mhornberger t1_iwcln9a wrote on November 14, 2022 at 5:27 PM

Reply to comment by thesephantomhands in Farmers in China and Uganda move to high-yielding, cost-saving perennial rice by tonymmorley

Unfortunately most of the methods he wrote about were very labor-intensive. Those guys rarely get a day off, and it has to be a work of passion for them. I don't see that scaling.

thesephantomhands t1_iwcmnkw wrote on November 14, 2022 at 5:33 PM

If that's true, it would definitely be a hurdle. But the benefit of a perennial (according to the book in the way that it's presented), it would require no tilling, less pesticides, herbicides, etc. Just the difference in no-till versus tilling every year is a dropoff in labor. There might be other things that I'm missing. What extra labor are you talking about?

mhornberger t1_iwcn2g6 wrote on November 14, 2022 at 5:36 PM

> What extra labor are you talking about?

The book itself talked about how labor-intensive some of the processes were. Not amenable to automation. I'm not asserting it's more labor-intensive, rather the book mentioned that several times. I only got halfway through it though. I felt it was talking either about shifts that were already happening (no till, cover crops, etc), or that wouldn't scale.

thesephantomhands t1_iwco6a7 wrote on November 14, 2022 at 5:43 PM

Okay, I could see where you're coming from, but I don't remember him talking about things that wouldn't scale or things that were prohibitively labor intensive. I'm very new to all of this, but I was quite inspired by the book. If they're going to be solutions or helpful, we would need to take those factors into account.