an archive

For clarification ^-^

world heritage post

Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato

For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!

I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.

There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼‍♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼

It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:

And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:

These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.

how dare you question the amazing method of farming that gives us so much food by simply killing the soil and leaving lands barren without maintaining the resources that make it work in the first place.

last year i got 1800 bushels of corn by killing the soil, as opposed to before when i only got 1200 by not killing the soil. surely i can simply keep killing more soil

wym there's only so much soil. that's an externality and therefore none of my concern

well here's the thing, under normal circumstances without human intervention soil recovery can take a long long time. with human intervention, such as mulching, cover crops (that you then turn into mulch), seeding with beneficial fungi, etc, soil buildup can be massively boosted. we can be a positive force instead of a negative one. we just have to start doing that

We literally already pulled off a 10-year turnaround by getting a company to dump a lot of orange peels in an area.

Good point! here it is:

people always blast right past the "if we continue with current practices" and go straight to "this is inevitable"

someone remind me to talk about how colonizer pearl clutching about soil degradation got used to fuck over African farmers when I'm not on my phone and I don't have to get ready for work

Reminding! 

Also here is your friendly neighbourhood librarian with a line in digital/online/news-info literacy reminding that literally all headlines are Advertising to convince you to click the link (or read the bit in the paper, or whatever) and you should treat them as being potentially as misleading as all other advertising. 

Secondary reminder that science reporting (yes even in Scientific American) is notoriously prone to being Terrible as Shit (see also: https://xkcd.com/882/) so you should definitely make sure you a. READ any ACTUAL ARTICLE and then b. Asses that article for its reliability and its actual relationship to the studies that it’s reporting on. 

So FOR INSTANCE: the Scientific American article above is, first off, from 2014. That is almost ten years ago at this point. To say that the state of our knowledge about farming, soil, and what does what, has change in ten years is to understate things significantly. 

Further, it’s reporting what speakers said at a large forum - a public meeting - where they were, bluntly, being imprecise as heck in order to try to stir people to action. Every single statement in the article is fundamentally [citation needed], but especially this one: 

I am absolutely sure that @kawuli​ can comment derisively on this statement better than I can, but this is an activist with a specific focus and without stated detailed sources making a statement to a forum that’s as much about fundraising and determining where the UN is sending funding focus as it is anything else - tl;dr even if you agree with his concerns, you should be aware that this is a rhetorical exercise in persuasion, not a fact-communicating moment. 

All of which brings me back to: just because someone drops a link doesn’t mean the link is reliable, or that it says what it’s implied it says, or that you should take its contents as truthful without question. Citations are for checking. And if it’s way out of your area of expertise maybe don’t form a firm opinion without checking further with people in the actual area. 

HOKAY. SO.

this is earth

In the 1930s, drought and high winds and bad farming practices turned the southwestern Great Plains in the United States into a Dust Bowl.

In the aftermath, we learned a lot about how to NOT do that. Like, for example, plowing up land and leaving it empty for parts of the year is bad and it's better to leave stubble in place until just before planting. Planting hedgerows on field boundaries helps keep the wind down. Not burning fields. Plowing less.

So then a bunch of well-meaning mainly French and British soil scientists who had recently learned quite a lot about soil erosion and the importance of preventing it got posted to The Colonies to Help The Natives by improving agriculture. This went... not great

Colonial agricultural officers definitely thought they knew how to farm better than the people who lived there (racism is a hell of a drug). Tell people to stop burning pastures and fields, teach them how to plow correctly, that sort of thing. You can see white people wringing their hands about how if the natives keep farming the way they are they'll run out of topsoil in a couple more decades....from the late 1800s on up through... well, today. For the most part, all the new ideas weren't an improvement on what people were already doing.

Hey thank you so much for this reply @findingfeather @kawuli ! this is maybe the best response this post has ever gotten, and I agree with basically everything you've just said. I've been learning a lot more for my thesis about indigenous agriculture and agroecology in mexico and it's true it's very complicated, what works will be more or less different everywhere depending on climate and ecology and culture. it's also very wrapped up in political questions about land use, food sovereignty, and colonialism. These responses are spot on. thanks for the reply