• 39 Posts
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Joined 2 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月14日

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  • Alley cropping has a lot of advantages and scales well depending on one’s goals. If you wanted to have large combines, you can simply make the alleys wider. Its all about tradeoffs. I’ll have to look into Kentucky coffeetree, I imagine that their bean pods would make good livestock fodder.

    Regarding the alfalfa wheat intercrop, the goal is actually to harvest the wheat for grain, with the alfalfa functioning as a sort of fertilizer crop (that’s still harvested for forage after the wheat is harvested). There are a lot of barriers, so it’s an active area of research, but it’s a really interesting topic.




  • Definitely a valid critique of Mondragon in the modern era, its commitment to the 10% ratio has atrophied somewhat. It’s still something that ebbs and flows, for example there is a current push to transfer 35,000 non-member workers in their retail coop into full members (from a total of 50,000 workers). From numbers I’ve seen, 85% of employees are still members, which is pretty good.






  • I’m not sure I would call that a monopoly though. Most farmland is owned by the operator, and a large portion of leased farmland is owned by retired farmers, descendants, or widows. Roughly 10% of land is owned by some sort of corporate or trust landlord. (This data is a tad old, but my general sense from subsequent years is that land transfers were mainly through inheritance, not sale, implying the situation is similar today). Price increases in land is due to different forces, and consolidation occurs mostly within communities (i.e. a big family farm purchases a small family farm, or when a farmer dies their kid retains the land and rents it, these are the processes behind consolidation and lack of land access, imo).






















  • I like to chop it up, fry it with onions, and put it in burritos. Breakfast burritos especially with egg, bacon or sausage, and cheese. It can also substitute for turnip or collard greens in a recipe if you’re looking for a place to eat it. Since its more of a bitter plant, you’ll want to use it much differently than spinach (whoever told you it tastes like that deserves a stern talking to)