Cereal led me here
A rabbit-hole ends up in a place of good news
Earlier this week we highlighted cereal. How efficiently it is made, and how good that is given that breakfast is or was considered the most important meal of the day.
In researching this article I came across the rather esoteric field of crop rotations.
Rotating crops is a self-defining field, you rotate the crops you are growing. It’s a practice which dates back to 6,000 BCE, and the in the 16th Century CE the Belgians took it up a notch with the also cleverly four-field rotation, which involved rotating wheat, turnips, barley, and clover. This led to both improved feeding for livestock and, in a much larger sense, the British Agricultural Revolution.
Since then we’ve tweaked around the edges (er, tilled in shallow soil?) as our understanding of soil acidity, nutrients and pests has increased, but recently we’ve taken it up to a whole new level as highlighted by two recent articles.
The first article, from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, focuses on the great environmental benefits of 21st Century crop rotation practices. These Minnesotans have realized that by adding small grains and forgeable legumes into the cover crop rotation, improvements can be made to soil constitutions which greatly reduce fertilizer needs (which leads to water pollution), and downstream of this reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and fossil fuel consumption. By adding small grains and forages into more diverse rotations, less fertilizer is required and less pollution is emitted, to the tune of:
used 56% less fossil fuels;
generated 54% fewer greenhouse gas emissions;
and had monetized damages from greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants 42% lower than the conventional corn-soybean system.
The second article, from Nature, comes from China! It focuses on found economic benefits of new more diverse crop rotations. It discusses how including cash crops and legumes (again legumes!) in crop rotations can augment those environmental gains with increases in crop yields and thus can increase farmer income.
Specifically, by including the ever-controversial sweet potato into the rotation increased:
The annual equivalent yield by 38%
The annual economic benefit (net income) by 60%!
So. Today’s good word is diversity. Diversity in science (Minnesota and China), diversity in crop rotations, and diversity in benefits.
Now, did I mention the problems with consolidation in our farming industry?
I did not.
Because this blog is about good news.