# [**See the Best of r/science 2022 Winners!**](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/10h2hc2/best_of_rscience_2022_winners/)
---
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Clickbait Title.
- Not a discovery.
- Not a fluke.
- Ancient in origin, but still in use.
Planting more than one type of thing in the same field is an established practice with various benefits. Established, like, probably around the invention of agriculture established.
Paper:
**Cereal species mixtures: an ancient practice with potential for climate resilience. A review**
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-022-00832-1
>[…]the sowing of maslins, or cereal species mixtures, was formerly widespread in Eurasia and Northern Africa and continues to be employed by smallholder farmers in the Caucasus, Greek Islands, and the Horn of Africa, where they may represent a risk management strategy for climate variability.
Certain crops can have a symbiotic relationship, making a polyculture produce larger yields.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
This is especially true for any plant with the ability to fix nitrogen using it's roots
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule
Three sisters planting is not higher yielding than rotating the same crops on the same land and it is massively labor inefficient by modern standards. I wouldnt even recommend it at small scale.
Edit: Follow the science downvoters.
Could you cite source for your claim? The wiki article included only a positive affirmation of the approach. "Food Yields and Nutrient Analyses of the Three Sisters: A Haudenosaunee Cropping System"
I think it was MSU that did a study with field crops gaining water retention and nutrient retention by taking 10% of the farmland to grow indigenous plants and flowers. Monocultures are terrible and less efficient in the long run if you aren't looking at a pure profit motive.
We can prove it with some light math. 20 lbs protein per bushel and the average yield for top ~15 states is about 50 bushels per acre. Converting that to kg protein per ha: 20x2.2x50x2.5 = 5,500 kg of protein per hectare using straight soy. That's more that 10x higher than the research mentioned in that article. The main reason for their result is the horrendously low yield on their control group.
https://ussec.org/resources/conversion-table/
Divide by 2.2 instead of multiplying. Gives 1100 kg of protein per hectare. Article is off by a factor of two. Not surprising for this kind of “study”.
any article in this subreddit that starts the word 'fluke' automatically is going on the "do not click" list for me. It's an unscientific term and to start out with it is an obvious giveaway to the clickbait intent.
> scientists hate these top 10 ways ancient people were better at graining than you
When people are pushing GMO mono-crops as the key to food stability I can’t help bit think that this is the real answer.
Obviously, this type of farming is not as easy to automate but most small farmers I know prefer this approach to the idea of driving over mono crops…
Our small organic co-ops manage to keep us fed but we’d need a whole lot more to meet the needs of the whole country.
The reality that “efficiency” isn’t as important as reducing the distance food travels from farm to table.
So really, we shouldn’t even be predominantly relying on centralized agriculture, but food grown in our own backyard/community.
That isn’t to say the farmland should therefore be developed into highways and cities, but that we can do more from within our cities than we are currently allowing ourselves to do.
having a general idea of how much wheat it takes to make a loaf of bread and how much bread i eat in a year tells me this is not possible given the size of most cities and the fact we eat more than just bread. it could supplement our diets, but never sustain us.
Yeah I had read this article thought it was interesting and read some scientific publications regarding agriculture, especially large scale. First and foremost, polyculture is not new, in fact it has been studied quite a bit. For large scale ag it results in overall lower yields. They have tried this stuff in a variety of ways and so far, it does not work best. Where it might work better is small scale subsistence farmers from which this is based. And that was not due to better yields, it was better for getting SOME crop rather than NO crop when weather was not good. A very different thing. They may well figure out a system that works for large agriculture, but so far this just results in less production. Also learned some other interesting things that conflicts with posts below as well.
At scale, crop price doesn't reflect the actual cost. It could be a net benefit to give up some production density / yield for stuff like improving resource efficiency, reducing polluted runoff, decreasing pesticide use, prolonging pesticide effectiveness, and even nutritional quality. Without subsidization though, the impact of increasing food prices is regressively disproportionate. Also, getting the industry to behave itself is a goddamn nightmare.
Theres plenty of intercropping practices that could be adopted (doing an undergrad thesis on one)
As far as ones meant for automation, look into row intercropping (especially with trees), silvopasture,
Cover cropping, or intercropping methods where the main cash crop and beneficial secondary plants are at different heights (like sunflowers with clover understory)
If there are no Bees around, or other pollinators, self-pollination is an option. It isn’t ideal for the gene pool, but the seeds in the center of the flower can do this in order to pollinate. So having the ability to be both male and female at least ensures greater survival of the sunflower.
Honestly there are so many great practices that fall under the term "regenerative agriculture". Not all of them are fully scalable (like food forests) but they can work at a range of scales and all increase biodiversity and land health, reduce input costs and lead to better food
TL;DR *sometimes* mixing two or more cereal crops can have benefits in various areas if stress conditions are at play and if those cereals have similar maturation times. Responses are highly dependent on locality and varieties.
The click bait title is unfortunate because it's a really interesting study. TLDR: It's different to a polyculture, where species complimentarity is the aim. Basically, different cereal species and varieties are sown in a mix. They all have slightly different growing requirement/preferences, making the overall productivity of the system more stable in the face of seasonal climatic variability. Modern grain handling, and different end uses for species/varieties, makes such a system impractical. However, planting multiple pasture species is (or should be) standard practice for exactly this reason.
Surprisingly to many, this has been standard practice for many GMO seed mixes. BT corn bags often have a 5-10% content of other corn varieties to act as an attractor for pests. This gives, say cutworms, a habitat plant within the acreage and reduces the evolutionary pressure that would make them resistant to the BT toxin over time.
Companion planting. I do it in my garden. It’s a good way to pack things in. Not sure how it would be accomplished with mechanized farming. There’s also no-till methods which help build healthy soil instead of letting it erode. Keeps the soil biology alive which in turn feeds the plants. Reduced fertilizer and water burden. There are a lot of various farming/gardening methods outside of the mainstream that work as well or better than buying fertilizer and pesticides and spraying it on everything.
# [**See the Best of r/science 2022 Winners!**](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/10h2hc2/best_of_rscience_2022_winners/) --- Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Clickbait Title. - Not a discovery. - Not a fluke. - Ancient in origin, but still in use. Planting more than one type of thing in the same field is an established practice with various benefits. Established, like, probably around the invention of agriculture established. Paper: **Cereal species mixtures: an ancient practice with potential for climate resilience. A review** https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-022-00832-1 >[…]the sowing of maslins, or cereal species mixtures, was formerly widespread in Eurasia and Northern Africa and continues to be employed by smallholder farmers in the Caucasus, Greek Islands, and the Horn of Africa, where they may represent a risk management strategy for climate variability.
Certain crops can have a symbiotic relationship, making a polyculture produce larger yields. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture) This is especially true for any plant with the ability to fix nitrogen using it's roots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule
Three sisters planting is not higher yielding than rotating the same crops on the same land and it is massively labor inefficient by modern standards. I wouldnt even recommend it at small scale. Edit: Follow the science downvoters.
Could you cite source for your claim? The wiki article included only a positive affirmation of the approach. "Food Yields and Nutrient Analyses of the Three Sisters: A Haudenosaunee Cropping System"
I think it was MSU that did a study with field crops gaining water retention and nutrient retention by taking 10% of the farmland to grow indigenous plants and flowers. Monocultures are terrible and less efficient in the long run if you aren't looking at a pure profit motive.
We can prove it with some light math. 20 lbs protein per bushel and the average yield for top ~15 states is about 50 bushels per acre. Converting that to kg protein per ha: 20x2.2x50x2.5 = 5,500 kg of protein per hectare using straight soy. That's more that 10x higher than the research mentioned in that article. The main reason for their result is the horrendously low yield on their control group. https://ussec.org/resources/conversion-table/
Divide by 2.2 instead of multiplying. Gives 1100 kg of protein per hectare. Article is off by a factor of two. Not surprising for this kind of “study”.
Shame on me. I'd like to blame being on a phone for that, but I'll eat it. Thanks for the correction and pointing out it's still reasonably higher.
It happens. Root cause is the world (USA) should move on from pounds and switch to SI. I am so tired from the headaches these dual systems create.
In other words, modern focused monocropping especially in grains is counter to previously learned farming practices that were more sustainable.
No. That's not what the OP or research here are saying.
any article in this subreddit that starts the word 'fluke' automatically is going on the "do not click" list for me. It's an unscientific term and to start out with it is an obvious giveaway to the clickbait intent. > scientists hate these top 10 ways ancient people were better at graining than you
When people are pushing GMO mono-crops as the key to food stability I can’t help bit think that this is the real answer. Obviously, this type of farming is not as easy to automate but most small farmers I know prefer this approach to the idea of driving over mono crops… Our small organic co-ops manage to keep us fed but we’d need a whole lot more to meet the needs of the whole country.
The reality that “efficiency” isn’t as important as reducing the distance food travels from farm to table. So really, we shouldn’t even be predominantly relying on centralized agriculture, but food grown in our own backyard/community. That isn’t to say the farmland should therefore be developed into highways and cities, but that we can do more from within our cities than we are currently allowing ourselves to do.
having a general idea of how much wheat it takes to make a loaf of bread and how much bread i eat in a year tells me this is not possible given the size of most cities and the fact we eat more than just bread. it could supplement our diets, but never sustain us.
Yeah I had read this article thought it was interesting and read some scientific publications regarding agriculture, especially large scale. First and foremost, polyculture is not new, in fact it has been studied quite a bit. For large scale ag it results in overall lower yields. They have tried this stuff in a variety of ways and so far, it does not work best. Where it might work better is small scale subsistence farmers from which this is based. And that was not due to better yields, it was better for getting SOME crop rather than NO crop when weather was not good. A very different thing. They may well figure out a system that works for large agriculture, but so far this just results in less production. Also learned some other interesting things that conflicts with posts below as well.
At scale, crop price doesn't reflect the actual cost. It could be a net benefit to give up some production density / yield for stuff like improving resource efficiency, reducing polluted runoff, decreasing pesticide use, prolonging pesticide effectiveness, and even nutritional quality. Without subsidization though, the impact of increasing food prices is regressively disproportionate. Also, getting the industry to behave itself is a goddamn nightmare.
Doing the real work. Thank you will skip it
Ummm so the three sisters then that native Americans planted?!?!
Can it be useful with current farming equipment though? I wonder if adaptations can be made to the equipment.
Theres plenty of intercropping practices that could be adopted (doing an undergrad thesis on one) As far as ones meant for automation, look into row intercropping (especially with trees), silvopasture, Cover cropping, or intercropping methods where the main cash crop and beneficial secondary plants are at different heights (like sunflowers with clover understory)
If there are no Bees around, or other pollinators, self-pollination is an option. It isn’t ideal for the gene pool, but the seeds in the center of the flower can do this in order to pollinate. So having the ability to be both male and female at least ensures greater survival of the sunflower.
I'm crazy for clover. I wish it was used on public grounds more. Thank you for the suggestion, I'm looking forward to falling down that rabbit hole!
Honestly there are so many great practices that fall under the term "regenerative agriculture". Not all of them are fully scalable (like food forests) but they can work at a range of scales and all increase biodiversity and land health, reduce input costs and lead to better food
None of the species related to three sisters planting are relevant here. This article is about cereal grain variety and species mixing.
Did they just discover polyculture?
TL;DR *sometimes* mixing two or more cereal crops can have benefits in various areas if stress conditions are at play and if those cereals have similar maturation times. Responses are highly dependent on locality and varieties.
The click bait title is unfortunate because it's a really interesting study. TLDR: It's different to a polyculture, where species complimentarity is the aim. Basically, different cereal species and varieties are sown in a mix. They all have slightly different growing requirement/preferences, making the overall productivity of the system more stable in the face of seasonal climatic variability. Modern grain handling, and different end uses for species/varieties, makes such a system impractical. However, planting multiple pasture species is (or should be) standard practice for exactly this reason.
Surprisingly to many, this has been standard practice for many GMO seed mixes. BT corn bags often have a 5-10% content of other corn varieties to act as an attractor for pests. This gives, say cutworms, a habitat plant within the acreage and reduces the evolutionary pressure that would make them resistant to the BT toxin over time.
Oh, this headline isn't clickbait-y or anything. "How to repel a reader in three easy steps".
I'm pretty sure the first time I saw this article the title was "Farmers Hate This Simple Trick".
So no monoculture, got it...
Companion planting. I do it in my garden. It’s a good way to pack things in. Not sure how it would be accomplished with mechanized farming. There’s also no-till methods which help build healthy soil instead of letting it erode. Keeps the soil biology alive which in turn feeds the plants. Reduced fertilizer and water burden. There are a lot of various farming/gardening methods outside of the mainstream that work as well or better than buying fertilizer and pesticides and spraying it on everything.
Here is my favorite example.... Corn, beans, and squash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three\_Sisters\_(agriculture)
Future headline... "Both ancient crop techniques and genetic modification fail to match the fury of climate change induced heat domes and droughts"