[HN Gopher] Soil: The world beneath our feet
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Soil: The world beneath our feet
Author : ljf
Score : 135 points
Date : 2022-05-08 06:59 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| kvetching wrote:
| Regenerative agriculture. Get rid of the feed lots and create a
| nationwide system throughout the farmland so that after every few
| years, all the land will have had cattle grazed upon it, adding
| nutrients back into the soil.
|
| It's absolutely insane that Regenerative Agriculture was not
| mentioned once in this. There are farmers that have figured out
| ways to make their farmland fertile again. These practices just
| need to be expanded.
| foobarian wrote:
| Every day we get a little bit closer to mass cultivation of
| truffles! Ahhh truffles.
| zeristor wrote:
| Lots of new ideas about plants encouraging bacteria around their
| roots, I guess this started before gut fauna in animals.
|
| So many things to think about.
| joeman1000 wrote:
| Soil is incredibly 'underrated', this is a great article. It:
|
| + filters contaminants in the groundwater
|
| + stores water for later use
|
| + hosts the nutrients for plant growth and therefore human life
|
| + dampens the effect of massive rainfall events by being porous
| and soaking up surface runoff
|
| We are doing so many bad things to our soil.
|
| + We're leaching all the nutrients out of it without replacement
|
| + we compact the hell out of it, reducing permeability and the
| benefits I mentioned above
|
| + we cover it in concrete, meaning groundwater recharge is
| decreased and more rainfall becomes surface runoff, resulting in
| flooding
|
| + we let it erode due to this higher surface runoff
|
| The erosion rate is higher than the rate at which it is replaced
| as well. We have _a few meters_ of topsoil at any given point on
| earth, minus oceans and deserts and now urban centres. We
| absolutely are not treating this vital part of our life
| correctly.
|
| It's easy to write it off as nothing. I did the same until I was
| forced to learn about soil in so many different contexts as a
| civil engineer. Luckily curriculum nowadays teaches more
| sustainable practices in soil hydrology and the design of urban
| drainage networks. The old ways still linger though, which just
| treat it as an infinitely available engineering material.
| mkurume wrote:
| There's a fantastic (and humorous) lecture from Dr. Elaine Ingham
| on soil science for anyone interested in digging into the
| science: https://youtu.be/ErMHR6Mc4Bk
| boredumb wrote:
| Everyone should invest in a decent microscope. Whether it's some
| soil or a drop of pond water there is an absolutely insane amount
| of life that escapes the naked eye. Easily one of the best couple
| hundred dollars I've spent in my life.
| pesfandiar wrote:
| What level of magnification would you consider decent in a
| microscope?
| boredumb wrote:
| you really only need 10x or 25x.
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/@madscientistken
|
| This guy does live streams almost nightly and I've found
| myself entranced more than I'd like to admit.
| dls2016 wrote:
| This rocks. I wood chipped a portion of my lawn and now
| grow fruit/berries there. Every morning after the kids get
| on the bus I walk around, pull some weeds and dig into the
| chips and dirt to see what's going on down there. Very
| relaxing.
|
| This article and tiktok make me want a microscope.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Closed-system farming, where basically everything is recycled -
| nutrients, water, biomass (except what goes onto people's tables)
| - is theoretically possible and this article describes what looks
| like a successful system. This is also the kind of thing you'd
| need on a large spaceship or Martian colony (where human
| feces/urine would also need to be recycled).
|
| However, the increase in labor needed shouldn't be
| underestimated. Some automation is likely possible with advanced
| robots, but this would mean a much larger fraction of the
| population would be involved in agriculture, perhaps as much as
| 10X as are currently employed.
|
| In the cited example in the article, apparently one worker has
| managed 7 hectares using a closed-system model, if we take
| 'single-handedly' at face value. In contrast, according to
| wikipedia, in the USA on average one worker can manage 100
| hectares (1 square km) with industrial methods (lots of water and
| fertilizer wastage).
|
| This would be a pretty radical social restructuring, probably not
| what most people have in mind when they talk about
| 'postindustrial society'.
| floren wrote:
| I think about farming a lot these days, especially when I'm
| reading about startups on HN.
|
| Our culture has spent decades putting down agriculture as the
| lowest work, worse than waiting tables or running a cash
| register. Hell, I grew up on a farm and I still looked down on
| it.
|
| When I compare it to building CRUD apps because a VC wants
| another unicorn, though, it seems pretty attractive. The work
| is hard, but the results are tangible, and you're fulfilling
| the most basic human need. Which is more worthwhile: actually
| growing potatoes, or programming Farmville?
|
| I would _love_ a future in which a much bigger percentage of
| the American population lived in clusters of small farms,
| growing food to feed themselves and to send to market. A
| community of 10-acre plots (why 10 acres? see
| https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48753), with a co-op
| organization that gathers up people's produce and hauls it to
| the nearest city for sale.
|
| > where basically everything is recycled - nutrients, water,
| biomass (except what goes onto people's tables)
|
| The parenthetical is an interesting problem... the current
| agricultural system seems to be a machine for pulling nutrients
| out of the soil, shipping them to cities, and then flushing
| them out to sea. Then we attack farmers for putting fertilizer
| into the soil.
| mattwest wrote:
| On the upside, new farming techniques may provide higher-
| skill and comfortable jobs in the field. Vertical farming
| will offer a ton of comfortable jobs (in the AC as opposed to
| outside in the sun). There will also be more expertise
| required in the ag industry moving forward, meaning higher-
| paying jobs.
|
| The downside is that food will, and probably should cost
| more. Our percentage of income spent on food is incredibly
| low and many don't realize how lucky that is. But a more
| sustainable system will likely mean more expensive food. That
| will be a tough pill to swallow.
| carapace wrote:
| > However, the increase in labor needed shouldn't be
| underestimated. Some automation is likely possible with
| advanced robots, but this would mean a much larger fraction of
| the population would be involved in agriculture, perhaps as
| much as 10X as are currently employed.
|
| I don't think it would be so radical. For one thing, only about
| 1% of us work in agriculture now, so even if it takes 10x
| that's still only 10%.
| black_knight wrote:
| You mean... "This will create a lot of new jobs - hooray!"
| seanwilson wrote:
| > We face what could be the greatest predicament humankind has
| ever encountered: feeding the world without devouring the planet.
| Already, farming is the world's greatest cause of habitat
| destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife
| and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It's
| responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that's happened
| this century. Of 28,000 species known to be at imminent risk of
| extinction, 24,000 are threatened by farming. Only 29% of the
| weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is
| poultry. Just 4% of the world's mammals, by weight, are wild;
| humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%.
|
| > ... While 1% of the world's land is used for buildings and
| infrastructure, crops occupy 12% and grazing, the most extensive
| kind of farming, uses 28%. Only 15% of land, by contrast, is
| protected for nature. Yet the meat and milk from animals that
| rely solely on grazing provide just 1% of the world's protein.
|
| It's unreal when framing this as the "greatest predicament
| humankind has ever encountered" and all the stats pointing to
| intensive animal agriculture as the obvious problem that "eat
| less meat" isn't entertained as a serious option. We're literally
| growing food to feed to animals that we bred ourselves, while
| losing ~90% of the calories in the process instead of eating
| crops directly when meat isn't required to be healthy. I don't
| share the high hopes people have with things like lab grown meat
| either as we've been waiting for years for it to arrive at scale
| and affordable, and it's not going to replace all the cuts of
| meat people want.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets "If everyone shifted to
| a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for
| agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use
| would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing
| and a smaller need for land to grow crops."
| Melatonic wrote:
| Fungi in general are amazing - it blows me away that in western
| culture we place such little emphasis on their consumption.
| There are three kingdoms (for the most part) that we can choose
| to consume - Plants, Animals, Fungi. And yet we just almost
| ignore the third one for what reason again?
|
| Many mushrooms are also a great meat alternative and have tons
| of health benefits not found elsewhere and can be great for the
| environment. They are, for the most part, less concentrated in
| protein than animals but still much higher than most plants.
| meetups323 wrote:
| Some meat substitutes use fungus. IMO they tend to produce
| the best chicken substitutes, for instance:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| > They are, for the most part, less concentrated in protein
| than animals but still much higher than most plants.
|
| According to Wikipedia, mushrooms generally have less than 5%
| protein. Almost every plant food I checked was higher,
| including wheat (15%), corn (10%), rice (8%), and potatoes
| (9%). (from United States Department of Agriculture).
|
| Protein rich plants like lentils, soybeans, and nuts are
| upwards of 30%.
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| > "eat less meat" isn't entertained as a serious option
|
| It's simply baffling that this always gets brought up without
| stating the obvious fact that many people love to eat meat, and
| have no obligation to put up with the boring diet these
| policies would impose on them.
|
| And I think this is yet another reason that the naive
| libertarian attitude of "I just wanna grill" (which I am also
| guilty of subscribing to until a few years ago) is a recipe for
| disaster. If we don't actively stand against these policies,
| soon the only thing you can grill would be veggies.
|
| Some think this is unlikely to happen. But the paper straws
| debacle tells us that a vocal minority can impose these things
| on others. And remember that Japan was vegetarian for centuries
| before the Great Emperor Meiji liberated them from the ideology
| [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-meat-ban
| ehejdud wrote:
| I find your opinion on it baffling as well. The obvious fact
| is that is a selfish attitude. Do what you want, but that is
| a fact.
|
| I don't think the animals feel very liberated either if you
| consider other life forms.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| You can love to eat meat, but still eat less of it. Many
| Americans are eating meat for literally every meal of the
| day, 7 days a week. That's complete overkill and one may even
| get more enjoyment out of meat by cutting back slightly on
| consumption. And I'm not sure where you get that "eat less
| meat" would be imposed on people, as opposed to individuals
| just choosing to eat less meat(like I have).
|
| The "I need to eat meat every meal" crowd reminds me of a
| morbidly-obese person saying "I just like food more than you
| do". Maybe in limited circumstances it is true, but for the
| most part it seems more like a pathological dependence rather
| than harmless desire.
| smileysteve wrote:
| The no true Scotsman of grilling meat as a libertarian (to
| not be impacting other's freedoms)
|
| 1. You raise the cow (on a non corn diet that you grow)
|
| 2. You harvest the methane from the cow (crop waste, maybe
| even your own waste)
|
| 3. You use the harvested methane from crop, cow, and self
| waste to grill
|
| Otherwise, you're not accounting for your externalities
| (unless you pay for the same)
|
| 4. You replenish the soil to repeat
| QuikAccount wrote:
| > We're literally growing food to feed to animals that we bred
| ourselves, while losing ~90% of the calories in the process
| instead of eating crops directly when meat isn't required to be
| healthy.
|
| Most animal feed is the byproduct of things we are not
| eating[1]. This same study also address the land use concern.
| Most of it is not fit to grow crops with. I agree that people
| should reduce meat consumption but I find the general framing
| around this topic to be dishonest.
|
| [1]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...
| [deleted]
| seanwilson wrote:
| How does this contradict the 75% land reduction link where
| they take into account land used for animal crops? They cite
| this study too so they're aware of it and cover that "Less
| than half - only 48% - of the world's cereals are eaten by
| humans. 41% is used for animal feed, and 11% for biofuels".
| jvvw wrote:
| Read the book Teaming with Microbes by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne
| Lewis, about soil, recently - very interesting.
| calebm wrote:
| > "meat and milk from animals that rely solely on grazing provide
| just 1% of the world's protein."
|
| Love the article, but this seems like a straw man. Meat and milk
| much more than protein. And it's difficult to replace things like
| butter without sacrificing health - look at margarine.
| ehejdud wrote:
| Yet Italian food doesn't use any and still extremely popular...
| perth wrote:
| Who is Sandy Loam? Who smudged the dirt docs?
| bmitc wrote:
| This is a great article. I forgot where I read it, but someone
| basically said that we need to stop treating soil as just dirt.
|
| I have found out through my research that replacing invasive
| species and lawns with native plants and also composting organic
| waste, leaves, and twigs and returning that to your lawn are two
| of the best things a single person or group of persons can do to
| thwart climate change. Organic material decomposing in landfills
| generates methane, which is 26 times more potent than carbon
| dioxide in terms of its greenhouse effects. Composting organic
| material generates much, much less methane, and you can use it to
| return sustenance back to your soil. Instead of taking twigs and
| leaves and removing it from your property, you can compost them
| as well and return it back to the soil or also just leave the
| leaves in some cases. Planting native plants is a big win all
| around, from soil conditions, to using less or no water or
| fertilizer, to improving wildlife and pollinator conditions.
| Additionally, replacing lawns, which should be viewed as
| wastelands and green deserts, with plants greatly increases
| carbon capture. These are things that nearly everyone can do
| literally right now. I've tried finding research, and my current
| knowledge is that composting could save as much as 8-10% of
| global emissions and restoring areas with native plants could
| save as much as 20-30% of global emissions.
|
| A few specific references that I have been using are _Nature 's
| Best Hope_ by Douglas Tallamy, as well as his other books, and
| the Monarch Gardens project (https://www.monarchgard.com/) by
| Benjamin Vogt.
|
| It blows my mind that people keep looking for technocratic
| solutions when we have solutions right in front of us that could
| be done right now. Take a look around next time you're driving
| around and just note all the lawn spaces sitting there and doing
| literally nothing. They could be replaced with native plants with
| zero negative impact, and it would do wonders for the local
| ecosystem.
| hosh wrote:
| Every year, landsats measuring soil temperature shows a spike
| in temperature at around spring planting. And this is because
| commercial agriculture kills off the soil in order to plant a
| single crop, maximized on yield. And every year, the soil
| fertility gets worse, because the ecology of fungi and microbes
| are not established or accumulating in the soil. It's just
| planting on dirt.
|
| It's not just nutrients. Living soil retains water, and
| regulates the release of water That has an impact on the
| microclimate.
|
| Going one step further, planting _edible_ native plants yields
| useful resources for humans, and helps decentralize food
| production systems. Add onsite composting and greywater.
| hetspookjee wrote:
| I read a while back a comment that put it really aptly:
| modern day agriculture is hydroponics with the exhausted
| ground being the substrate.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| How to find out which plants are native to which region?
| mattwest wrote:
| If you are in the US, most state universities will have an
| extension program that guides native plant selection. There
| are also quite a few regional native plant societies, many of
| which will even send free seeds.
| hetspookjee wrote:
| I struggle to find the answer too. I want to plant
| exclusively plants in my garden that are native to my region
| and find other properties. These sources do provide some
| information but none of them are really pleasant or on par
| with quality.
|
| - garden.org - https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/home -
| http://eol.org # This shows some nice graphs of what pest
| might ward of other invaders but its quite the challenge to
| find it. For illustration on what I mean with the graph,
| here's a good example: https://eol.org/pages/45515235
|
| I am dreaming of having the time and budget to expand on this
| website of EOL and develop an open source farm where non-tech
| users can contribute through tools like iNaturalist and
| collectively create the graph of life. In such a way that we
| can formulate the world as a LP problem where we maximize for
| bio-diversity with respect to the surroundings. Imagine being
| able to insert any terrain, be it France or Somalia, and have
| a recommended plantplan over time be delivered. I think it's
| a matter of time till we're there.
| bmitc wrote:
| I am honestly thinking about working actively on this
| problem. Right now, the information is spread out across
| several websites and databases. The best way that I have
| discovered is to find local to your state organizations
| that serve as stewards for native plants. At least in my
| state, there are at least three, and these places are
| normally non-profit organizations that also sell the native
| plants which are also grown in your state, making them a
| great choice. We just got our house last year and a yard to
| go with it, and it's my plan this year to go along with
| these local organizations to purchase all my native plants.
| I use the app Picture This to identify plants that are
| currently in my yard to know which ones I want to remove
| and replace with native plants. The app will often tell you
| where the plant is native to, and if not, I research it
| online.
| mcbishop wrote:
| There are native plant nurseries.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| What's the difference between composting in the yard and
| composting in a landfill?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| If you do it wrong - nothing. As others have responded
| though, oxygen is the difference, and that is why you need to
| "turn" your compost every couple of days. If you don't, it
| will start to get very stinky - if you're doing aerobic
| composting shouldn't really have a smell, maybe something
| slightly earthy but that is it.
| janj wrote:
| I've been composing for years without turning and without
| the stinky issue. My compost is connected to the chicken
| coop, they always have full access to the compost, maybe
| that has something to do with it. All year I add
| everything, yard and kitchen waste, without turning. I stop
| adding beginning of spring, towards end of spring I dig it
| out for the garden. Easiest method of composting I've come
| up with, no fuss, great soil. Just wanted to put out there
| there's an easier way to compost.
| carapace wrote:
| In a word, oxygen.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_organism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_organism
|
| - - - -
|
| "Compost" and "composting" is a fairly specific kind of
| process, it's just not correct to call what happens in a
| landfill "composting" (or contrast with a _midden_ which is
| just a pile of kitchen refuse, and also not "composting".)
|
| The key difference in composting (as contrasted with just
| piling up waste material) is the specific formation of a kind
| of ecosystem within the pile. A healthy compost pile produces
| it's own heat. It's a concentrated and accelerated form of
| the natural processes that happen in healthy soil, and in
| many ways it really is a kind of organism.
|
| (The dividing line between organism and ecosystem is not
| sharp. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_mat
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war#Coloni... and so on... )
|
| Anyway, in a landfill you get your pockets of mostly organic
| biomass, and decomposition happens, but it tends to be
| anaerobic (which generally is less healthy from the POV of
| human metabolism) and the results don't get integrated back
| into ecosystems rapidly (isolation is not complete, so they
| ooze back into the water table but they are almost always
| accompanied by toxic chemical wastes, so it doesn't really
| help.)
| bwestergard wrote:
| Composting in the yard, if done correctly, is aerobic. In a
| landfill it will be anaerobic, generating more methane.
| soheil wrote:
| > Without a radical change in the way we eat, by 2050 the world
| will need to grow around 50% more grain.
|
| Is that the only way? What if we grow grains that need 50% less
| water? This article is mind numbingly preachy and ignores that
| technology can and always has been at the forefront of human
| progress. Yes, if we wake up one day in 30 years and find that we
| have made 0 technological progress then we will need 50% more
| grain.
| Melatonic wrote:
| In my opinion what we really need (if we are going to continue
| to live a lifestyle at all similar to what we have now) are big
| investments in new farming methods that allow food to be grown
| next to where people live. If you want to live in a big city
| now (which potentially can have big environmental benefits with
| multiunit housing and whatnot) your food probably comes from
| far away. Imagine if the highrise next to you instead grew tons
| of fresh vegetables, mushrooms, and other food and you could
| buy it direct from the "farm" at a store at the base? Nothing
| would be wasted in shipping - it would be as fresh as possible
| - prices could be low - and convenient as hell. I don't see any
| reason why we could not (with better understanding of soil)
| have complex systems of fungi and dirt in such a system as
| well.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| would the farm next door also be farming beef & chicken?
| soheil wrote:
| > I don't see any reason why we could not
|
| Because of pollution from the city getting into the food and
| also as importantly the pollution from farming back into the
| environment.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's a ridiculous article that proposes we use poor countries
| to cultivate fermented gruel for fats and protein and then rely
| on a radical farming method that struggles to replicate
| anywhere outside the handsome farmers small plot of land.
|
| If you were to ask experts 50 years ago if you'd be able to
| feed todays population with their methods they'd say no. But we
| engineered methods to not only do this but annihilate global
| starvation. All without having to eat fermented gruel.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Modern farming results in a lot of rainfall runoff. Healthy
| soil infiltrates and absorbs rainfall. The water then slowly
| makes its way to waterways and aquafers. We can use far less
| water by having healthy soil.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rbSWey0pOg
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| It's not the only way. We could keep eating grain but stop the
| multiplication of humans on the planet.
|
| But technology won't solve the problem that if human eating
| habits stay on the current trajectory, they will eat 50% more
| grain.
|
| I get it that this is not what you meant. But the progress of
| technology, while you can rely on it getting somewhere, is
| unpredictable. It'd be foolish to count on it without
| considering contingencies in case it doesn't deliver.
| soheil wrote:
| I know it's good to always hedge against risk. But to hedge
| against technological progress is shorting humanity as a
| whole and is a dark place to go. Arguments of type "let's
| reduce population" nonetheless stem from that line of
| thinking as you eluded to.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I don't see how hedging about development of a particular
| technology is a bad thing. We have expected CPUs to get
| faster, but it didn't get there. Some people were
| presumably hedging against it, and now we've routed around
| this with multi-core computers.
|
| People might have expected flying cars, yet they didn't
| come to be. Instead, quick communication has been solved by
| the Internet.
|
| The world has many ideas, and they can be explored
| simultaneously, but we also must face the possibility of
| failure in case we paint ourselves into a corner, like we
| just did with the global warming. I find broad exploration
| rather optimistic compared to being single-minded about
| something happening in the future.
| vixen99 wrote:
| _Stop the multiplication of humans_ sounds authoritarian. Is
| that how you meant it? A recent experiment along those lines
| didn 't go so well.
| https://www.npr.org/2021/06/21/1008656293/the-legacy-of-
| the-...
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I didn't mean this as authoritarian, I meant is as the only
| alternative answer to the question as it was asked.
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