Talk:Three Sisters (agriculture)

Renaming disambiguation page
Please note that there has been a proposal to make the default for "Three Sisters" the Chekhov play rather than the disambiguation page. Please refer here to express your view. Somno (talk) 03:19, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

clean it up
at the bottem of the page it has a thing about native american religion and in the list of stuff there is a bunch of games, please remove this — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.173.112.195 (talk) 07:03, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Absurdity
No one ever sees the logical fallacy of using several hundred grams of protein (fish, eels, which Native peoples knew how to preserve by smoking and drying) to fertilize crops that provide far less nutrition? Yet people who rely on Mother Jones and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for scholarship on North American Natives insist on keeping this nonsense in the entry. Spoonkymonkey (talk) 18:37, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The use of fish as hill fertiliser is indisputably established in the historical record. Interestingly, there is only record of one First Nations agriculturalist doing so, however; the famous Squanto, who befriended the first English settlers in Massachusetts. Historians believe he learned about fish fertiliser during his significant stay in England, during which he learned to speak English and was known to take a keen interest in the local agriculture. On the southeast coast, where Squanto did most of his research, farmers used a specific species of fish in a specific way. Squanto counselled the "Pilgrims" to use the same species (alewives) in precisely the same way (laid on their left side with their head pointed toward the nearest body of water). All of which is established in reliable period records, both Squanto's agricultural research in England and the particulars of his advice to the settlers on the other side. Laodah 05:55, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Ah, when people (like our sanctimonious friend Spoonkymonkey here) disparage sources without having actually read them… The Mother Earth article expressly states the use of fish 'carcasses', meaning that the people ate the fish and then put the uneaten remains (bones, organs, etc) in the ground as fertilizer — something we do to this day with fish meal. — tooki (talk) 00:03, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Also beans don't need pollinators - they self pollinate. There are exceptions, like runner beans, but those are not what were grown in North America. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Loki-dog (talk • contribs) 15:18, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

incorrect statement about legumes and nitrogen fixing
174.21.110.155 (talk) 20:59, 3 August 2015 (UTC)The article repeats a common misunderstanding about legumes. The plant uses almost all of the nitrogen it fixes for itself. This is especially true if the seed (bean, or what is called "grain" in the quotation below) is harvested:

"When the grain from a grain legume crop is harvested, little nitrogen is returned for the following crop. Most of the nitrogen fixed during the season is removed from the field as grain. The stalks, leaves, and roots of grain legumes, such as soybeans and beans, contain about the same concentration of nitrogen as found in non-legume crop residue. In fact, the residue from a corn crop contains more nitrogen than the residue from a bean crop simply because the corn crop has more residue left after the harvest of corn."

http://aces.nmsu.edu/pubs/_a/A129/

The bean plant only adds significant nitrogen to the soil when it decomposes. Can one of you correct the article to reflect this?

"Plant based diet" (biased citation #7)
If you feel like investigating this for consistency with the spirit of Wikipedia, please investigate. I am myself biased in the opposite direction so I will not be further involved in this matter, other than saying that I believe John McDougall to be religious. Ellenor2000 (talk) 08:59, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

"Three Sisters vs. European Farming" -- Incomplete and misleading
I'll quote the whole section here, as it's rather short:

"A monoculture field is a field where only one crop is grown at a time. This technique was brought over to America from Europe and now dominates the Three Sisters technique in terms of popularity, despite its major drawbacks. The Three Sisters harvest technique yields more produce than a monoculture field while using less space and resources.[14]"

There's a lot wrong with every piece of this section, except the very first sentence.

This segment is based on a paper that examines only one question: Could the society known to modern westerners as the Iroquois (whom I shall henceforth refer to only as Iroquois, for the sake of brevity, I apologize in advance for any offense given), adequately support their nutritional needs on a particular kind of farming system? The answer turns out to be not only "yes," but also that it would have had certain advantages ***for them*** over Western-style monoculture farming, particularly in the area of calories-per-unit-area.

Whomever it was that created this section takes that piece of information and extrapolates it to come to the conclusion that this is the kind of farming we should all be doing and that monoculture farming is a product of the fundamental degeneracy and profligacy of white men, and that we should all be doing Three Sisters-style agriculture in bare feet and fully natural body hair. Or something. I'm not sure.

This view of the topic has some fundamental flaws. I'll address only one here, mainly that not every farming method is appropriate for everyone, everywhere, at every time.

This method of farming was the best method for the Iroquois. It was not the best method for Western Europeans in the late medieval and Renaissance eras, otherwise they'd already be doing it. People everywhere, from Europeans to Africans to the First Peoples of the Americas are smart and clever. They don't do stuff for no good reason. The problem with the Three Sisters method, for Europeans, is that it is not in any way amenable to mechanization, even the most rudimentary mechanization of a plow pulled by beasts of burden, which is what early modern European agriculture is based on,given that all the plants are interspersed and intertwined with each other. Having oxen, and later horses, to pull implements meant that Europeans could farm very large areas, very quickly relative to purely-human labor. This ability to quickly work large areas compensated for the low yield-per-area. However, no New World society except for the Inca had any large beasts of burden, so it made more sense for them to use a method that required more human labor, but gave a better yield-per-area.

So, on this basis, I propose that this section be built on heavily, or removed altogether. Johnny Wishbone (talk) 02:33, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

Is it still in use anywhere in the world?
The article mostly speaks as historical, but is it still in use in some farming communities across the world?

I remember as a child that in the 1990s rural Romania, it was still the main method of growing maize, but it went out of use in the 2000s as fertilizers became relatively cheaper and labor more expensive. Bogdan (talk) 12:51, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm not aware of anyplace where the three sisters is still used by farmers -- but a lot of gardeners (me included) in the U.S. have tried three sisters plantings. My experience with it has been good. If I had to survive on what I could grow without benefit of modern hybrid seeds and fertilizers, I would utilize the three sisters as it preserves the fertility and moisture in the soil better than mono-culture. You can survive pretty well on a diet of only the three sisters, especially if you nixtalmalize the maize. Smallchief (talk)

Propose using the term "corn" consistenty throughout this article
I propose using the term "corn" consistently throughout this article because it is the common term in North America. According to MOS:TIES this should be the term used. ☆ Bri (talk) 00:19, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
 * The word "corn" has different meanings to different people. In the U.S. corn means "maize." In the UK "corn" can mean wheat, oats, or barley. Example from the King James Bible: "He that withholdeth corn, the people shall curse him" That verse is talking about wheat or barley -- not maize. To avoid confusion, I think it's better to stick with maize. Smallchief (talk) 00:43, 1 May 2023 (UTC).  He  iro  00:48, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Agree with Smallchief, for the reasons stated.  He  iro  00:48, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
 * I realize usage is different in the UK. But by MOS:TIES the article should follow American usage nonetheless. ☆ Bri (talk) 00:51, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
 * I've edited multiple dozens if not hundreds of Native American archaeology pages here in the last 15 years. I, and in general most of the other editors who work on them, have used maize consistently for the subject matter. Most Mesoamerican articles also use maize.You type in "corn", and it takes you to our article on maize. So changing all of those hundreds of articles, including this one, would entail adding a redirect instead of linking directly to the subject. Leave as is.  He  iro  01:11, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Comparison of yields
Under there is a description of Native American crop production followed by this sentence (my bolding):, average yield of maize per acre in New York in 2021 using modern techniques with hybrid maize was 167 bushels (4,200 kg) per acre. Combining figures from two different sources to effectively state that Native American agricultural practices were less productive than modern methods is improper synthesis. Since the source doesn't say anything about the topic of the article (or even mention agricultural techniques or hybrids) I'd suggest removing this sentence entirely. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 16:01, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for stating your view so clearly. However, juxtaposition or sequence is not synthesis, per WP:NOTSYNTH. The words "for comparison" do no more than invite the reader to view the stated facts together; any conclusions they draw are up to them. Had the editor written "As you can see, conventional agriculture is a whole lot better and more productive than The Three Sisters...", that would have been original research by synthesis. Just giving readers the facts is not. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:06, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
 * The phrase "" implies more than mere juxtaposition. WP:SYNTH uses a similar example: The United Nations' stated objective is to maintain international peace and security, since its creation there have been 160 wars throughout the world. You could say this does no more than invite the reader to view the stated facts together, and that any conclusions they draw are up to them. Nonetheless it is improper synthesis, i.e. to reach a conclusion not explicitly stated by any source. The article implies these things are even worthy of being compared, but why? A more relevant comparison would be with 17th-century European agriculture, not 2020s American agriculture. In any case, it's up to published RSes to compare things, not Wikipedia. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 16:32, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Hm, a source would certainly be nice. The WP:SYNTH example is a great deal stronger than what is present in this article, so I'd say it was no more than borderline here, but I'd agree that a controlled experiment would be the best, and failing that, a like-for-like comparison would be apposite. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:37, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Fine. In the meantime I'll remove the sentence, which is at the very least off-topic, a random factoid with no relevance to the article subject. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 16:40, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I replaced it with an experiment already. But the language you've just used is both inappropriate and uncollegiate: the facts juxtaposed by some long-gone editor were by no means random, just not ideally chosen and wandering rather close to the limits of policy. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:48, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
 * My point is that editors should not be choosing which facts to include at all. That leads to undue weight. Instead we should just summarize the most reliable sources on the topic at hand. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:25, 18 January 2024 (UTC)