s a reason rural escapism in China has risen over the past several years. Millions are drawn to lifestyle vloggers like Li Ziqi and Dianxi Xiaoge, who portray idyllic countryside lives spent creating everything from food to clothing from scratch. There’s even a small but notable group of young people called fanxiang qingnian, who, in a departure from China’s mass rural-to-urban migration of the past four decades, have opted to return to farm life. Of course, Chinese nationalism and the state’s push to promote Chinese culture do play a role, but the fact remains that China’s rapid economic growth, not unlike that of its American counterpart, has left its people wanting something more. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/howie-lee-birdy-island/

Or FAO: https://www.fao.org/3/i0526e/i0526e.pdf

Herbs can be grown easily even indoors.

Containers are good for balconies.

You can get as excessive as possible if you have some good soil around, either alone or as a communal/collective garden.

Do you favour production quantities or ease of growth or permaculture / aquaponics?

Are old style cold frames back in business?

This post belongs more into c/gardening or c/chat than agriculture

The 'Libreta' (Libreta de Abastecimiento) is the ration-book, gets people basic foods at 80-90% subsidies.

Cooperativa de Producción Agropecuaria, CPAs, which are private coöperatives, and Unidad Básica de Producción Cooperativa, UBPCs, coöperatives created by the state in 1993 (in the special period) out of previously state-run farms.

UBPC are state-run coöperatives. Workers get profit-sharing. The coöperative has the right to use the land (usufruct) but the state remains legal owner, and have a special econmic relationship with the state. They commit to selling 70% of their primary production produce to the Acopio (state), which goes to the Libreta. The syndicate does its own decision-making.

CPAs have more autonomy than that, and do own their land. The State owns UBPC vehicles; CPA vehicle are jointly owned. The state created the UBPCs, but each CPA is formed by its people. Both have collective governance.

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Into the sources –

• Cuba's Basic Units of Cooperative Production: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FE487

• Evaluating the Performance of Cuba's Sugarcane Basic Units of Cooperative Production During Their First Decade – https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FE562 – this says yield grew too slowly, advocates economic liberalisation

• https://www.ascecuba.org/asce_proceedings/an-empirical-study-of-income-and-performance-incentives-on-a-cuban-sugarcane-cpa/

• https://web.archive.org/web/20170601014151/https://www.ascecuba.org/asce_proceedings/an-empirical-study-of-income-and-performance-incentives-on-a-cuban-sugarcane-cpa/ – "Overall, the “Amistad Cuba-Laos” farm was found to be a highly mechanized, well organized, on-going op­eration, with basic planning and accounting systems in place. The cooperative leadership appeared to be open to the adoption of new technologies, and sugar­cane yields, which plummeted as a result of severe in­put shortages in the early 1990s, were recovering somewhat as inputs became more available. On the other hand, work quality and intensity appear to be below potential, in part due to an incentive system that had not evolved to meet the country’s changing economic conditions"

• Cooperatives and Socialism: A View from Cuba – PDF on annas-archive

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Development Report No.14: Cuba's New Agricultural Revolution: The Transformation of Food Crop Production in Contemporary Cuba – https://web.archive.org/web/20061130165605/http://www.foodfirst.org/files/pdf/DR14.pdf

Reforms around 1993 "included the legalization of holdings and expenditures in foreign currencies and self-employment in certain specified areas; the active promotion of foreign investment in Cuba; the elimination of subsidies on some items of popular consumption; and a move toward implementation of a system of taxation. The outcome of these and other measures will have a notable impact on the effort to bring about the recovery of specific sectors of the economy, such as agriculture"

"The urgency of Cuba's agricultural crisis of the early to mid-1990s highlights in a dramatic fashion the fundamental weaknesses inherent in the classical (socialist) model of development that its government adopted more than three decades ago. That model, whose applicability in more developed countries is even open to question, heightened many of the problems already existing in Cuban agriculture. It increased the country's external dependence, while reinforcing its reliance on one crop to fuel international economic relations. At the same time, it exacerbated the rural exodus that had been initiated by the spread of agroexport production, creating a situation in which, once jobs were available in agricultural production, there were few people to fill them."

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• Burchardt, H.-J. (2001). Cuba's Agriculture after the New Reforms: Between Stagnation and Sustainable Development. Socialism & Democracy, 15(1), 141. – https://sci-hub.ru/10.1080/08854300108428283 – Says that the reforms of the 1990s were about diversifying the economic forms of agriculture. – Is written by someone sympathetic to socialism. Says collectives are proven in Cuba.

• Deere, C. D. (1993). Household incomes in Cuban agriculture : a comparison of the state, cooperative, and peasant sectors. The Hague, Netherlands : Publications Office, Institute of Social Studies, [1993]. – https://sci-hub.ru/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1995.tb00550.x – "This article presents the results of a 1991 household income survey of the three main groups in Cuban agriculture: wage workers on state farms, members of production co-operatives, and peasant producers. It is shown that since the 1959 revolution household income levels in the agricultural sector have improved dramatically, while regional differences have been ameliorated considerably. Households in the private sector of Cuban agriculture have fared the best. It is also demonstrated that agricultural households rely on multiple sources of income to generate their livelihood. Rather than being strictly proletarian, collective, or petty commodity producers, these households are best characterized by the multiple class relations in which they participate."

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I didn't even get into the famous organopónicos.

It's a literature review largely based on DOI:10.2307/23060037 which "found that RF [rice-fish] maintained the same rice yield and stability as RM [rice monoculture] but required 68% less pesticide and 24% less chemical fertilizer" and "confirmed that the temporal stability of rice yield is higher in RF than in RM in the absence of pesticide"