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Comment by ZeWaka

17 hours ago

Also why the whole region has so many sinkhole and similar drainage problems - it's literally built on a lake.

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ZeWaka

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culi  17 hours ago

Yup. A lake that used to fuel the single most productive agricultural system humans have ever practiced. It's sad but there is a strong indigenous movement to bring them back. The axolotl actually became a major symbol of indigenous resistance because of this movement

  • ch4s3  12 hours ago

    > the single most productive agricultural system humans have ever practiced

    This is simply not true. The highiest maize yield per hectare I can find anywhere online for chinampas is less than half the 13.5 metric tons per hectare that farmers get in Iowa. The more reputable numbers are less than 1/4 of that. It's probably true that they were among the most productive pre-modern agricultural plots which is a great achievement, but there's no need to make things up.

    • culi  11 hours ago

      I'm not being hyperbolic.

      They produce a lot more than just corn. Not only can they be farmed for hundreds of years without break, but they can be harvested 4 to 7 times per year. They are 13 times as productive per unit of area as conventional dry-land farming.

      > In Xochimilco, roughly 750 hectares of active chinampas produce around 80 tons of vegetables daily. This translates to a massive, continuous, year-round output of over 38,000 tons per year across the entire area

      So that translates to 50.7 metric tons per hectre.

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      > the most productive pre-modern agricultural plots which is a great achievement, but there's no need to make things up

      Post-industrial agriculture is not actually more productive per area. It's just more productive per input labor.

      > Agricultural yields within the most densely populated and productive preindustrial land-use systems compared well with modern yields and were sustained in some regions for centuries to millennia, even though they also tended to require extreme inputs of labor and other socially unsustainable hardships

      https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1217241110

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    • zeckalpha  11 hours ago

      How much fertilizer does the Iowan farmer need to add to their field to achieve that? How many years can they maintain that yield without eroding the soil?

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