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A comment on The Hidden Dangers of Lead in Urban Gardens. Parent comment

Re:The Hidden Dangers of Lead in Urban Gardens by schiffern on Monday July 28, 2014 @06:31PM (#8099711)
>It's much more efficient to grow food where it grows best

Food grows best (when measured in both biomass-per-acre and biomass-per-man-hour) in forests, not monoculture fields. This becomes pretty obvious when you compare the percentage of sunlight that hits bare soil.

The only trick is to figure out how to design a forest (a non-trivial task by itself) using species that produces edible biomass, and arrange everything such that it's easy to harvest.

One example of forest gardening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFbcn06h8w4

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Re:The Hidden Dangers of Lead in Urban Gardens by Litost on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @11:46AM (#8102853)
Many thanks for the post, and the link which eventually led me to this, in which Martin Crawford also appears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVBYgg013KM

which also explains why both old (reliant on intensive manual labour) and modern farming methods (almost entirely reliant on oil) are unsustainable in the long term.

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