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Comment by culi

18 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

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culi

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ch4s3  14 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  13 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.

    ---

    > 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

    • ch4s3  2 hours ago

      That article you linked doesn't mention Xochimilco at all so I have no clue what you're quoting. I can't find a single source for your 80 tons claim (other than some blog post that cites another blog post), which if true and I suspect it isn't is 20 tons less per hectare than many conventional vegetables like cabbage and tomatoes. Other sources I found cite a number that's less than half of what you're claiming. Do you have a real source that isn't a blog post?

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

      This is alarmingly false. As I pointed out many conventional vegetables yield 100 tons per hectare today. Moreover yes they are more productive per unit of labor. The Mexica and their contemporary polities around Lake Texcoco were miserable slave societies that used armies of captured war salves (tlacotin) to perform much of the work. They also used unpaid corvee labor through the coatequitl system, and serfs known as mayeques. So honestly its quite the social advancement that we don't have to press people into agricultural labor at spear point anymore.

      > Agricultural yields within the most densely populated and productive preindustrial land-use systems compared well with modern yields

      The references for this quote are about South East Asian rice agriculture, which today is still done more or less done the way it was in premodern times. This quote doesn't support your argument and is at best deceptive.

  • zeckalpha  13 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?

    • ch4s3  2 hours ago

      Who cares? Fertilizer is nitrogen that literally comes out of the air. Erosion is vastly overstated by permaculture enthusiasts and can be mitigated vy changes to tillage and irrigation. Erosion in the Midwest clocks in at about 0.04 mm per year, but there's plenty of new soil deposition around the Mississippi. It's a manageable issue.

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trhway  18 hours ago

How it was (a great interactive 3d reconstruction)

https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/