61–70 of 278 posts
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.
Good news! we're orbiting the sun now, well ahead of target date
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Wasn't the dust bowl caused by topsoil degradation? That seemed like a very substantial crises for wide swaths of the country's population.
(which didn't disconnect productivity from soil condition, but it loosened the relationship)
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-...
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.
Lot of corn and soybean oil produced, animals get whats left, generally.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
It's as if humanity is squeezing the planet like a lemon for every last drop. There's not much left...