tacheonabike
Any competent gardener or allotment holder could have told you what would happen with mulching and composting , common sense really
Aross
As tacheonabike said every gardener could tell you this would work. This story also highlights the stupidity of business, lawyers and the courts in continually undoing good things all in the name of money or egos.
Jose Gros-Aymerich
Nice story, and an use for orange waste plenty of ingenuity. This reminds me a tale by a teacher of Physics, about an Agricultural engineer who pointed a farmer his land was in need of gypsum; the countryman didn't believe the engineer, so he went at night, and spread gypsum on the land, making the letters 'Gypsum', when the time for harvest arrived, a set of healthier, taller, greener plants draw the name: 'Gypsum'. This is marketing, and not other more childish approaches!
Lardo
I wonder why the "after" photo wasn't taken from the same vantage point as the "before" & "during"?
ljaques
Hmm, that triptych at the end shows two nearly identical photos, but the one on the right (after) isn't the same. Poorly done, researchers. I think you got the pic of the untouched area mixed up with the treated area. Anyway, if the orange peels do so much good, why aren't we hearing of similar good projects here in CA and FL, at minimum? Could they help restore fire forest damage more quickly? Let's do it!
chase
Actually... I think what this shows is "some" was better than extreme.
Had the deal not been halted continued dumping in the same area may not have produced the same results. So some good may have resulted. And they may have gotten lucky on the quantity dumped, type soil it was dumped on and local vegetation thriving in such a soil mixture.
That may not have been the case if they continued to dump the amount the proposed over 20 years.
And I agree, and decent horticulturist could have taken soil samples of the proposed dumping area and giving close results on what will happen to the soil and what would be best suited to grow there.
Perhaps this area could be used as the new control area for future dumping plans.
Gregg Eshelman
Much of the South American jungle isn't completely natural. Ancient peoples burned wood to charcoal and spread it on the land for fertilizer. Before they did that, the land was barren or grassland.
When their civilizations declined (a process started long before the Spanish and Portuguese arrived) and they abandoned their charcoal fertilized farmland, the other plants and trees thrived on the rich but thin soil.
Forward some centuries and farmers cut down everything and burn it, returning nutrients to the soil. But then they planted and harvested without additional fertilizer or deep tilling and depleted the soil nutrients.
The environmentalist 'solution' is to just stop farming to grow food.
They tend to fly into fits should anyone try to discuss applying fertilizer and deep tilling to improve the soil quality so that more food can be grown on less land, and to enable better regrowth of the jungle.
If the fertilizer can be natural food processing waste like orange peels, so much the better. Even better than simply dumping it would be tilling it in down to a half meter or deeper so that it can support deep root systems for trees.
npublici
Lawyers can destroy anything.
amazed W1
A brilliant positive result but so many negatives. 1) that the nobody is willing to get the UN onto overgrazing and so onto the absolute need for population control of the humans, not just the cattle. 2) that both the slash and burn techniques and the so-called civilised equivalent, a.k.a. deforestation are not banned 3) that such a ridiculous lawsuit should be brought and the court decision did not include allowing Del Oro to claim for all costs if the environmental benefits became so obvious.
Don Duncan
Aross & npublici: Business/lawyers are unethical, not stupid. They benefit from govt. force at our expense. But in the long run, we all suffer, thanks to pubic support of the use of institutionalized violence (govt.). Replacing that paradigm with a voluntary system would give reason, not force and corruption, a chance to change the present political chaoic societies into peaceful and properous ones. It's only logical, even if it doesn't comply with the age old paradigm of faith in force.