Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: 1 ... 27 28 [29] 30 31 ... 35

Author Topic: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution  (Read 148421 times)

NW_Kohaku

  • Bay Watcher
  • [ETHIC:SCIENCE_FOR_FUN: REQUIRED]
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #420 on: February 02, 2013, 03:22:35 pm »

Let me try explaining this in a different way...

The way that you're talking about the system, where players will sit there manually calculating out even a single variable "for simplicity", but where they do they work themselves will always be micromanagement.

It's like how the farms first operated in 2d, where farming was simply a matter of remembering to turn on the pumps at the start of the year to flood the fields again.

What I'm proposing is that, since we are the overseer of the whole fortress, we do not manually order every single worker to do every single menial task.  We are more like the legislature of a city counsel. 

We set the budget

We assign a set number of people to completing a certain job.  We ask someone who tracks the data for us what tasks we can accomplish (crops can be grown), and what costs are associated with that. (See what Zwei and I were discussing.)  We then say what we are tasking the workers with accomplishing, and what they are budgeted to accomplish that task.

You tell them, "You are allowed to use this much of this type of fertilizers," and if they need more, maybe they come back and say they can't accomplish their job with the current resources because of something unforseen, and you need to spend more, and you may spend more or say no, but that's a managerial decision for you to make based upon what resources you can budget.

We then may inquire into their progress and possibly intervene, but, fundamentally, the actual task of knowing when it's time to water the crops or apply fertilizers is not our job.  Doing the math is not our job.  Only setting up the routine for collecting compostable materials and the "workshop" to produce it, assigning farmers, zoning land for farming, and telling the farmers what their goal is would be our job.

The point of having multiple soil variables is just to make it so that, like a RTS game where you have more than one resource, sometimes one of your resources is very abundant, and sometimes one of your resources is very scarce, and you might make choices as to what crops you plant based upon whether that unit costs more minerals or vespene gas to produce because of your resource limitations.

That's what it means to be making top-level managerial decisions, rather than low-level optimization decisions.



As for what you said about pests...

If bugs are a distribution pest, I just need to increase the size of my plantation an appropriate variable according to the distribution of pest losses, and increase the labor pool. The inclusion of the pest is just a frontloaded obstacle, that raw planting increases can overcome. Variances over time are just noise on the distribution, and can be further eliminated with larger plantings, which increase the SNR.

You seem to be mistaken in how pests work.  Pest populations grow geometrically, and are not tracked in just one farm, but across the whole map. 

Hence, growing potatoes in one field one season, and then in another field the next, as it seems like you're proposing, in a bid to wait enough seasons for the pests in the first field die out would fail because pests redistribute themselves across every field every tick. 

One of the ways in which I simplified what I said to winner was that some pests have longer life cycles or dormant periods than others.  This would mean not all creatures will starve as quickly as others.  (And not all would explode in population size every month, and would have more annual mating cycles.)

Losses in soil fertility can be offset by adding more farming labor, and adding non-food producing farm plots, that do NOTHING but produce compostable materials. Increasing the size of the cleanup crew, and penning a bunch of animals to get poop is just offsetting the freestuff button to a different location, rather than removing it.

Actually, I do think that's something of a cost, especially if you're trading huge amounts of land and inefficient use of labor for the ability to do a simpler style of farming.

There's only so much a system can do, of course, but if you want to farm with huge amounts of land and labor to reduce on the complexity of how you set up your farm (avoiding better irrigation techniques or more complex cycles of crops) then that's an option as the basic "foot of the learning hill". 

The difference here between what I'm proposing and just a simple "take up more land and labor" solution is that there's an actual reward for doing things more creatively, and that's what makes the whole exercise interesting.

Further, it's not really "free stuff" if you're giving up your chance to eat those crops you're tilling back into the soil, now are you?  Especially if it takes adding a bit more compost than just that set of techniques alone will allow you - you're paying something back to the soil, and it's therefore not just plain free.

Besides which, what you're proposing actually isn't any different from what I'm proposing in that key regard - you're still just proposing adding compost and having to farm more plants to put back in the soil.  The difference is that I'm trying to shift the focus of the player more into abstract ways of looking at the problem (building a sustainable system) as opposed to simply focusing upon a details-oriented approach (keeping a watch on exact fertility levels and manually ordering their renewal).
Logged
Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
Class Warfare

wierd

  • Bay Watcher
  • I like to eat small children.
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #421 on: February 02, 2013, 03:30:50 pm »

The micromanagement portion can be effectively eliminated, with a simple "Composting" section to the stocks screen, like the kitchen, where you can turn on/off autocomposting.

After that, you just set crop prefs on farm plots, and let sit.

No more micromanagment, but with the possibility of HILARITY ENSUES!, when you get lots of bad weather, or pests destroy produce faster than you compost, etc.

As for the pest mitigation issue, I was thinking more like this:

Code: [Select]

#####
#P#P#
#####

where ## are farm plots you have PURPOSEFULLY depleted, and P is a plot you keep up, and retain.  By interspersing enough barren plots, you throw off the granularity calculation of the pet distribution function, so you have fewer pests than you should. (each plot is a 1x1 farm plot, well below the efficiency threshold for your distribution function, because it would result in singularities if you tried to fix it!)
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 03:35:55 pm by wierd »
Logged

10ebbor10

  • Bay Watcher
  • DON'T PANIC
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #422 on: February 02, 2013, 03:38:08 pm »

That's just an implementation problem though, which can be fixed quite easily by redividing the pests over the places with support plants they can eat (and optimally adding more pests to those plots whose plants they like more).

With the above thing fallow plots won't noticable affect anything, and making bait plots to lure pests away might have an adverse effect, as these cause the population to increase.
Logged

wierd

  • Bay Watcher
  • I like to eat small children.
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #423 on: February 02, 2013, 03:41:07 pm »

You are also forggeting about creative use of Verminators.

Penning a bunch of naughty kitties in the bait plot will result in active destruction of pests, and the generation of compostable remains as a fresh, new exploit. The spontaneous generation of pests suddenly becomes an item generator.
Logged

10ebbor10

  • Bay Watcher
  • DON'T PANIC
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #424 on: February 02, 2013, 03:48:20 pm »

So you're placing a crop that attracts a certain type of bug near one of it's natural predators. Seems like a perfectly legit idea, both realistically and gameplay. It won't be perfectly efficient/realistic and needs to be balanced to prevent a free energy exploit, but why not?

Seems like a plus to the system rather than a minus.
Logged

wierd

  • Bay Watcher
  • I like to eat small children.
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #425 on: February 02, 2013, 03:55:00 pm »

it runs into a problem with unrealistic energy generation.

EG, lets say I have decided I want to BRUTE FORCE the problem to begin with. My farms are holding steady. I have a catsplosion.

I decide that I want to pen the naughty kitties outside, so I pen them all in micromanaged, individual 1x1 pen/pasture zones, that checkerboard the growing feilds. Even with their deleterious effect of the kitty poop, their vermination activity boosts crop yeilds to astronomical levels, which triggers more bugs to form... kitties kill even MOAR bugs. Eventually, the whole top surface is a swarming pile of bugs and bug corpses, with all the dwarves dutifully scooping them up, and dumping them into the composter, generating VERY valuable compost through the infinite item generator mechanism. I put some of that output back into the system to keep it purpetuated...  My networth explodes, and my FPS tanks.

Improved farming thoroughly broken.
Logged

10ebbor10

  • Bay Watcher
  • DON'T PANIC
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #426 on: February 02, 2013, 03:58:22 pm »

You're assuming that the generated biomass would be larger than the biomass provided, which shouldn't be the case in proper balance. At best, you will probably loose about 80% of the biomass/nutritients and such. (Because, the vermin replicates based on the crop eaten, not the crop produced. The vermin thingies you see on the field would be a visual representive of those, and killing them should lower the parameter with X amount, so that all remains balanced.)
Logged

wierd

  • Bay Watcher
  • I like to eat small children.
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #427 on: February 02, 2013, 04:00:30 pm »

Not necessarily.  By introducing predators like that, either the bugs are spontaneously generated (like they currently are), or they follow a fixed progression curve, and penning verminators allows greater biomass retention, and still results in positive feedback.

Remember, homeostasis was achieved with BRUTE FORCE to begin with. Any improvement in efficiency will result in a log efficiency effect over time. (assuming you reinvest the surplus, and impact of soil improvement remains linear.)
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 04:03:05 pm by wierd »
Logged

NW_Kohaku

  • Bay Watcher
  • [ETHIC:SCIENCE_FOR_FUN: REQUIRED]
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #428 on: February 02, 2013, 04:02:23 pm »

Alright, I think, upon reflection, the problem here is that what was meant by "free stuff" wasn't entirely conveyed.

The problem with the current model, and why it's "free stuff", is that you don't have to pay anything back to the soil.  That is, mud can produce crops forever without anything being returned.  It's creation of infinite matter ex nihilo.  What any sort of soil fertility model (yours or mine) creates is a finite ceiling on how much material can be removed from the soil without giving something back.

That is, it's an explanation as to why you need to have soil fertility at all instead of just making farming take more space or labor.  (Some of the people in the older thread said that the only problem was basically that farms weren't big enough and that it only took one or two farmers to feed a fortress.)  I'm not saying that space and labor can't be part of the solution, but that they, alone, aren't going to solve the problems of current farming.

By having to put something back through composting to get something out in return, you have a (fairly soft, but at least extant) finite cap on the quantity of material that can be in the fort at any period of time - something has to be decomposed and put back into the soil to get more out of the soil.



The micromanagement portion can be effectively eliminated, with a simple "Composting" section to the stocks screen, like the kitchen, where you can turn on/off autocomposting.

After that, you just set crop prefs on farm plots, and let sit.

No more micromanagment, but with the possibility of HILARITY ENSUES!, when you get lots of bad weather, or pests destroy produce faster than you compost, etc.

... Which is exactly what I'm proposing, but with more than one kind of fertilizer available, and multiple variables for those differences in fertilizers and crops to be more distinct.

As for the pest mitigation issue, I was thinking more like this:

Code: [Select]

#####
#P#P#
#####

where ## are farm plots you have PURPOSEFULLY depleted, and P is a plot you keep up, and retain.  By interspersing enough barren plots, you throw off the granularity calculation of the pet distribution function, so you have fewer pests than you should. (each plot is a 1x1 farm plot, well below the efficiency threshold for your distribution function, because it would result in singularities if you tried to fix it!)

Well, then, a solution to trying to exploit the game like that would be to set a limit on the number of farms you can declare, so as to stop people from doing something crazy like that.  (It would be micromanagement hell, anyway, to set up that many farms.)

Besides that, there's not actually going to be much barren soil in the game, since the game already tracks multiple grasses in a single tile of open wild land, and part of what this suggestion does is make farms not actual "buildings" but just zones - grasses would be growing even in lands you don't tell dwarves to do anything in unless you're purposefully going to keep weeding them.  Pests would then eat the grasses if they would care for them, or skip them if they didn't.

Beyond that, even if you did have a set of productive and then barren tiles, it still wouldn't actually stop pests, since there would be no reason for most bugs to concentrate around the barren soil.  I'm dividing up where the pests go by shares, and shares are determined by how attractive any given farm plot is.

Hence, the barren tile might get 1 share, and the juicy crop might get 51 shares or something.  If there were 1150 insects to divide up across the shares (just to pick a number that makes things round...) then each barren tile would get 10 insects, and the crop tiles would get 510 insects. 

The whole point is that the crops attract the insect type they are vulnerable to. (And putting in some repellant plants drops that attraction.) 

The major result of trying to do that would actually just be to bypass an FPS-saving trick I was proposing.  So you're really only pointlessly hurting your own FPS for no gain.



You are also forggeting about creative use of Verminators.

Penning a bunch of naughty kitties in the bait plot will result in active destruction of pests, and the generation of compostable remains as a fresh, new exploit. The spontaneous generation of pests suddenly becomes an item generator.

Crop pests are tracked invisibly off-map with the exception of maybe a few that could appear to help give a graphic understanding of when you have a real problem on your hands.  Killing off the few visible vermin wouldn't do any good - the game is invisibly tracking 800 caterpillars on your tomatoes, so killing off the 16 you actually saw isn't going to make a big dent in the overall population.  There are a few pests that appear visibly for cats to take down, especially for going after food supplies, but these pests would be far more numerous, and not actually appear on-map.

Besides, cats currently hunt every vermin.  The whole point is that predators will only hunt their own specialized types of vermin, meaning just having a cat is not protection against caterpillars.



EDIT:

Seriously, guys, slow down a bit and let me have time to respond...  It's not a race to making this thread have the most posts in the forum.
Logged
Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
Class Warfare

10ebbor10

  • Bay Watcher
  • DON'T PANIC
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #429 on: February 02, 2013, 04:07:34 pm »

Not necessarily.  By introducing predators like that, either the bugs are spontaneously generated (like they currently are), or they follow a fixed progression curve, and penning verminators allows greater biomass retention, and still results in positive feedback.

Remember, homeostasis was achieved with BRUTE FORCE to begin with. Any improvement in efficiency will result in a log efficiency effect over time. (assuming you reinvest the surplus, and impact of soil improvement remains linear.)
That's not a problem related to this suggestion, or to the model, but an exploit that's the result of a possible implementation of this system. (A possible implementation that might or might not be used).

Besides, argueing that a system is broken because it can be implemented in a way that will cause it to be broken is kinda bad/circular reasoning.
Logged

wierd

  • Bay Watcher
  • I like to eat small children.
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #430 on: February 02, 2013, 04:08:08 pm »

LOL, Sorry.


Still, even a tiny impact by penning rotten kitties would result in a tiny but significant log curve, if you dont cap the benefit of fertilization over time. (Compound interest on a penny over enough time will bankrupt the planet.)

10ebor10:

You misunderstand. I point these out, so that they WONT be implemented that way. :D (not because I like being an argumentative douche. LOL)

Kohaku: Are you intending to implement pesticides? There *ARE* very potent organic pesticides you can use, especially against soft bodied caterpillars. (A jug of warm milk, and some mooshed caterpillar juice, shake it all up, set in the sun, strain out the clumps, and you have yourself concentrated, all natural BT bug killer!)

Others that are useful:

Against fruitiverous birds and some beetles, use a tincture of capcasin from hot pepper seeds and fruit bodies. Some birds are immune, like sparrows and finches, but the major offenders like pigeons and doves dont like the hot at all. Beetles avoid it because it causes chemical irritation of their antennae. Encouraging predators, like snakes or cats, deals with the finch problem.

Moles, gophers:
Sideplanting castor beans. All that ricin! Kills em dead! Castor beans themselves make effective mouse and rat poison, when pressed as a seed cake. The oil is a useful product in and of itself. Castor beans dont have many natural predators, owing to their toxicity.

Nematodes:
Side planting marigolds is frequenly suggested. Others include the capcasin tincture. Nematodes are soft bodied, and strongly irritated by the capcasin. Same with grub and tubeworms, which are also vulnerable to the BT milk juice.

Just some suggestions. :D
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 04:31:00 pm by wierd »
Logged

winner

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #431 on: February 02, 2013, 05:50:43 pm »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Still, even a tiny impact by penning rotten kitties would result in a tiny but significant log curve, if you don't cap the benefit of fertilization over time. (Compound interest on a penny over enough time will bankrupt the planet.)
The pests don't have to contain any nutrients or be compostable.  They can return any nutrients they steal from the plant back to the soil immediately.  There don't have to be any violations of conservation of matter.

You seem to be using a fertility modal that I'm not familiar with.
The official fertility modal as I understand it is
  • Green manure and other raw biological material: poisonous to plants if there is more than a certain amount. Gets converted to organic matter over several months.  When you plow a crop in, this is what is added.
  • Organic matter: keeps nutrients from washing away in the water (not necessary for growth)
  • Nitrogen: necessary for growth, washes away easily, can be created by growing legumes
  • Phosphorus: necessary for growth.  Closed on map nutrient cycle
  • Potassium:  just like phosphorus

None of the composts or other supplements are pure biological material or organic matter, they all contain plenty of nutrients to do the fertilizing for them.

I think NW_Kohaku is arguing that we don't need to bother modeling organic matter because different soil textures already have different amounts of nutrient leaching so organic matter would be redundant.
I want to include organic matter because I'm really attracted to the idea of allowing a badly maintained forest to erode into a sterile wasteland that can no longer hold any nutrients. 
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 06:34:20 pm by winner »
Logged
The great game of Warlocks!

NW_Kohaku

  • Bay Watcher
  • [ETHIC:SCIENCE_FOR_FUN: REQUIRED]
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #432 on: February 02, 2013, 06:13:33 pm »

Still, even a tiny impact by penning rotten kitties would result in a tiny but significant log curve, if you dont cap the benefit of fertilization over time. (Compound interest on a penny over enough time will bankrupt the planet.)

That's what inflation is for.

For an extreme example, current annual interest on a U.S. Treasury Bond minus the annual inflation of a dollar is currently at around -0.5% interest.  Debtors are functionally paying us money for the privilege of loaning us money. 

Anyway, for penning kitties, that's part of the reason I'm including the notion that directly dumping a corpse on a farm adds to bio-pollution that kills plants (the same way that adding manure directly to plants adds bio-pollution) - over time, that causes an abstracted build-up in either dangerous bacteria or their toxic by-products (which is tracked as a single integer that goes down over time) that will harm or kill plants that aren't particularly resistant or are decomposers that just love the stuff.

Also, on the topic of invisible vermin, I'd like to point out that tracking vermin counts invisibly is already implemented in the game.  For example, telling dwarves to fish from a stream means that they deplete fish that aren't actually rendered on the game map that are tracked as nebulously being in a stream zone and are just tracked as a counter of how many trout or turtles or whatever are in those waterways, and occasionally bumped up invisibly.  (You can run out of fishable vermin, especially if it's just turtles from a murky pool.)

The difference here is making this vermin counter much more active and actually respond to predator-prey population growth models, rather than just occasionally making more fish.

Vermin that appear on the map can appear basically anywhere they're allowed (they get segregated by biomes, so fairies won't always appear in the half of the map that isn't part of a good biome) but they only downtick vermin levels by one when they are killed, meaning that kitties can stop vermin that appear on the map, but that's a tiny fraction of the vermin that actually exist in the game. That's why you keep seeing knuckle worms appearing in your food stores, and can't just let a single verminator loose to finish off all your vermin once and for all - they're only killing off the ones that actually appear on-map, and the game invisibly has a counter that says tens of thousands more rats still exist where that one came from.  (And yes, if you open up the memory hacks, they will say you have tens or even hundreds of thousands of insects or the like in a map.)

Hence, the idea is to have vermin-eating-vermin that are working pseudo-invisibly.  Bats, spiders, insectivorous birds, wasps, ladybugs, ants, etc. can be added to the game as vermin-predators where you can take a macro-level step to build up vermin-predators (setting up bird/bat nesting/colony boxes, transplanting ant colonies, planting a crop that has a scent that attracts more wasps) that don't involve actually keeping exact count of the thousands of individual creatures being spawned and killed in a war of attrition.

You misunderstand. I point these out, so that they WONT be implemented that way. :D (not because I like being an argumentative douche. LOL)

And that's valuable, especially if it makes me change something because it's something I didn't consider.  I appreciate dissent when it's based upon the argument (rather than just name-calling) although it is sometimes frustrating when it feels like the counter-argument comes because my original argument wasn't understood.

Kohaku: Are you intending to implement pesticides? There *ARE* very potent organic pesticides you can use, especially against soft bodied caterpillars. (A jug of warm milk, and some mooshed caterpillar juice, shake it all up, set in the sun, strain out the clumps, and you have yourself concentrated, all natural BT bug killer!)

Not particularly, since I don't know of terribly many of these techniques that would actually be available in that era. Hence, I'm more relying on planting insect-repellent herbs alongside crops or else vermin hunters.  (I.E. the side-planting marigolds.)

Putting in real-life examples for examples is good for context, but since I'm guessing we'll be having fictional plants (and probably fictional insects like "sweet pod borer" or something) all over the place, it's more a matter of generating the formula for them actually being used in-game.

Having something like an herb or just using captured vermin or something in a reaction to get some sort of organic insecticide and then letting the farmer dwarves deploy them if you give them permission to use certain amounts of it seems a reasonable way to fit it into the game, provided we are at a point already in game development where you can have standing orders so you don't have to micromanage the development of each and every one.



Responding to winner in next post



Incidentally, this thread is already 7th in most posts (432) in the entire suggestions forum when the most posts spot is held by the original Improved Farming thread at 721 posts. (I created this thread to make a more concise version of the conclusions of the original thread because nobody was willing to read the 45+ pages that had already gone into the first thread to get us to the position where I was proposing what I was proposing at the start of this thread.)
Logged
Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
Class Warfare

wierd

  • Bay Watcher
  • I like to eat small children.
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #433 on: February 02, 2013, 07:13:17 pm »

It is a common misconception that biomass in the soil is not essential for growth, but that is simply untrue.

Soil carbon is literally a combination of a soil conditioner (keeps soils together, keeps wind from blowing soil, keeps clays from forming thick crusty flakes, etc) as well a medium through which organic acids produced by microbes, soil fungi, and even plant roots, are able to slowly attack, break down, and dissolve inorganic nutrient supplies found in clays and crushed rock mineral sources.  Without the biomass, the plant is significantly impacted in its ability to absorb these nutrients, and any dissolved nutrients are EASILY washed out. Only very simple "plant like" species, like mosses and lichens, can live without an existing biomass component to their substrate. Soil building over the aeons requires first going through this "lichen" period, so that dead and dried out lichens slowly accumulate in the environment, and act like sponges while decomposers saturate them with organic acids, and liberate mineral sources for actual plants. After that, the process slows down, and depending on the climate, a specific biome will take root, which ultimately determines what the character of the soil will be like.

This is why pouring water on the carbon-less sahara desert will not magically transform it into a lush paradise. It will just wash out all the dried out mineral precipitates between the sand grains, and make the desert even less hospitable to life. The sahara used to be a fertile grassland, before climactic shifts caused it to dry out, and natural aerobic decay of the biomass by microbes depleted the blowing topsoil, slowly transforming it into little more than blowing sands.

Excessive qualtities of carbon sponge in the soil cause serious problems for most ecosystems, because it holds excessive water, and becomes swampy, and anaerobic decay processes take over. Root systems need oxygen to thrive, so the anaerobic conditions actively suffocate plants, making the area into a disgusting bog of slowly rotting vegetation. The biomass holds on to the acids produced by this decay, making the soil very inhospitable, even after being drained.

The process of composting (for a garden), takes a nitrogen rich source, like kitchen scraps, bird or animal dung, fish emulsion, etc--- and blends it with a carbon rich source, like dry leaves, grass straw, or bast fiber heavy plant stalks. A good deal of this nitrogen gets blown off as nitrogen gas as microbial activity uses it to break down the cellulose and lignins in the plant matter, but enough of it stays as free nitrate ions, that it chemically binds to the compost's matrix, and fixates it against being washed away. This process is very similar to mordanting cellulose fibers, before dying them. The nitrogen becomes chemically bound to the compost, and also buffered by all the inorganic cations it soaks up while being made.  Compost is the perfect fertilizer, because it contains literally everything the plant needs, and releases it only as the plant requires.

Raw animal dungs, on the other hand, deliver a whole lot of nitrogen all at once in a soluble form. This is why they are "hot"-- Urea is very reactive biologically, and it basically causes chemical burns to the plant's leaves, stems, and roots--- Without biomass in the soil to catch the urea, and hold on to it for slow re-release, the nitrogen then just washes out the next time it rains. One solution to this problem, is to produce "Manure tea". This is basically just pouring water through scooped up poop, and letting all the nitrates leech into the solution, then conspicuously applying it as a nitrogen booster through irrigation. Over application will nuke the plants though.  Once the dookie has been used to make manure tea, and stops colorizing the water, it is safe to apply as a mulch.  This is frequently done by people who want to use manure fertilizers, but dont want to go through the effort of composting it first.  One of the benefits of manure tea over other methods is that more of the nitrogen ends up in plants, as opposed to composting.  The leeched poop left over from the manure tea will naturally turn into compost over time, as new manure tea is added.

Kohaku mentioned using mushroom compost as a possible fertilizer.  Mushroom compost is just ordinary compost, that has had mushrooms grown on it until the spawn died out from starvation.  Mushroom compost therefore, has all the cations and nitrogen compounds normally found in healthy fresh compost stripped out of it, by the biologicial activities of the mushroom. The positive side of mushroom compost, is that it often is mixed with casing clay, due to the reproductive cycle of crimini (white button) mushrooms; The mushrooms are light induced. That is to say, they start producing mushroom caps, instead of threadlike mycelial fibrils, after those fibrils are exposed to light and air. To ensure good colonization of the compost for the mushroom crop, the mushroom farmer 'cases' the compost in a layer of organic free clay, which keeps light and air out. When the mycelial fibrils have fully permeated the compost, the farmer will purposefully disturb the surface of the casing clay, which exposes the mycelium to air and light--initiating fruiting. This will be repeated as often as needed, until the compost gives out, and the mycelium can no longer fruit. After this point, the compost is heated to sterilize it, and tumbled together.  The admixture of this clay, coupled with the enzymes present in the mycelium, causes partial decomposition of the clay on a chemical level, making it receptive to breakdown by the microorganisms found in healthy soil and the acids produced by plant roots.  Mushroom compost is therefore more nutritious to soil than raw organic material, like coir or dry straw, but only marginally so. Mushroom compost, like coir, suffers a profound nitrogen deficit, and will rob nitrogen compounds from the soil it is mixed into through osmosis. Mushroom compost and coir, must therefor be used with manure tea, or with commercial fertilizers, or they will actually inhibit plant growth. This is a common problem with novice gardeners who mulch with dry leaves, or bales of dry wheat straw. They forget to supply a nitrogen source with the watering can, and the mulch literally robs the soil blind, making their plants grow poorly.

As for the issue with limits on how much a plant can take from the soil per season, you clearly have no concept of how ravenous some cash crops are, like corn or cotton. You can take a rich field from productive to barren in just 10 years growing intensive cotton on it, with just one crop per year!

Cotton is a "Only once in a while" crop. Not an 'All the time!' crop. Many economists are unable to comprehend this fact, along with many urban dwellers. (Not to sound offensive.) It and corn are notoriously deleterious to soil, which is why corn ethanol is not a viable alternative energy source. :D This deleterious behavior toward soil is WHY it is a cash crop to begin with-- It has natural scarcity built right in, because it is so damned abusive to soil, that you just cant grow lots and lots of it.

The basic rule of thumb, is that the more you have to till and preen the soil while the crop is on it, the more destructive to the soil it is.  This is why corn is so destructive. It isnt necessarily that the corn plant is hungry, (though cotton most assuredly is!) so much as it is that exposure of the soil to sunlight and air causes aerobic decomposition of the soil's biomass, and the heavy water requirements of the crop itself cause excessive soil mineral leeching. Combined, the soil is left abused after a corn planting, and in serious need of replenishment.

Some mitigating approaches to crop cultivation is to plant 2 or more crops simultaneously, with one being the primary food crop, and the others being used as a ground cover, and after harvest, as a green manure; (Such as clover planted beside beets, turnips, or potatoes)  Another is to grow the cover plant and the food crop, then after harvesting the food crop, use the cover crop as a graze for animal pasturage. You dont really care if the cover crop gets harmed by the hot animal manure-- it's just a cover crop.

Examples of this include growing a root vegetable next to a lowlying ground cover, like clover-- or growing clover next to a short season grain crop, like buckwheat, in the spring and fall.

These approaches keep the soil shaded, and covered, which prevents aerobic destruction of the biomass in the soil, and retaining soil vitality.

Other practices are things like crop rotation, where you will grow a high maintenance crop, like corn or cotton one year, grow a soil cover and vegetable crop the next with a winter green manure, then allow the field to lie fallow with tall grass before tilling it under in fall of the third year, before returning to the high maintenance crop on the fourth year.

If you have 3 plots, you can have each one of them offset on the stage of the rotation cycle, and have concurrent crops every year, at lower but sustainable yeilds.


Essentially, retaining soil carbon, and keeping it loaded with inorganic cations like calcium, phosphorus, potassium and pals, is the quintessential purpose of soil management, which makes carbon the fundamental variable in soil culture. That's why I used it as the simplified nutrient in the simplified model I demoed.  :D Most of the others can actually be implied to be present, if you use compost as the primary fertilizer.




Logged

winner

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #434 on: February 02, 2013, 07:22:19 pm »

are there any points that we disagree about?
Logged
The great game of Warlocks!
Pages: 1 ... 27 28 [29] 30 31 ... 35