Team urban ag with beds of native wildflowers for pollinators. Food sovereignty for all!
If it's suburban lawns in the prairie region of the US then sure prairie. But if you're moving some of your agriculture to urban centers or even better just removing animal agriculture that already frees up a lot of rural land to return to prairie.
luv me a good chinahmpuh. also could this be how to create agriculture in wetlands? Like, instead of polders, levies and dykes we keep the water and just dig channels and make islands?
Couldn't we dig man made lakes and replicate this? Go to a place with a high water table and dig down a bit? I guess evaporation might make it too water intensive. Either way there is lots of farming that uses flood irrigation but using sluices and weirs and things to keep a consistent water table in a man made wetland isn't something I've seen before. The cinampas specifically are hard to replicate exactly because they need a shallow depth and a consistent water table. If we took all the runoff from urban and suburban areas and used it to make wetland agriculture that be fucking rad. did some googling to see what people were doing with wetland agriculture, its not much but there is some stuff.
Projects in malawi and zambia to integrate farming with multiple ecosystems for water conservation and biodiversity
https://www.wetlandaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Wetland-Action-Functional-Landscape-Approach.pdf
china doing neat things, plus a followup study I can't read
http://www.intecol-10iwc.com/EN/HelpCenter/HelpInfo.aspx?nid=77
https://xblk.ecnu.edu.cn/EN/10.3969/j.issn.1000-5641.201931009
less interesting but still neat about using small wetlands to reduce nutrient polution, control flooding, and provide water. Including US initiatives to get farmers to adopt the practices
https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/united-states/illinois/stories-in-illinois/constructed-wetlands-reduce-agricultural-runoff-study/https://www.ramsar.org/sites/default/files/documents/library/bn13_agriculture_e.pdf
https://www.farmers.gov/blog/are-wetland-easements-right-you
http://www.wetlands-initiative.org/growing-wetlands-for-clean-water
interesting ideas! I will take a look at the links after work tomorrow if I remember.
The cinampas specifically are hard to replicate exactly because they need a shallow depth and a consistent water table.
unfortunately
If we took all the runoff from urban and suburban areas and used it to make wetland agriculture that be fucking rad.
yes (though I wonder if the pollution would be an issue)
yes (though I wonder if the pollution would be an issue)
that's probably true. It'd have to be just wetlands and not the agriculture then, still it'd be a really cool way to bake nature reserves and parks into the planning of cities. Making institutions or local governments responsible for their own runoff would be really cool. It reminds me of a video on the same channel you linked about a plan in the past to draw political boundaries around watersheds. here
Combo. Permaculture and/or non-monospecies food sources. It's just a wildflower field full of harvestable food. Produces more per acre with more labour, but thats a problem we can definitely solve
and pokemon-themed play parks over mostly concrete, woodchip, and native grass/growth. Sorry if this is too "un-PC" for you.
My lawn, if I had a lawn, would be overgrown and natural. The unshaven pubes of suburbia, if you will.
Can't hear them behind my thicket of various plants that I can't and won't identify.
The average suburb would deplete the soil pretty fast if they went 100% agriculture.
So divide your lawn in half, and rotate crops/fallow between the two sides every year.
If I had land in general or any sort of green space, half and half because that's how farming works.
I mean, down in the Houston bayou, you get inch high green rectangles naturally. One of the perks of living on land where that kind of grass is naturally occurring. A couple of big trees provide enough cover that the grass never grows particularly tall. And then the worst thing I ever see are mushroom circles or dandelion patches.
In fact, its usually the trees and ferns I'm investing time fighting against. That's mostly because I need to keep them from suffocating my AC unit or decomposing my fence line.
We just have native weed cover for ours. It doesn't require watering or maintenance, it's still green, it doesn't die due to lack of sunlight underneath our big tree. All the neighbors spend so much water and effort on creepily manicured lawns, or they let it go for a while and it turns into dirt immediately in our climate.
