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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

#51

Post by leecb »

mycologos wrote: post #48
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…

> 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?

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?

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

#52

Post by CountSessine »

snarf21 wrote: post #19
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.

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.

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)

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

#53

Post by mberning »

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.

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

#54

Post by maxerickson »

mycologos wrote: post #48
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…

> 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?

They can't stop other states from competing to be first.

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

#55

Post by tastyfreeze »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #22

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…

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.

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

#56

Post by CountSessine »

mycologos wrote: post #48
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…

> 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?

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.

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

#57

Post by hinkley »

selimthegrim wrote: post #11
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.

Sarah Taber covers this very well on her Twitter (even though she has a particular anti-dairy ax to grind)

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.

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

#58

Post by titzer »

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.

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.

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

#59

Post by ljm »

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.

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

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

#60

Post by hinkley »

haram_masala wrote: post #49
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.

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

[1] because we will engineer the process to a terrifying degree.
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