Lessons posted:i don't know how much the tractors themselves cost but my dad's wife works for a tractor company and she told me their models retail for around $200k-$1m, with the average being about half a mil
it's different all over. the third world side of my family has a tractor and live in corrugated tin. there's stuff in mo yan about tractor prices that i think comes out to significantly less than that, but i don't know if that sort of thing is factual or not.
palafox posted:Lessons posted:i don't know how much the tractors themselves cost but my dad's wife works for a tractor company and she told me their models retail for around $200k-$1m, with the average being about half a mil
it's different all over. the third world side of my family has a tractor and live in corrugated tin. there's stuff in mo yan about tractor prices that i think comes out to significantly less than that, but i don't know if that sort of thing is factual or not.
yeah i'm sure it differs but i was sort of confining that to countries with truly mechanized agriculture and only a tiny fraction of their population working in the agricultural sector. that might apply to some of the third world, particularly in latin america, idk if that's what you're talking about though.
roseweird posted:so it spent decades protesting nuclear reactors and now spends all its energy fighting fossil fuels, despite their overuse being the obvious consequence of abandoning nuclear development in a state as energy intensive as the u.s
it's almost like some people love to feel aggrieved and malcontent
that said, the mo yan stuff relates to tractor prices after end of the cultural revolution and collectivized farming, where they're within the grasp of the nigh-impoverished independent peasant farmer w. luck and planning, but i don't know if that's trustworthy at all. the only in-depth academic stuff i know about chinese agriculture is from a little before that.
the important lesson to learn here, tho, is that with gumption and ingenuity you can jury rig parts for a beat up ole junker tractor for hella cheap and drive it drunk in a field and thoroughly enjoy yourself, and i'd advise this if you get the chance
roseweird posted:well, cheer up iwc
i'm ok actually, just had a week away from computers and went to a friends house up on the coast, it was fun.....
roseweird posted:
roseweird thanks for putting effort into this post it was interesting to read
your talking about the fantasy of pushing plows, but its been shown that !in most biomes with most plants! small labor-intensive farms are the most productive. mechanization reduces yields, but this effect is masked by expensive fertilizer and genetically vulnerable hybrids. if you want to feed the world without mass human death (which i think is totally possible as well!) then the only answer is to get people back to growing at least part of their own diet. not out of erotic nostalga for dirt but because thats what needs to be done to feed people even without the issue of land ownership and national subsistence. do you think haitain rice-farmers liked being underdeveloped into proles after clinton forced aristide to remove the rice-tariff? (that is a mean question, sorry)
also saying the environmental left is primarily worried about nuclear power is like saying feminists are primarily worried about women's access to consumer goods. The 'green movement' as a political entity in most liberal democracies does pander to nimby dumbasses but the core 'actually-doing-things' green leftists have been doing really important research and experimentation in things like Temperate Food Forests and Management Intensive Grazing - medium/high labor, low capital, and high yield growing methods.
you dont cause a communist revolution by shifting the OVerton Window left every election cycle and you dont feed the world by tinkering with a wholly profit-oriented system. im fine with nuclear power and solar power as long as they arent made from the spilled entralls of africa, but thats their most likely source so might as well try to build a system that can survive without them.
edited some words better
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this tower is the last i shall upgrade for sweet graphics, Dark Souls 2 will be the last of the steam purchases. this is my sacrifice, the lamb i offer unto the alter of mud, no more video games. my god. my god.
also to clarify i last upgraded this desktop when I was a teen and plan never to upgrade it/purchase a new computer again, not that i want to upgrade it in the future but 'for the last time!!'
this is sort of separate, but i feel like a lot of the discussion here is about technologies that have been developed to feed a capitalist market, and the moving on to say that it is impossible for any technology to be developed, in any framework, that will not be literally worse than doing everything by hand. and the same goes for nuclear power. there are plenty of nuclear power options that are much less wasteful or dangerous than what we use right now (because what we use right now was developed to be part of the nuclear weapons cycle) and just because what we have is bad doesn't mean that we can't all be better off with doing it better than by ditching it entirely. that's some wile-e-coyote logic.
c_man posted:when you say "mechanization reduces yields" are you talking about total production or like production per unit area or something? also what's wrong with nuclear power?
he's talking in terms yields per unit of energy spent ("the corn syrup you get from a coke can has a 10 to 1 petro-calorie to human-calorie ratio") and he said he's fine with nuclear power
roseweird posted:why is the left full of crypto-primitivists hoping to wait out an apocalyptic starvation event? it's unseemly. come on. get up, dust yourselves off, remember the state you must inherit as communists.
probably because global warming and the energy crisis in its modern form (capitalism is actually in a perpetual energy crisis but lets leave that aside) are relatively new things and no one's done the theoretical work to integrate the solutions coming from environmental science and theory into a marxist framework, or at least not well enough to reach a wide audience, and so people just wail about how we're all going to die. not that thats what scree is doing necessarily.
the big way hybrid grain and synthetic fertilizer increase yield on say, corn, isn't by tripling the amount of kernals on each cob but by allowing the corn to be planeted incredibly close together. genetically identical hybrid corn means no plant grows faster than any other (or has any greater pest/disease resistance!!!) and the fertilizer prevents the soil from being completely stripped of nitrogen after a single season of overproduction.
HOWEVER polyculture methods improve yields the exact same way without the need for oil-based inputs! the classic and a bit hokey Three SIsters - Corn + Bean + Squash - all compete on different soil/sun levels and so produce greater calorie per acre than corn or beans or squash by itself in the same amount of space (without nitrogen fertilizer)
HOWEVER mechanization removes the possibility of polyculture because each machine can handle only one type of plant, and only those that all ripen at the around the same time. outside of not-yet-seen handlike harvest machines (which if they could be made without huge material/energy inputs i would totally support!) using large machines in harvesting is going to require monoculture, which reduces yields, which must then be boosted by genetically vulnerable produce and water-poisoning fertilizer.
the industrial agriculture companies say they want to feed the world, but they dont! their systemic goal is to grow the most corn possible to make the most profit possible by selling corn-based products, even if it means sacrificing total calorie yields. this is why capitalist agriculture must be treated skeptically (NOT thoughtlessly rejected) at all turns, because they do not grow food, they grow profit.
and so its important to the remember that the reason monoculture was adapted by humans in the first place wasnt to increase the amount of food avalible, but to make food production more legible to the tax officials of kings. monoculture is state-culture, and if the ultimate goal of Communism is the abolishment of the state through the dictatorship of the majority then a food system that is designed to feed that majority, not profit off of them, is needed
roseweird posted:Lessons posted:
he's talking in terms yields per unit of energy spent ("the corn syrup you get from a coke can has a 10 to 1 petro-calorie to human-calorie ratio") and he said he's fine with nuclear power
right, are we clear though that we can use harvester combines and satellite maps without using them to make corn syrup? in fact that it is our obligation to use them, because if we and people like us do not then no one will turn them to more ethical use? someone please register for agricultural school on account of this thread.
if you dont like the us political policies why dont you become a politician, get elected, and change them?
edit: got a better one: mad at how youre treated at work? dont join a union, get a ba and become a manager!
mad about israel's ethnic cleansing of palestine? have you considered converting to judaism and
Edited by Scrree ()
c_man posted:just because what we have is bad doesn't mean that we can't all be better off with doing it better than by ditching it entirely. that's some wile-e-coyote logic.
Wile E. Coyote was a Rational Actor whose only failures are directly attributable to the fact that his environment was irrational and did not conform to the Euclidean geometry, Newtonian physics, and classical education upon which his purely rational expectations were based. Wile E. Coyote logic is, in fact, Logic.
im sorry if im talking past you roseweird because your right that there is no reason to reject technologies like satelites just due to their associations with iphones and yuppies; i just really love thinking about growing things and trying to grow things so this thread is kind of a soapbox for me
roseweird posted:i'm sorry if i upset you. i don't think those analogies are valid. however i've said all i have to say. enjoy homesteading.
i will, thanks
Scrree posted:HOWEVER mechanization removes the possibility of polyculture because each machine can handle only one type of plant, and only those that all ripen at the around the same time. outside of not-yet-seen handlike harvest machines (which if they could be made without huge material/energy inputs i would totally support!) using large machines in harvesting is going to require monoculture, which reduces yields, which must then be boosted by genetically vulnerable produce and water-poisoning fertilizer.
sounds good to me.
Lessons posted:roseweird posted:why is the left full of crypto-primitivists hoping to wait out an apocalyptic starvation event? it's unseemly. come on. get up, dust yourselves off, remember the state you must inherit as communists.
probably because global warming and the energy crisis in its modern form (capitalism is actually in a perpetual energy crisis but lets leave that aside) are relatively new things and no one's done the theoretical work to integrate the solutions coming from environmental science and theory into a marxist framework, or at least not well enough to reach a wide audience, and so people just wail about how we're all going to die. not that thats what scree is doing necessarily.
what solutions? there are no solutions to global warming possible under capitalism. so unless you think marxism needs more theoretical work to say 'overthrow capitalism or we're all going to die' than I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Scrree posted:freeing people from the slavery of labor... has there ever been a greater good?
imma 21st century schizoid man
Scrree posted:HOWEVER mechanization removes the possibility of polyculture because each machine can handle only one type of plant, and only those that all ripen at the around the same time.
youre not thinkin about the future where drone gundams harvest our polyculture fields.
Scrree posted:using large machines in harvesting is going to require monoculture, which reduces yields, which must then be boosted by genetically vulnerable produce and water-poisoning fertilizer.
not really the latter afaik, but it's obviously not good for the soil and it clearly is not robust for changing conditions. i'm sure you can design cultivating machines that can accept more diversity within crop types.
Scrree posted:properly managed ecosystems produce an energy surplus from the sun, not a deficit from the earth, and combines haven't been proven to work within that kind of system.
what? show me an equation balancing the energy and how you define your system. to oversimplify, it'll always be dissipative if only for 2nd law losses, even for biological systems. more on point, you have to track your sources as bookkeeping fossil fuels requires a whole need system to include. ultimately, the complexity is rather staggering.
in general, i don't know if the difference is in the noise or not, but i imagine it is more energy intensive to harvest polyculture fields. tools and labor have to vary for each crop on a given field. bringing out X, Y, Z tools for harvest and then changing your work flow for each plant is more disruptive. i imagine it might be minor with good design, but just a thought.
Scrree posted:and so its important to the remember that the reason monoculture was adapted by humans in the first place wasnt to increase the amount of food avalible, but to make food production more legible to the tax officials of kings.
its origin isn't really relevant at the stage of industrial agra and it's meaningless to bring up. if you are to imagine the harvest problem as an optimization (to get wonky linear algebra) problem, monoculture clearly has less variables and permits simpler theoretical and practical solutions. given some of the reasons above and for the farmer, as opposed to, but perhaps, the holistic system, the added complications of polyculture not just complicate the solution but i posit would add terms that would increase the energy/action (in lagrangian terms).
i can see where you're coming from and i'm sympathetic. the issues i would have with industrial farming are that of industrialization as a whole, where it creates a far more sensitive, less robust system but one that is tremendously more efficient. issues of sustainability are obviously important, if not the most in the long run, but it's not to say better industrial design can't account for it, either. at this point, you need to start defining other variables to optimize over, rather than cost or energy, and then rerun the same work.