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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

#71

Post by analog31 »

corty wrote: post #12
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.

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.

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?

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

#72

Post by stolenmerch »

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…

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.

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by gumby »

dcolkitt wrote: post #46
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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

#75

Post by gwright »

dcolkitt wrote: post #46
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#76

Post by jcranmer »

leecb wrote: post #51
mycologos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This is basically what happened in 2008.

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

#77

Post by redisman »

markdown wrote: post #65
makerofspoons wrote: post #3

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-...

Where does the topsoil go? Doesn't it, by definition, just become topsoil somewhere else?

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.

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

#78

Post by stakkur »

virtuallynathan wrote: post #66
stakkur wrote: post #38

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.

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.

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).

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

#79

Post by hinkley »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #21

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...

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.

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

#80

Post by gwright »

consensusform wrote: post #62
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…

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.…

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.
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