[HN Gopher] The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil
___________________________________________________________________
The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil
Author : DyslexicAtheist
Score : 146 points
Date : 2021-04-15 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| 99_00 wrote:
| Right now there is no financial incentive to preserve topsoil. In
| the future there will be.
|
| So why artificially create incentive to pay the higher cost now
| when we can punt to the future where technology will be so much
| better and the cost will probably be lower?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Topsoil takes a long time to build up. If you wait until it's
| an emergency to start trying to change farming practices, it'll
| take 10 years for farming practices to change, then another 10
| years to build topsoil, and a lot of people will starve.
| 99_00 wrote:
| >"In 150 years or so, we've lost over half of that rich
| topsoil--if not all in some places."
|
| If the timescale of the solution is decades we are good,
| because the time scale of the problem is centuries.
| meowkit wrote:
| Same problem with climate change.
|
| 1) You assume technology will be better. There is no guarantee
| that this will be true.
|
| 2) Externalities like mass migration or civil unrest that could
| occur from food shortages would mean we don't have a chance in
| the future to tackle the problem effectively.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Nuclear power can solve climate change now. Technology
| doesn't need to be better.
|
| People don't want to solve the problem now because
|
| 1) We don't need to solve it now
|
| 2) Fear of impending doom is a great way to push a wide array
| of agendas (ideological, economic, political) forward.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I have done a little quick and dirty looking around, trying to
| get an idea of how much damage was done in the Dust Bowl and what
| the long term consequence were (as a point of comparison/trying
| to find a thing that might help mentally model where this is
| going). Here are a couple of links:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl#Long-term_economic_i...
|
| https://www.softschools.com/facts/us_history/dust_bowl_facts...
|
| I run r/UrbanForestry and have recently posted some soil-related
| pieces there and I'm trying to get a handle on a complex topic
| without having to get a PhD in it. If anyone can suggest some
| good sources for me, I would appreciate it.
| drawkbox wrote:
| Agriculture also reduces the root depth as crops are harvested
| fast and regular iterations. This was a large cause of the Dust
| Bowl issue. There was a great post on this on reddit that has
| photo for reference. [1][2][3]
|
| Cover crops help this now to prevent Dust Bowl like conditions
| and bad soil where possible [4].
|
| Side note: Most carbon capture also happens in the root of wild
| grasses and plants. It isn't just agriculture but all our
| landscaping types that prevent root depth. We need more trees,
| and more wild growing but we cull it all back for the Stepford
| style perfect landscaping. HOAs in Arizona for instance hate
| wild grass and wild flowers, but they capture more carbon and
| can look amazing. Planting trees and plants that are more
| natural with deeper roots can help climate change and help the
| Gray-Green divide that highlights inequality on the amount of
| green in urban areas [5].
|
| [1]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/mdocyn/c...
|
| [2]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/microgrowery/comments/mdyb3h/compar...
|
| [3]
| https://preview.redd.it/sp1n9tf6hdp61.jpg?width=509&auto=web...
|
| [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/business/cover-crops-a-
| fa...
|
| [5] https://www.geographyrealm.com/gray-green-urban-divide-
| wealt...
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| YouTube soil health videos has all you need. Gabe Brown and Ray
| Archuleta presentations are easy to consume. Dr. Elaine Ingham
| focuses more on the soil life in greater detail than most care
| about but she does provide some important to understand details
| on rhizosphere interactions. Living Web Farms has quite a lot
| of lectures about regenerative practices. There are also a
| myriad of academic papers on soil health as well.
|
| This video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A , by
| Gabe Brown set me on the regenerative path.
|
| If you dont want to consume hours of information here is the
| gist. The soil is alive. Plants use microbes and fungus as an
| external stomach. Direct sun and disruption/tilling kill the
| soil life. Without life in the soil you eventually have a
| desert as the organics are sifted out of the sand by
| weathering.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| It would probably be worth contacting someone at the Natural
| Resources Conservation Service, which is part of the USDA. It
| was literally created as a response to the soil lost during the
| dustbowl and was originally called the "Soil Conservation
| Service". They may already have studies that cover exactly what
| you are asking about:
|
| https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/abou...
| aaron695 wrote:
| Luck the environmental lobbyist have got the suckers into only
| caring about CO2 levels, and not harming the planet.
|
| That said, if this reduces productivity that would mean more
| forests to cut down but I'd need to see a more full report on
| what is happening.
|
| Loss in land value and productivity should also be happening to
| back this up. The entire region will not suddenly become useless
| at once.
|
| And if there's anyone left who cares about the environment not
| CO2, helping quantify this at land sale level would help push
| some market forces.
| nobrains wrote:
| I think everyone needs to learn from the ancient wisdom on the
| Punjab province in India and Pakistan.
|
| Open Google earth and zoom into Punjab. It is the greenest
| agriculture zone in the entire world. Just look at it yourself.
|
| Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we
| are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their
| ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive
| for the world.
|
| And one more thing. The GMO crops being introduced I that region
| needs to STOP. It will kill the best farming land we have and
| then there will be no ability to rewind time.
|
| Read about the recent farmers protests there to also know more
| about the problems the farmers are facing.
| awillen wrote:
| GMO crops allow us to grow more food with less
| space/nutrients/etc. They are a solution, not a problem, and
| when people fear monger about them it hurts everyone.
| ekam wrote:
| Thanks for highlighting the protests-it's getting really bad
| over there. My dad is a farmer from Punjab originally and while
| he's in America now and doesn't farm he has a slightly
| different perspective. He tends to be far more concerned about
| todays farmers using harmful pesticides and overworking the
| land than GMOs. Maybe Punjabis on HN can shed more light, but
| at least from what I've heard GMOs are not the big issue in
| contemporary Punjabi farming
| julianlam wrote:
| You seem to think that GMOs mean scientists are injecting
| mutant genes into corn and wheat in order to increase yield.
| This is wrong.
|
| GMO means the crop itself has been selectively bred over time
| to increase desirable qualities, yield being one of them.
| Taste, perhaps another.
|
| Are you afraid of GMO foods? Perhaps you should avoid orange
| carrots, and sweet corn, then.
| kbenson wrote:
| > GMO means the crop itself has been selectively bred over
| time to increase desirable qualities
|
| That's _one_ thing GMO means. It can also mean genetically
| modified species that are resistant to a specific herbicide.
| For example, Round-up ready crops.
|
| That doesn't necessarily mean breeds that have been
| genetically altered are bad or worse than ones bred over
| time, but it's incorrect to say that GMO means breeding.
| alice-i-cecile wrote:
| This is a frustrating, mystical simplification of agriculture.
| We can understand how these things work, and implement best
| practices, rather than appealing to tradition and eschewing
| things like synthetic fertilizers and GMO crops purely out of
| how "unnatural" they are.
|
| Much of the woes in North American agriculture are down to the
| refusal of farmers to implement known best practices and the
| incredibly distortionary effect of endless layers of
| agricultural subsidies.
|
| Ancient practices may have interesting things to teach us, but
| they're not inherently good. And to actually fix things, the
| people who control the land need to actually care about doing
| the right things.
| okareaman wrote:
| I guess we'll have to replace it
|
| "Artificial soil: quick and dirty"
|
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526161-700-artifici...
| hinkley wrote:
| Requires a subscription.
|
| 'Replace it' is a little imprecise here, allowing for
| substitutes. I'm sure some people are trying to make
| substitutes but we know a lot more about how soil becomes these
| days and we're able, to an extent, to create it by introducing
| food to the right food chains.
|
| Unfortunately for perennial crops, you have to build that food
| chain up orders of magnitude more than you do just for annual
| plants. At the same time the carbon content and resiliency are
| much much better.
|
| Elaine Ingham is worth some time in a search engine.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| These topsoil crisis stories have been running since the 1930s,
| and are still nonsense. Modern farming doesn't depend on soil
| nutrients. The soil is tested, then minerals and petrochemical
| fertilizers are added. The soil is basically a growing medium.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| > The soil is basically a growing medium.
|
| This is absolutely false and is the idea that got us to where
| we are today with heavy tillage, fertilizer application and
| biocide application. Those practices are demonstrably
| destroying our environment and are wholly unnecessary.
| merpnderp wrote:
| Funny because when I saw the headline it reminded me of the
| same crisis in the 80's that never came to pass.
|
| I sometimes wonder if these crisis stories are just written by
| journalists he need to meet their clickbate quota for the week
| in this Google Adsense driven industry... naaaaa
| milkytron wrote:
| Wasn't the dust bowl caused by topsoil degradation?
|
| That seemed like a very substantial crises for wide swaths of
| the country's population.
| searine wrote:
| >Wasn't the dust bowl caused by topsoil degradation?
|
| No. It was caused by extensive deep tillage as method of pest
| control.
|
| We have better tools and methods now.
| sp332 wrote:
| It was caused by lack of cover plants. Farms are using cover
| crops like ryegrass more because it helps keep water in the
| soil better.
| Edman274 wrote:
| "These topsoil crisis stories have been running ever since
| that time that topsoil crisis killed thousands and caused
| widespread food insecurity. Utter hogwash. Well, it would be
| hogwash if any of the hogs had anything to eat."
| maxerickson wrote:
| The chemical fertilizer revolution happened in the 1950s.
|
| (which didn't disconnect productivity from soil condition,
| but it loosened the relationship)
| worik wrote:
| That is the problem in a nutshell
| mberning wrote:
| Here in SW Ohio I'm not sure there ever was an abundance of rich
| topsoil. I have 5 acres which has never been farmed and the
| native soil is dense, sticky clay. It is hard to get anything
| other than weeds to grow in it. Yet the corn farms around here
| always seem to produce.
| hinkley wrote:
| > I have 5 acres which has never been farmed
|
| If your records don't go back to the 1700's then you don't know
| that for sure. SW Ohio was the eastern tip of the savannas, so
| even if it wasn't farmed, someone busted the sod for your
| forebears to stake a claim.
| briga wrote:
| It's a shame we don't have satellite imagery dating back to when
| Europeans first arrived on the continent. I suspect the whole
| western US was once far more lush and green than it is today. The
| central valley in California, for example, used to have several
| natural lakes. Who knows how much impact the damming the Colorado
| river has on the ecology of the southwestern deserts. I can't
| imagine that concentrating water into man-made reservoirs
| combined with intensive agriculture has done much to help the
| drought conditions we see today across the US.
| gumby wrote:
| Modern farming is not the bucolic system drawn on the food
| packages in the supermarket.
|
| It's an extractive industry little different from mining or oil
| drilling. In fact industrial food is largely eating oil, both in
| energy intensity itself and the use of oil as feedstock for
| fertilizers and food additives.
| nuisance-bear wrote:
| Maybe we shouldn't burn ethanol in cars. Maybe we shouldn't
| load up every food product with corn syrup.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Corn in the US is heavily subsidized. It's why corn syrup is
| so prevalent in US foods, because the subsidies mean it's
| cheaper than any other sources of sugar.
|
| In the US, Iowa is the largest producer of corn [1]
| (producing nearly 40% more than the next, Illinois,) and thus
| the greatest beneficiary of those corn subsidies. Could we
| reduce those corn subsidies? No, it's politically nonviable,
| in part because Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must
| have the first primaries in the US [2][3]. No candidate that
| has ever said anything against corn subsidies has won a
| primary.
|
| [1] https://www.cropprophet.com/what-state-produces-the-most-
| cor...
|
| [2] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-iowa-and-new-
| hampshi...
|
| [3] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/01/why-the-iowa-
| cau...
| stolenmerch wrote:
| The government subsidies on corn pushes Iowa farmers to
| produce more than normal (depleting the soil faster) and
| sell their corn regardless of the market price. This is
| mostly done at the behest of other industries and huge food
| corporation lobbyists. It's a perverse economic incentive
| to say the least. I don't disagree with your conclusion,
| but I also don't think there's a bright line between corn
| subsidies and Iowa somehow playing kingmaker in the
| caucuses.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| It's my understanding that these subsidies came into
| existence in the Great Depression when farming was
| unprofitable even while people were starving. The
| government came to the realization that free market forces
| are not enough to stabilize the supply of food, and when
| food becomes unavailable... bad things happen. Car
| companies can go out of business and the country will
| survive, airlines can fail and the country will survive,
| movie theaters can go bankrupt and the country will
| survive, but food? That's an existential crisis for the
| whole nation. When large masses of people start to starve,
| you're looking at political change. You don't fuck around
| with your food supply. You can't just leave that up to
| supply and demand. Hence it's subsidized and managed.
| mycologos wrote:
| > Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must have the
| first primaries in the US
|
| I'm confused, how can a single state unilaterally require
| that its primary is the earliest in the nation? What's to
| prevent another state from passing a law that its primary
| must be one day before Iowa's?
| leecb wrote:
| Does this mean that if another state organizes a primary
| earlier than Iowa's primary, that Iowa will reschedule
| their primary to be even earlier than the other state?
| jcranmer wrote:
| This is basically what happened in 2008.
| maxerickson wrote:
| They can't stop other states from competing to be first.
| CountSessine wrote:
| If another state scheduled their's ahead of Iowa's,
| Iowa's state officials would be legally required to
| reschedule Iowa's ahead of this other state's.
|
| It would be super fun if another state passed a similar
| law.
| smegger001 wrote:
| is it bad of me that I want this to happen to end the
| madness. I can just imagine Iowa trying to sue another
| state for doing this.
| CountSessine wrote:
| I want this to happen too
| fzzzy wrote:
| Infinite corecursion!
|
| [edit] apparently corecursion isn't the correct term for
| when two functions call each other recursively? I thought
| there was a term for it
| retzkek wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_recursion
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| And if you believe in a link between obesity, diabetes, and
| the prevalence of corn products in our food, the chain of
| causality looks even worse.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Big corn. Amazing plants have enslaved us.
| jagger27 wrote:
| There's a brilliant chapter in Sapiens: A Brief History
| of Humankind about how as we domesticated wheat, it
| domesticated humans in return. Grains are thought to have
| been dropped along trade routes which allowed for humans
| to be less nomadic as crops became established. Then we
| got comfortable. Fascinating to think about.
| consensusform wrote:
| This claim, often repeated, is misleading to the point of
| dishonesty.
|
| Corn isn't really subsidized, and iowa corn farmers are not
| the benefactors of the agricultural bills. Cattle producers
| and chemical corporations are subsidized, and the way
| they're subsidized is by a myriad set of policies which
| encourage grain prices to stay very low. This makes cattle
| feed cheap and corn and soy inputs to chemical plants
| cheap.
|
| If the price of corn doubled, farmers could afford to pay
| their mortgage and taxes without trying to extract every
| bit of possible yield. But then the price of beef would go
| up and the profits of 3M and Dupont would go down, and
| that's a far more powerful force than farmers in Iowa.
| gwright wrote:
| I don't know much about direct corn subsidies, but we
| could talk about sugar tariffs -- which you could
| interpret as a subsidy to any substitute product producer
| -- like maybe corn syrup producers.
| CountSessine wrote:
| I'm kind of puzzled by this. Your post defies
| conventional wisdom (which you say is misleading). I'm
| giving you the benefit of the doubt because conventional
| wisdom is often misleading. But these links seem to
| indicate that in fact corn farmers ARE directly
| subsidized, both in terms of crop insurance (cheaper than
| market insurance is clearly a subsidy), as well as price
| protection. See that second link, especially ARC and PLC,
| which compensates farmers if their prices fall below
| benchmark rates set by Congress.
|
| Is that not a direct subsidy? Are they wrong? (genuinely
| curious - your post is interesting enough that I felt I
| had to do some research to clarify my own thinking)
|
| https://www.cato.org/commentary/examining-americas-farm-
| subs...
|
| https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidie
| s
| wnevets wrote:
| > Corn in the US is heavily subsidized.
|
| So is oil. So farming corn is actually subsidized at-least
| twice!
| [deleted]
| slt2021 wrote:
| if you think about it, it is ridiculous that we burn food as
| fuel in our cars and add unhealthy amount of sugar syrup into
| everything
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Sarah Taber covers this very well on her Twitter (even though
| she has a particular anti-dairy ax to grind)
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| There is more than one twitter account that comes up when you
| search for that name. I assume you mean this one (whom I
| happen to be following already and didn't realize it):
|
| https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Yes that's her.
| hinkley wrote:
| From what I understand we probably all should.
|
| Mark Shepard also complains from time to time that dairy
| supply is outstripping demand to the point where farmers
| can't make money off of it. That's dumb in it's own right but
| if you consider the ecological footprint, then we have a
| problem.
| corty wrote:
| Most important is nitrogen-based fertilizer, that can easily be
| produced from any kind of electricity. Most of the other stuff
| are minerals that are cheaply mined anywhere and won't run out
| for the next few thousand years.
|
| The most important oil consumption is for driving farm
| implements, but that can easily be changed to rapeseed oil in
| the short term and other green energy in the long term.
|
| So no cause for panic.
| analog31 wrote:
| Explain the reaction that turns electricity into nitrogen
| based fertilizer. What are the other inputs and outputs of
| the process? Are you forgetting the most important
| ingredient?
| philipkglass wrote:
| The Haber-Bosch reaction is what turns atmospheric
| dinitrogen (N2) into ammonia. Ammonia can be oxidized to
| make nitric acid and nitrate fertilizers, combined with
| carbon dioxide to make urea, or used as-is for fertilizer.
| The inputs to the Haber-Bosch reaction are hydrogen and
| nitrogen gases:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
|
| The nitrogen is easily separated from air. The hydrogen is
| the energetically expensive input. Most hydrogen is
| presently made by steam reforming fossil fuels. Hydrogen
| can also be produced from water and electricity via
| electrolysis:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water
|
| In the 20th century, surplus hydroelectric power from dams
| was used to electrolyze water for making ammonia. More
| direct demand for electricity and cheaper processes for
| making hydrogen from fossil fuels gradually eliminated it.
| Now people are planning to bring back large scale
| electrolytic hydrogen for fossil-free hydrogen from
| renewables:
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/canada-is-set-to-have-one-
| th...
|
| https://www.chemengonline.com/uniper-unveils-plans-for-
| germa...
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Well I agree that the oil argument isn't very good. But I
| don't think the conclusion is "no cause for panic."
|
| I think water loss (especially from aquifers but also just
| drought and river diversion in California), soil erosion,
| habitat loss, and homogenisation are big worries. We've seen
| big problems from soil loss before in America where the
| prairie grass with its deep root systems holding the soil
| together was replaced by cereal crops with short roots and
| plowing exposing the soil. The result was the dust bowl.
| markdown wrote:
| Rapeseed oil isn't green energy. It's just more big-Ag.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If you don't have topsoil you don't have water retention and
| you don't have organisms and structure that avoids the need
| to till for aeration and mineral movement. That means the
| garbage soil we're left with must be watered from aquifers
| when it's not constantly raining, and we must till the soil
| then work in fertilizers, which wastes gas and time.
|
| The path you say has "no cause for panic" is a path to
| cyclical famine in 50-100 years.
| titzer wrote:
| I come from a long line of farmers. My father was the last of
| our family to try to hold onto the farming tradition. He grew
| up on a farm, along with all my aunts and uncles. His
| generation was the first go to college. He chose business. He
| made a ton of money, and hated it. After leaving the business
| world in the mid 1980s to return to farming, it was not the
| same, and he soon returned to what was effectively day trading
| in the early to mid 1990s.
|
| The transformation of farming is a direct result of
| corporatization and globalization, like almost every other
| sector of the economy. It's just more of the machine eating the
| world. Small, family farms, the kind that my ancestors toiled
| on, since unrecorded history, literally centuries, back to
| central Europe, were chewed up and spit out by the machine. The
| forests, the land, the local wildlife, now, too, the soil, all
| chewed up and digested in the pursuit of the one thing that the
| machine really craves: money.
|
| It's the legacy of our entire economic focus on profit, growth,
| scale. No big conspiracy, no evil bad actors you can hate
| forever, just the summation of our value system expressed in
| the invisible hand of the market, jostled or cajoled here and
| there by policy, or retarded briefly by it, but always pointing
| in the same direction, eventually to consume all the natural
| resources, dipping over the threshold of sustainability to the
| reservoir of resources behind it, extracting and emptying it,
| until eventually there is nothing left.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Self sustaining societies will always be out competed and
| subsumed by extractive ones.
| nine_k wrote:
| Not always, but as long as the unsustainable extraction
| lasts. By definition, it has to run out of the stuff it's
| extracting.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I'm not sure how much this actually scales and makes enough
| money but it sure is an awesome tale (saw the movie on
| Netflix - https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829):
|
| https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/
|
| Your dad might love it, even if just for the nostalgia.
|
| That said, I think some of the lessons in there are awesome.
| Both the ones about biodiversity but also perseverance in the
| light of 'disaster' striking and staying strong and going on
| with the biodiversity path instead of just resigning and
| saying "yep, alright, Big Farmer is right, this doesn't
| work".
| stefs wrote:
| it's a wonderful feel-good movie (i loved it), but i'm not
| sure whether this is actually a sustainable farming
| solution. afaik they make the farm profitable tourism, i.e.
| the guided tours, which wouldn't scale.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| My grandparents were all farmers. They did it for money, not
| because they loved corn and the smell of pig shit.
|
| As soon as they paid off the loans for the land, they rented
| the farms out to someone else to work and moved to town to
| get easier jobs.
|
| I love the smell of capitalism in the morning. Smells
| like...better than pig shit.
| dagss wrote:
| Makes me think of easter island. When our civilization
| perishes, money will seem as useful as those statues.
| hangonhn wrote:
| There's nothing bucolic about farming -- ever. Both my wife and
| I come from farming families. I lost a great grandfather who
| effectively worked himself to death in his early 30s and my
| wife had a great grandfather who died from being attacked by a
| bull. Farming has always been very hard work. I have friends in
| tech who grew up in farming families and they are the few
| people in tech who can easily get up early in the morning
| because that's also a part of farming life -- get up before the
| sun is even up.
|
| I don't know where the romanticized idea of farming life came
| from because it was never that great. Historically, it was just
| a way to provide food for your family and maybe make a profit
| on the side if you're lucky.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| I worked on a farm in my teens in 90s upstate ny that was like
| the last dying breath of the traditional family farm. It was a
| property that was intact since a land grant from a Dutch
| patroon and continuously farmed until around 2000. Today the
| family still owns it, and boards a few horses to pay the taxes.
|
| The farmer was an old-school conservative farmer. He was a
| local Republican Party leader for awhile, a conservationist and
| just overall hardworking guy. The modern farm is more like an
| oil company. I think that 75 years from now, when we lament the
| fate of the impoverished Midwest Desert and will see the
| 1970s/1980s as a watershed moment where we flipped our entire
| governance philosophy to short term P&L, despite then obvious
| and already learned lessons of the past.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| This makes me think of the Grapes of Wrath:
|
| >Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they
| had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to
| be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long
| ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were
| cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than
| themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove
| them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the
| mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and
| from feeling.
|
| >You know the land's getting poorer. You know what cotton
| does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.
|
| The squatters nodded--they knew, God knew. If they could only
| rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.
| failrate wrote:
| This is a romanticized view of the small family farm. Our
| farmibg practices in the US were imported from Europe and
| were not adapted to our climates. Settlers spread like
| locusts across land that was so fertile that even if they
| didn't know what to do, the soil would rescue them. Until it
| was finally so used up that it couldn't support crops.
| [deleted]
| dijit wrote:
| This is a weird take on history, it contradicts directly
| what I was taught and understood to be true. The dust bowl
| was pretty bad but as far as I understood it there was very
| little fertility to much of the land in what we now call
| the USA, which is why life was difficult for the early
| European settlers.
| failrate wrote:
| Can you explain all of the people who were living and
| farming here prior to the European invasion?
|
| The land in the US is fertile. The prairies were
| incredibly fertile.
| supernovae wrote:
| I saw something recently that showed the dustbowl was
| from loss of native grasses that had deep roots to crops
| that couldn't contain the soils and hold the bio-mass...
| Eventually without the root mass of the native grasses,
| it withered away...
|
| The treatment of the soil as if it is infinite and
| something purely to be extract is exactly like oil and
| mineral mining no matter the scale...
|
| Regardless of the dust bowl and the types of farmers that
| caused it, the hopes are that we learned how to farm
| within the ecology of the region(s) we live in and how
| those regions may vary from one another and we should
| build adaptive farms that work in harmony...
| titzer wrote:
| I think you're being ungenerous to settlers from Europe; my
| ancestors were some of them. Soil conditions varied a lot!
| In Indiana, where my ancestors settled, there was largely
| forest, and great soil for farming, but the plains weren't
| that way. But regardless, yes, humans have very radically
| changed not only the soil ecology, but the entire ecology
| of North America over our entire time. But it's really
| picked up in the last 50 years. We're way past
| sustainability now.
|
| The practices of 100 or 200 years ago were much more
| sustainable than what we have now. They had no pesticides
| or fertilizers, and they couldn't till the soil so
| thoroughly. Farms were smaller and the increased
| biodiversity of "pests" was actually better for the soils,
| if not for yields.
|
| What has really tipped the balance is the "amazing" 4x crop
| yield increase over the last century. It came at the
| expense of literally every other living thing associated
| with the land: pests, grasses, trees, animals, birds, you
| name it. And it required juicing everything up on steroids,
| genetically modifying and breeding different crop
| varieties, and carpet-bombing an entire phylum of life with
| chemical warfare.
| ljm wrote:
| Settlers didn't intuitively know how to farm the land at
| home, whether that was in the Mediterranean climate of the
| south of Europe or the temperate one in central Europe, or
| the colder one further north. And it's certainly not as if
| the European continent is somehow especially farmable
| without knowing anything about farming.
|
| The wikipedia article on crop rotation[1] explains quite
| plainly that this has been evolving over _eight thousand_
| years, with a recent development pre-WW2 being in the
| southern US, and the most recent one being a shift to
| stopping crop rotation and instead switching to chemicals.
| That last particular update should be setting the alarm
| bells ringing.
|
| The evidence doesn't really support your claim unless you
| think the entirety of Northern America had no concept of
| farming until colonialism arrived a few hundred years ago.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation#History
| failrate wrote:
| The settlers had every opportunity to learn local farming
| practices from the Native Americans.
|
| Instead, they did everything in their power to force
| their farming practices onto the land where they
| occupied.
|
| Native Americans farmed. They farmed different crops that
| were actually suited to the local biome.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I'm not worried about the soil, I'm worried about the water.
| The Ogallala Aquifer is shrinking. The more it shrinks, the
| more there will be compaction preventing it from refilling to
| previous states. We can always grow food in water but getting
| clean water will be an increasingly difficult task. Look how
| bad it already is in CA.
| nradov wrote:
| We can grow crops with far less water. Look at farms in
| Israel. The problem is that water prices don't account for
| externalities or sustainability, so in the short term farmers
| have little incentive to conserve.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| How much of the water that Israel's farms consume, depends
| on desalination? So, if it really long-term sustainable?
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting
| factor is electricity. And renewables continue to deliver
| Moore's law like improvements in the price and quantity
| of electricity, without any environmental externalities.
| gumby wrote:
| > Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting
| factor is electricity.
|
| Disposal of the extracted salt is a serious issue. You
| can't just inject brackish water back into he ocean as it
| screws up the ecology of the near shore environment (or
| wherever else you're willing to squirt it.
| haberman wrote:
| Why does desalination produce brackish water (this is a
| new term to me)? From context I expected "brackish water"
| to mean water that is saltier than seawater. But when I
| look it up, it's apparently water with salinity between
| fresh water and seawater.
| nradov wrote:
| Most desalination plants do just inject saline water back
| into the ocean. There's no where else to put it. In most
| cases the outflow pipe runs some distance offshore into
| deeper water to reduce the environmental impact.
| gwright wrote:
| I actually think that desalination and solar are a good
| pairing but
|
| > without any environmental externalities
|
| doesn't sound quite right to me. In particular I think
| there are reasonable concerns regarding lifetime energy
| and environmental costs of solar panels, mining of and
| disposal (or recycling) of the rare materials used in the
| panels, etc.
|
| TANSTAFL
| Veserv wrote:
| Desalination is sufficiently cheap to not be a material
| problem for US consumers (or other developed countries).
| State-of-the-art desalination plants in Israel are
| fulfilling contracts at ~$0.40/m^3 [1] and the per-capita
| water usage in the US is ~1200 m^3/yr [2]. Even if we
| assumed that the current price of water is $0, this would
| only amount to a $480/yr increase in expenditure per
| American which would constitute a one-time 1.4% increase
| of yearly expenditure for the median American. Note that
| this accounts for all agricultural production in the US;
| if we consider just water for domestic use such as
| drinking, bathing, and watering the lawn the average
| person only uses ~100 m^3/yr [3] which is ~$40/yr which
| is within reach of every household. This also assumes
| that increased water prices will not result in changes to
| water usage which is very doable as the US uses ~3-4x as
| much water per capita as other peer countries such as
| France and Germany and 10x the water of Israel which
| already needed to adjust to a regime of desalination
| water prices.
|
| All in all, considered merely in economic terms,
| desalination is a perfectly viable solution to the water
| crisis in developed countries and would incur at most a
| relatively minor economic impact by this analysis. Note
| that this does not necessarily apply to developing
| countries where a $40/yr expenditure increase could be
| catastrophic. I am also not making any statement about
| non-economic considerations such as possible effects on
| the environment that may occur as a result of the need
| for increased power generation for mass desalination.
|
| [1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-
| release/2020/05/27/203950...
|
| [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263156/water-
| consumption...
|
| [3] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Your analysis above is remarkably detailed, but it misses
| the point. When I used the term "sustainable" I was
| speaking of resource usage and environmental impact, not
| whether the practice was affordable.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I's not an "either/or". You should worry about both. Some
| areas are having a problem with soil, some with water and
| some with both.
| abduhl wrote:
| Do you have any papers on compaction induced reduction in
| water bearing capacity? This idea does not mesh with my
| understanding of the Ogallala as being generally coarse
| grained and thus not as at risk of what you're suggesting.
| Compare to consolidation of fine grained soils which does
| have a hysteretical behavior relating to storage capacity.
| CountSessine wrote:
| I'm not worried about the water, I'm worried about the
| phosphorus! Almost all of the fertilizer in the world is made
| from phosphorus that comes from Morocco and Western Sahara,
| and it appears that we're depleting it very quickly.
|
| http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/p.
| ..
|
| (actually, I'm worried about the water and the soil too)
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| All the minerals needed for plant life are available in the
| sand, silt, and clay in soil. Soil life is the key to
| breaking down aggregate minerals into plant usable
| nutrients. In healthy soil fertilizing is not necessary.
|
| It is hard to talk about soil life without sounding like a
| kook to most people. But, our practices of using synthetic
| fertilizers and spraying fungicides, herbicides, and
| pesticides are literally killing the soil's capacity to
| feed plants.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It seems to me that aquifers aren't sustainable water sources
| to begin with--we shouldn't treat them as a primary water
| source, but rather as a reserve source for scarce years. On
| the other hand, topsoil could be sustainable (at least for
| very large time scales) provided it's properly managed.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| You should be worried about soil. Increasing the soil organic
| matter improves its water holding capacity, improves tilth
| and increases infiltration rate. In turn that decreases how
| much water is needed for crops in dry times and allows
| recharging of aquifers.
|
| With the currently degraded soil, farmers worry about a
| couple inches of rain causing washouts or flash floods. Water
| runs over the top of the soil into surface waterways. Healthy
| soil can infiltrate many inches of rain an hour.
|
| Infiltration example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggDY35gGBkA
|
| Longer soil health vid:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBnsgzeNIng
| makerofspoons wrote:
| We're ~60 years from running out of topsoil globally if we
| continue degrading it at the current rate:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
| markdown wrote:
| Where does the topsoil go? Doesn't it, by definition, just
| become topsoil somewhere else?
| redisman wrote:
| Well no. Just like a rainforest doesn't just fly in the wind
| to become a rainforest somewhere else if you burn it. Soil is
| a ecosystem, not a raw material.
| supernovae wrote:
| It doesn't have to go anywhere, it can just "die" - lose its
| ability to hold water, nutrients, fungus, microbes -
| everything necessary for it to be beneficial to plants.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| It gets eroded by wind and water, with the end result being
| at the bottom of oceans and lakes.
| FredPret wrote:
| We'll probably be eating lab-grown meat and hydroponically-
| grown vegetables by then.
|
| If we're not all uploaded to a server embedded in the planet's
| core or orbiting the sun.
| debacle wrote:
| Hydroponically grown vegetables tend to be nutrientless
| sponges.
|
| Hydroponically grown celery tastes like water. Fresh, dirt-
| grown celery is nearly inedible because of how sharp and
| metallic the flavor is.
|
| Industrial and lab-grown meat will face the same problems.
| faemir wrote:
| As someone in the industry, this is absolute rubbish and
| misinformation.
| haram_masala wrote:
| Lab-grown meat will taste exactly the way consumers expect
| meat to taste, for the same reason orange juice does.
| hinkley wrote:
| [1] because we will engineer the process to a terrifying
| degree.
| sp332 wrote:
| I've heard exactly the opposite about hydroponic
| vegetables. I suppose it depends on what nutrients the
| plants are given in the water. What is your experience?
| debacle wrote:
| It's 100% the nutrients + minerals. When you get right
| down to it, you're just trading one growing medium for
| another.
|
| That said, hydroponics allows for a level of control in
| nutrients that soil does not, generally leading to
| weighty, tasteless veggies.
| FredPret wrote:
| Uhm... no.
|
| Ever actually had any? How do you what lab-grown meat will
| taste like? And why do you think lots of pot-smokers insist
| on the hydroponic kind? For the weak watery effect?
| klyrs wrote:
| It can go either way, depending on how much fertilizer
| you use. Farms that cheap out will have an inferior
| product.
| FooHentai wrote:
| I don't believe that's accurate. The main issue or
| limitation of hydroponics/aquaponics is that many types of
| vegetables cannot be grown via the method. It's suited to
| leafy greens and not, for example, root vegetables.
| FredPret wrote:
| I googled "hydroponic potatoes" and I kid you not, the
| first words in the results were "Potatoes are one of the
| easiest crops to grow with a hydroponics system".
|
| I've also had grown and eaten hydroponic potatoes myself
| and they were great.
| neonnoodle wrote:
| Good news! we're orbiting the sun now, well ahead of target
| date
| FredPret wrote:
| Didn't think the words "in an _artificial_ sattelite" were
| really needed to convey the idea.
| pepperonipizza wrote:
| This claim has been contested
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/soil-
| lifespans#:~:text=But%20the%....
| ciconia wrote:
| It's as if humanity is squeezing the planet like a lemon for
| every last drop. There's not much left...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The planet will be fine, but we are sawing off the branch we
| are sitting on
| stakkur wrote:
| Yes. But most of the crop grown in that 'corn belt' is not for
| human consumption, it's for feeding livestock. We're destroying
| farmland to feed our need for meat. The rest of the crop in the
| Corn Belt--soybeans--is mostly exported abroad.
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| I don't believe that's fully the case:
| https://www.sacredcow.info/blog/qz6pi6cvjowjhxsh4dqg1dogizno...
|
| Lot of corn and soybean oil produced, animals get whats left,
| generally.
| stakkur wrote:
| I believe it is, as does the USDA:
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-
| feedgra...
|
| Ethanol is a factor, but again--most production
| overwhelmingly ends up as livestock feed (as the USDA points
| out).
| rootsudo wrote:
| So we short or long soy/corn?
|
| Insurance regarding farming crops and futures though is a very
| interesting topic, one that I wish to have learned more about.
| Tons of big things.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| If anyone is curious I am working on an open source farming robot
| meant to be used for regenerative agriculture techniques.
|
| My hope is that we can build robotic tools that work the land
| more like human hands do instead of the big tools and poisons we
| use today.
|
| If you like that kind of thing please take a look:
|
| https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...
| hinkley wrote:
| On the plus side, your rover is going to work better with
| contour planting, which is part of the solution to our
| problems.
|
| The downside is that most of the post-modern agricultural
| variants embrace _observation_ as being critical, and we of all
| people should know that statistics and graphs are not a
| substitute for actually looking at things. Having a robot phone
| home is not the same as knowing what 's going on.
|
| As an aside, I think you're going to need chonkier wheels on
| that thing, and better resistance to mud (what are those boxes
| right above the wheels?) Also you should research fork rake,
| and how it relates to the tendency of a wheeled vehicle to
| maintain or change direction. There may be a wheel design that
| affords you more cycles for other activities besides keeping
| the vehicle tracking straight.
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