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> Growing food is very complex, probably too complex for our brains.

Can you expand on this?

I'm no expert, and I fully agree that growing food at scale can be difficult. It also requires a lot of space.

But what do you mean by saying it's "too complex for our brains"?

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To grow food in a truly sustainable way, we need to really understand the laws of biology at a macro and micro level (soil biology, water cycle, carbon cycle, etc...). Our scientific systems are not working efficiently towards that necessary understanding. 2/3 of life forms by mass in soil are microbes and we know nothing about 99% of them. We just know that soil biodiversity and food production/quality are highly correlated. If we don't work on this correctly, in the end, we will end up in a dead end and join the 99% of species that disappeared since life exists on earth in the long term. Odds are against us but I'm working with scientists and professionals that are having incredible results.
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> truly sustainable way

What do you mean by that?

> If we don't work on this correctly, in the end, we will end up in a dead end

We have over 10.000 years of agriculture already behind us so I think that's proof that it works well enough to support small communities in a sustainable fashion. It's simply not necessary to understand all the microbes etc..

If you are hinting on optimization so we can feed all of humanity, then I mean we are definitely not resource and knowledge limited but rather by more mundane things. I'd wager just the US defense budget is enough to feed to world without a problem.

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I don't really agree with the person you responded to, but there is a lot of agriculture that is dependent on mined input, having long depleted the soil of whatever nutrients were there when we started. There are many places that are abandoned and barren because we did agriculture there. Land is still being dramatically degraded by many types of agricultural practices.

Meanwhile there are forests that were forest (and other ecosystems as well) 10s of thousands of years ago and just as lush and fertile (if not moreso) than they were to begin with.

Sustainable generally means we can maintain the fertility of the land indefinitely without mined inputs. Whether or not it's a completely achievable goal, it makes good sense to strive for it... Mines will become spent, theres only so much land to degrade, etc.

Often when people talk about sustainable agriculture they are talking about systems that mimic biological systems that keep those forests lush for millennia. These types of agricultural systems frequently look similar to agricultural systems of the past with more human labor involved, but less damaging waste products and fewer externalities. (Reducing pollution of the water downstream and minimizing ecosystem impact).

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> There are many places that are abandoned and barren because we did agriculture there.

Totally but I'd argue nowadays it's not because we are missing the knowledge but rather ignorance and short-term economic gains.

Imo sustainability goes hand in hand with population (and lifestyle). We want a diverse ecosyaystem, this simply doesn't work if there are 10 billion people wanting to eat meat or produce tons of plastic. Our problem is not knowledge in agriculture that prevents us from sustainable living.

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maybe he means it's too complex for science to rediscover. maybe rediscovering/using ancient wisdom regarding this domain is better. but this is just intuition
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> I believe we will have to learn again how to grow food without our current support systems one day

You've AI generated an application. How are you executing your mission statement?

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I'm working with scientists and field practitioners to improve the tool to help them. And now it's growing thanks to my network: https://youtu.be/lC5ixsaGx-4 No one wanted to build that before AI because it was not cost effective.
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I appreciate that your site even includes a bibliography. The UI is similar to the companion planting mini-game from Palia and that's appealing. The link between resilience and your project is still unclear to me. Is my perspective myopic or cynical? Thanks for clarifying.
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No worries. I have no ego in this project. The goal is to help future generations have food on the table even in countries that will have less access to oil and its byproducts like fertilizer. There is a growing movement in my country and others of people that are working towards being more robust. And they missed a tool to speed up design, sharing, learning and collaboration between researchers and field practitioners. They were mostly using pen and paper and custom excel sheets. I'm trying to fill that gap with a research approved database of plants, field oriented design tools, and now I'm starting to add algorithms to help improve hydrology using lidar data as this is one of the top features requested by users.
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Thanks for walking me through the project. I was myopic. I was focused on "Can any future generation use this tool?" which is not as pressing as "Will we have arable soil?"
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So you read an entry-level college syllabus on farming and decided that makes you an expert on regenerative farming techniques?

That's some hubris you got there.

There are millions of farmers around the world that use traditional/regenerative farming techniques because they don't have access to the "current support systems" that make modern farming possible, and thousand in the U.S. and Europe that do so because they can.

And worse...you couldn't actually be bothered to build the website yourself so you outsourced it to an AI....

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