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The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#41

Post by wnevets »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #29
nuisance-bear wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we shouldn't burn ethanol in cars. Maybe we shouldn't load up every food product with corn syrup.

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 e…

> Corn in the US is heavily subsidized.

So is oil. So farming corn is actually subsidized at-least twice!

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#42

Post by sjg007 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #30
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

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.

Big corn. Amazing plants have enslaved us.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#43

Post by failrate »

Spooky23 wrote: post #4
gumby wrote: post #2

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.

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…

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.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#44

Post by faemir »

debacle wrote: post #23
FredPret wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

As someone in the industry, this is absolute rubbish and misinformation.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#45

Post by monkeybutton »

Spooky23 wrote: post #4
gumby wrote: post #2

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.

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…

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.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#46

Post by dcolkitt »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #26
nradov wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much of the water that Israel’s farms consume, depends on desalination? So, if it really long-term sustainable?

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.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#47

Post by dijit »

failrate wrote: post #43
Spooky23 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#48

Post by mycologos »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #29
nuisance-bear wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we shouldn't burn ethanol in cars. Maybe we shouldn't load up every food product with corn syrup.

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 e…

> 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?

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#49

Post by haram_masala »

debacle wrote: post #23
FredPret wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Lab-grown meat will taste exactly the way consumers expect meat to taste, for the same reason orange juice does.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#50

Post by klyrs »

FredPret wrote: post #39
debacle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

It can go either way, depending on how much fertilizer you use. Farms that cheap out will have an inferior product.
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