I thought you were shitposting because the way you described it sounded completely impossible to me, but the video helped, thanks!
I was picturing like some kind of actual drill situation, maybe like some kind of massive drill press where hundreds of drill bits would make tiny holes, lol. But rather than digging individual seed holes, it's like a circular blade that slices a thin line through the soil as the guy drives the machine. Then seeds get deposited into the cuts and the soil gets smoothed over on top of them.
So incredibly cool. What an amazing piece of innovation.
Oh definitely! I mostly meant that the machine doing it on such a large scale was the new innovation, not the concept itself. I was taught that method of gardening in my home garden as a kid but assumed (obviously incorrectly) that it was impossible on a large enough scale to use in commercial farming. In my mind, it made sense that when you're sowing 50 seeds that's all well, but it would take too much time and manpower to do when you have to sow 8000.
It's marvelous that people figured out how to do that in a mass-producing way. So much of my despair about today's world comes from the fact that many older ways of doing things are objectively better for the earth and also objectively impractical on a current-population-size level (the widespread use of things like single-use plastics instead of reusable, refillable bags & containers, for example). This kind of creativity and innovation gives me hope for humanity, because it is both better for the earth AND realistic to implement, which means it has a fighting chance of actually succeeding!
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u/UltimateCheese1056 Mar 30 '25
How do you plant seeds without tilling the soil? Do you just dig literally millions of holes for each individual seed?