I watched several videos on a Combine Harvester's inner workings and I still don't understand how this thing works.
I watched several videos on a Combine Harvester's inner workings and I still don't understand how this thing works.
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From my perspective this "pinnacle of human ingenuity" is actually a farse, because it relies on a monoculture and is therefore unsustainable in the long term.
Don't get me wrong, the engineering is cool and I understand how important the mass production of food has been up to this point in human history, but there is another side of the story. The advent of machinery like this is part of why modern farmers use so many pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers - a monoculture depletes the soil of its nutrients and decreases natural pest control, necessitating the use of chemicals. The use of those chemicals has in turn driven huge ecosystem changes that we are only just beginning to understand the impact of (such as mass pollinator die-offs, changes to soil microbiology, pollution of fresh water sources, pollution of cropland soil, and more) as well as impacting humans in ways we don't understand since some of those chemicals make their way into our bodies.
You do know that crop rotation exists? It is absolute bullshit to say that using a combine harvester requires monoculture. You can simply rotate what crops you plant on a single field each year. This is also necessary if you care about would health and want to reduce efforts in fighting other weeds. If you also include Legominoses (idk if that's the correct word) into your crop rotation you reduce the need for fertilisers, due to them being able to fixate ammonium in the soil.
Crop rotation is a great thing but still falls within monoculture. Planting a field with only one type of thing is the definition of monoculture.
I seriously believe that cover cropping, intercropping, and examples like MonkderViete posted are the way forward - they result in higher crop yield per square foot and are more resilient in the face of climate change and pest pressure.
You should learn about the benefits of no till market gardens - they are real and they work.
Covercrop is still monoculture, monoculture isn't inherently bad. Ultimately it comes down to cost. Labor is limited and a lot of the stuff you're talking about are fine for small volume vegetables but you're not gonna get feed the world wheat yields from that.
You're tilting against the wind. It seems people that know nothing about farming are the ones that have the strongest opinions about farming and food.
Cover cropping does not constitute monoculture when done ideally. In my personal experience with cover crops I have used multiple types of cover crop concurrently in one space.
Here is a great source on cover cropping: https://growingformarket.com/articles/cover-cropping-notill-systems
Excerpt from my source: "Rarely in nature do we see a field covered in just a couple of plant species; the natural soil care principle of maximizing diversity inspires us to do better. At Frith, we aim for at least three species in each mix, but some mixes may contain six or more."
And I don't think we'll be able to keep feeding the world with our current style of agriculture, which is generally depleting soil health and setting us up for future failure. We need more people to be active or semi active in agriculture on smaller scale farms and to eat more local food.
Again, this isn't going to work for bulk grains like wheat and corn. I've seen plenty of permaculture type farms and they're fine for small stuff and vegetables and more of that is good. But it's not suitable for growing 50 million tons of wheat. Labor is already short and it will get worse.
Any farming will deplete the soil of nutrients over time simply because we harvest things from the plants and ship them elsewhere and don't ship the waste or replacement nutrients back. Especially considering the insect die off, which at least moved some nutrients at random, though still not likely enough to make up for removing them at an industrial scale.
Came in to make a similar comment. Giant machines like this are a huge part of the problem in a number of ways. Their rigid design limits the kinds of environments that you can farm on, if you're trying to run at competitive scale. It also limits you to monocropping as you said, whereas a complex polycultural system would both more efficiently build soil over time, but naturally deters pests if properly designed and maintained.
They also contribute to soil infertility by overly compacting soils due to their mammoth weight. And they are not at all cheap either, and one of the contributing factors to so many farmers ending up hopelessly in debt.
The bottom line is that industrial farming is not sustainable, and like it or not, homescale and small community agriculture is going to have to play larger roles in our lives if we want to have any hope of staving off famine as resources become more scarce.
One 4 meter line wheat and the next one a different crop, with 3 or 4 crops alternating, would be fine too. Especially with kilometers long fields.
Edit: sonething like this:
This is not really doable. It may be for small scale production of vegetables, but not for anything that needs great efficency. In the farming sector the trend goes towards bigger machines and bigger fields to increase efficiency and also to eliminate the need for work done by humans through automation. Concepts like this are incredibly hard to adapt, since they significantly increase the amount of work without increasing the profit. Also due to different plants having different needs it becomes significantly harder to actually harvest the needed amounts in order to make a profit.
I mean, one track can be as wide as a field sprayer as well. Not more work then.
For harvesting you would need to change the tool or adjust the machine for every row.
What, why? Barely two cultures have the same harvest time.
You seem to think of a lot of different cultures in rows. What i'm trying to say is, maybe 4 cultures in a field 4 times the size, but alternating rows.
So what if your rows were 1/2 mile wide and 1/2 mile long, and you had dozens of these rows with about 4-6 cultures interspersed amongst them? It would be like a single field with several rows, but at a scale that makes 120' sprayers and 60' combine headers make sense. You know, like a farm.
No, not a half mile wide but a few meters wide.
is this solarpunk 🫴🦋
-circa the 70's- we call it 'green revolution' because we multiplied tenfold the harvests with mechanisation and standardisation. Back than the world wad hungry so it was necessary.
Today we see a weird phoenomenon where the abundance of resources changed customer behaviour and now we are causing the opposite effectes, effectively depleting the environment around us.
I can't type too much on a phone but the consistent way to learn this is following researches and learning the basis of soil maintenance, structure etc.
All that can be done with agromomy manuals and practical tips.
Even old ones really