Swords into Plowshares by dreamtrove

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Swords into Plowshares

POSTED BY: DREAMTROVE
UPDATED: Saturday, July 10, 2010 11:29
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Friday, July 9, 2010 11:11 AM

I have an idea, and I thought I would float this to see if any of the more military minds could come up with anything.

Figure you have a large number of seeds, and you want to sew them in a field such that the land could in theory become a certain percent tomato seed, so that it might randomly sprout tomatoes for a period of time into what might become a permaculture.

Each tomato requires some special attention, but tomato seeds are not rare, tomatoes are full of them. There's not really a need for tomatoes to be neat an orderly, a piece of land is capable of carrying far more tomatoes than one could grow.

Anyway, I had the though of a seed-gun. Think about a tomato seed, then a lot of them, as ammunition. fired at the ground, they'd need penetrate about 1/2" of dirt.

This is silly, and not what I'm talking about ;)

My thoughts are running about like this:

The available space for tomato seeds is virtually infinite, tomato seeds are virtually infinite, so the limiting factor is the care needed for each tomato.

If tomatoes are in a manner of an environment where their water needs are met perpetually throughout their lifecycle, the amount of micro-management of tomatoes could be greatly reduced.

Another thought is how to auto-mulch the tomatoes which came up. One thought would be to use a plastic sheet, and for the tomato shot to clear a large enough portion of the sheet for the tomato to come up. If you simply plowed a field of tomatoes, they wouldn't last, because they cannot defeat the competition. Without doing anything chemical to the soil, I'd like to make essentially a field of tomatoes, where the tomatoes essentially manage themselves. This lead me to the tomato gun idea.

Thoughts?

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Friday, July 9, 2010 12:05 PM

FREMDFIRMA

From a practical perspective, maybe.

From a metaphysical, spiritual, perspective, never - and whatever your beliefs hold as mother nature, will kick your ass for your wasteful, callous behavior.

And in the real world ?

Imma still bet the latter, your effort, your connection to the earth, the seed, the cycle, is important to the development of the plant in a way science cannot yet explain to us, but exists all the same.

-Frem

I do not serve the Blind God.

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Friday, July 9, 2010 12:25 PM

WULFENSTAR

http://youtu.be/VUnGTXRxGHg

In a somewhat related note...

If male semen is the "seed"... does that make the female reproductive system..

Dirt?

(Oh man I am soo on a roll today and going to catch so much crap for this...heheheheheheh)

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Friday, July 9, 2010 3:08 PM

BYTEMITE

DT, I'd maybe keep tomatoes mostly human cultivated, seeing as how they're poisonous to a lot of animals. Grapes too probably.

Other seeds, hmm, maybe, though maybe rather than just one kind of seed, it's a bunch of area-native edibles, that have to compete with each other, so you don't run into the biodiversity issues of a lot of farms.

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Friday, July 9, 2010 3:10 PM

BYTEMITE

Wulf: I think you may be doing something wrong.

Despite the traditional (and incorrect) references to sperm as seed, sperm is more like pollen. Ova are the seeds.

Semen is the fluid which carries the sperm, though cowper's fluid sometimes also can.

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Friday, July 9, 2010 4:25 PM

DREAMTROVE

Logically, the number of tomatoes one can grow is limited by human involvement. It's not a matter of being lazy, it's a matter of how many tomatoes for the same amount of effort, which is a matter of factors of ten, perhaps several of them, and pretty critical to making it a viable business.

That said, I can also be quite sure that tomatoes would do better with less management, which is why when people ask me what my tomatoes want I say they keep saying "don't micromanage us!"

But it's so true. Tomatoes are fragile, and the more they're managed by humans, the more likely they are to die. Sure, you need to intervene to make sure that the water balance is correct: Wet dry, on and off, about three days each way: Too dry, and they shrivel, tomatoes drink much more than most plants. Too much water and the roots are eaten by fungi. But they can handle several days of dry without flinching. (Actually, when they break you can sometimes put them in water to grow new roots and replant them.)

But think of this as an issue of engineering.

Here's my thinking on this:

Farming has been automating to larger and larger scale. Maybe that's not what's needed. Maybe we need to automate on a smaller scale, to make the planting and picking faster on an individual level, and to make things like water maintenance automatic on an individual level for the plant, rather than on one global level for the whole field.

Our ability to use tools is way up their in our advantages as a species. If we can make an use better tools, we should. If anyone wants organic farming to survive, it has to take into account that the yield per acre has to be competitive. If organic farms can only turn out a handful of tomatoes, not only are they economically non-viable and will fail in competition with GMO (think fish DNA) and heavily mechanized operations (this those ethylene gas tomatoes you get in the winter, and lately, in the summer as well) unless you want it to become a small fringe thing which only serves a wealthy elite.

But all of that said, the yield per acre of traditional farming is quite low. It could be radically upscaled if there were more hands, or if hands could become much much faster, which is what I'm thinking.

Wulf

Egg

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Friday, July 9, 2010 4:37 PM

DREAMTROVE

Byte,

I'm thinking it's a difference of several factors of ten here, It's not a matter of whether or not to do it but of how. If you plant 1000 tomatoes by hand, it's fine. What about planting a million?

Say you have a million plants. Who is going to pick them? Mexicans? I think that the labor markets we've created for our ag industry are as bad as any.

Best if the whole thing is engineered so that the plants do most of the work themselves, and do not need you interfering on quite the level I do now.

I have a little diagram of how I'd like it set up. The tomatoes start on top of a miniature set of stairs, submerged in the earth. The plants walk down with their roots as they grow, so the tap root is always in the water, but allowing the rest of the roots to dry to avoid blight. The water would be controlled by floodgates which would rotate every few days, keeping the cycle going.

This would work, but it leaves me three major issues:

1. How to plant a potentially infinite number of tomatoes.
2. How to pick an infinite number of tomatoes.
3. How to mulch an infinite number of tomatoes so they do not have to be individually mulched and weeded.

Also, a way to separate seeds for the next generation, but that would come later.

From the point of view of the exercise of caring for a plant, Frem is right. From a point of view of producing food, it's not practical.

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Friday, July 9, 2010 4:59 PM

FREMDFIRMA

*rubs his hands with glee*
Shall we take bets then, DT?