• @[email protected]
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      1987 months ago

      All plants require different levels nutrients to grow. If the same plant is grown repeatedly in the same soil then the soil will run out of the nutrients that plant needs and growing that plant becomes difficult. By rotating through plants with different nutrient requirements, the soil can maintain a sustainable balance of nutrients.

      We now use the scientific method to argue ideas, but in the past ideas could just be laughed at if people thought they sounded dumb. People laughed at ideas like the sun being the center of the solar system and doctors needing to wash their hands before surgery. Refusal to accept these ideas held humanity back from technological advancement.

      • @reattach
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        457 months ago

        Good explanation. Crop rotation also decreases plant diseases and insect damage.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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        377 months ago

        People didn’t just laugh at those ideas, they actively punished the people who proposed them.

          • @xantoxis
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            117 months ago

            Because change is costly and therefore a risk. When it seems that resources are scarce, risks are dangerous, and it can seem rational to destroy ideas that cost more resources, lest your imagined model of society collapse for lack of resources as the idea takes over.

            It’s always conservatism, in other words.

            • @ThatWeirdGuy1001
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              67 months ago

              Let’s not take the religious aspects out of it though.

              The church said earth was the center so saying the sun was the center was going against the church which was blasphemy. Blasphemy punishable by lifelong imprisonment or death.

              Likely both as dungeons weren’t exactly life friendly.

          • JJROKCZ
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            7 months ago

            Because many considered any change to be an affront to Gods will. So they killed free-thinkers to prove God infallible

          • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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            27 months ago

            Because they challenged the notion that mankind is the center of and purpose for the universe.

      • @Woovie
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        47 months ago

        I feel like this is something that would happened at one of my past shitty jobs or in a crappy friend group.

      • @[email protected]
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        27 months ago

        We now use the scientific method to argue ideas, but in the past ideas could just be laughed at if people thought they sounded dumb.

        Used to before the whole covid scam anyway. Now it’s “trust the science” which of course is an oxymoron. The whole point of science is that we don’t trust it, we verify it. And that wasn’t allowed.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      You can’t really grow the same crop in the same field season after season (without fertiliser), because they’ll sap the specific nutrients they need from the soil. If you do that over and over eventually the soil wont have any food for that crop. Growing something different each season that takes different nutrients from the soil lets it recover the other ones. I don’t know how it recovers on its own, circle of life stuff probably. Modern farming can cheat by artificially replenishing the nutrients with fertiliser.

      • JJROKCZ
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        27 months ago

        The problem is that even with crop rotation much of our soil is still nearly depleted. Most farmers aren’t doing enough varied rotation or rest cycles or regenerative farming since anything other than the same 2-3 crops isn’t profitable for them

    • @MehBlah
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      417 months ago

      Unobservant idiots will always try to hold progress back.

    • @SpruceBringsteen
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      197 months ago

      As others have said, a monoculture will drain those specific nutrients.

      Beans are kinda special being a nitrogen fixer. Lot of plants will drain nitrogen so we fertilize as supplement.

      Plant beans, squash, and corn together and you won’t need to rotate your fields and the plants will form a sort of symbiosis working together.

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox
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      7 months ago

      She is playing the part of the dumb antagonist saying Jeff is stupid for rotating his crops.

      Somehow the dumb antagonist is 5000 years old. Humanity can be dumb lol.

      • @[email protected]
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        117 months ago

        She’s playing a collective of dumb antagonists, and Jeff may or may not be a collective of progressive thinking/experimenting people who were ignored throughout history despite their efforts.