I read years ago that the local Indians, instead of farming or conventional gardening, would create gardens with the desired plants all mixed together (including trees and bushes). This would create an ecosystem of interdependent crops which would provide food year round.
They're largely abandoned and forgotten, but one can find them having gone wild in various places. They're marked by a marked diversity of flora.
Simple monoculture fields were appropriate for 20th-century mechanical equipment. I wonder if these kinds of higher-complexity arrangements could be automated with modern robotics and computer vision.
That idea sounds excellent and combines old and new ideas in an unexpected way. Hacker News can facilitate wonderful syntheses sometimes.
Any startup working on this in EU?
Intercropping, yes. One type of which is called Three Sisters, where you grow corn, climbing beans and squash together.
It is of course harder to do on industrial scale, but it probably beats doing row monocrops on your backyard.
I think there's a bit about that at the end of Seeing Like a State.
Sometimes this is what is meant by permaculture.
There’s def a bit in Mann’s 1491.
A friend of mine in Brazil abandoned working in tech to start farming using these methods.
He grows many different crops intermixed with native vegetation, it's been about 12-15 years and the progress is astounding, all while helping to recover a little bit of the Atlantic Rainforest of São Paulo.
Can you share where?
This sounds desirable. How could we harvest mixed cultures at industrial scale to feed the many mouths of humanity?
Robotics and computer vision perhaps?
This is the principle behind biodynamic farming, right?
I understand it more as "it turns out composting tons of organic material makes the soil more fertile"
Which is far from a breaking news. I'm just curious about how composting this much agrumes didn't unbalance the soil's pH, but that they don't mention it at all in the article.
Eh, sorta. Biodynamic farming in the form promoted by Rudolf Steiner is kinda semi-mystical and involves astrology, lunar phases and manipulating the 'cosmic forces of the soil' by doing things like burying quartz inside a cow horn.
But biodynamic farming does also emphasise the kind of cohesive view of your crops as an interacting system that you'd find in modern permaculture. It's just that biodynamic implies a bunch of other spirituality stuff that you wouldn't normally consider part of permaculture.
> "It's a shame where we live in a world with nutrient-limited degraded ecosystems and also nutrient-rich waste streams. We'd like to see those things come together a little bit,"
Saw a talk about circular economies once. One of the things that stuck in my mind was, "If mankind has any chance of a permanent occupation of earth, the current meaning of the word 'waste' will have to fade away."
What is the normal outcome of these orange peels? Fed to livestock? Mulch? Or just added to landfill?
The results were impressive, but I imagine there were months of rotting orange peels. Which is probably not ideal neighbors, but fine in otherwise barren, uninhabited land.
You don't need to imagine:
>"Kind of passing through this gross stage in between of kind of sludgy stuff filled with fly larvae."
i grew up near an orange producer and they burned them. god it stunk. nice to see they found a better way to use the peels
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1994/jun/23/straight-bil...
>As for what happens to all the rinds from that mountain of oranges Tropicana processes, the nutrition in them (and apparently there is a lot) eventually comes back to us in the form of hamburgers. Tropicana and other processors dry the rinds, chop them up, and sell them for cattle feed.
> the company would be allowed to dump its discarded orange peel at no cost on degraded land in the park.
> The juice company agreed to the deal, and some 12,000 tonnes of waste orange peel carried by a convoy of 1,000 truckloads was unceremoniously dumped on virtually lifeless soils at the site.
I guess they weren't doing this cattle feed deal back then, since evidently it was more economical for them to find a free dumping ground? Maybe they produce too much of it: 12000 tonnes, that's the cargo capacity of ninety 747s...
I read about that case years ago, and as a result started composting my biomass garbage, especially the orange peel! I don't generate enough to make a difference, but the local fauna eats most of it. A couple of onions have sprouted in the pile.
We used to do that, once I figured out how to stop the rodents.
In the end our local council started collecting food waste which was a lot less hassle for us and we could include bones. We get to collect free compost once a year.
> once I figured out how to stop the rodents
Any tips?
I'm surprised that the oranges didnt make the soil too acidic, but I guess organic matter + water == lushness works 100% of the time
Some plants prefer a more acidic soil compared to others. Tomatoes are pretty well known for liking acidic soil.
Tomatoes like a fairly neutral ph of ~6.5. A better example is blueberries with mid-4’s.
Other articles (and the underlying research) actually mention this. It's suspected that the acidity killed off most of the younger, more temporary "new growths" (like non-native grasses) in the area and provides suitable conditions for "old growth" plants to quickly expand into the area after the acidity dropped off.
The acidity is temporary. The organic acids in the peels are eventually metabolized by the fauna and converted to carbon dioxide.
The juice is acidic. Are the peels?
It is recommended against putting them into your composite.
Some people recommend avoiding citrus and onions in compost and worm farms typically because worms don't like it in the early stages of decomposition.
I've never followed that rule personally and my compost system works really well. I get some black soldier fly larvae and other vermiculture in the early stages. In case you're wondering the black soldier flies aren't annoying like houseflies and typically steer clear of homes and humans. I usually only see a few BSFs around the compost and sometimes a lot of larvae, but it's seasonal.
I'm not completely sure, but that might be because of the oils in the peel. Citrus peel oil has antimicrobial properties.
I wish they had a picture of this fig tree they mention.
This is the best image I could find (from another article). It's not the same fig but you can see a pretty substantial fig growth in this image.
https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI...
https://www.upworthy.com/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-peels...
> a fig tree so huge it would take three people wrapping their arms around the trunk to cover the circumference.
No way that grew in 16 years…
Keep in mind that banyan trees (those massive trees that can basically be a small forest in of themselves) are figs as well. Figs grow incredibly fast and often go from a bunch of vines all fighting to climb for sunlight into a giant fused mass that is a fig tree.
Fig trees are incredibly fast growing. They can grow 15 feet in a single year
Fig trees are insane, you can literally put a branch on the ground and it will grow
Isn't "barren pasture" an oxymoron?
This is particularly interesting to me because (1) they have a natural control, given that it’s such a small area, and (2) the mechanism is apparently a mystery?
> When comparing the site to a nearby control area that hadn't been treated with orange peels, Treuer's team found their experimental compost heap yielded richer soil, more tree biomass, and a broader diversity of tree species – including a fig tree so huge it would take three people wrapping their arms around the trunk to cover the circumference.
> As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.
> "That's the million dollar question that we don't yet have the answer to," Treuer told Popular Science.
Very misleading title. Barren soil is barren soil. Desert is a classification based on rainfall. Dumping ground is/was not a desert.
Ok, we've put the barren pasture the article talks about back in the title above.
You could call it a “ecological desert”, but that said, it’s not even the title of TFA, which is more accurate.
Thanks, I wasn't happy with the title either, for what is otherwise a decent article. TFA's title exceeded the HN limit, so I've done what I can.
This article is from 2017
