Using CRISPR-Cas9, scientists engineered a yeast to produce the nutrient feed. Farmers could have it in two years.

  • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
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    6 hours ago

    Do farmers still do crop rotation? Here in the Netherlands they pump the ground full of the appropriate chemicals so they can grow the same crop in the same place every year.

    As for your plan, the fact that bees are getting essential nutrients from those flowers proves a fallow field with wildflowers isn’t being fallow; it’s extracting resources from the soil which may have needed replenishment for crop rotation to work. You can sacrifice productivity for wildflowers, but at that point you’re just designating a space to be a meadow.

    The solution is complicated and requires society to step away from the industrial model of agriculture entirely. Food forests are diverse and resilient permaculture, where a farmer does the labor of monitoring nutrient flows through the ecosystem so that a large population of humans can be part of that balanced ecosystem (possibly at a distance, with food being exported and feces imported). Bees are a natural part of such an ecosystem.