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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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

titzer wrote: post #58
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 tra…

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by tharkun__ »

titzer wrote: post #58
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 tra…

I'm not sure how much this actually scales and makes enough money but it sure is an awesome tale (saw the movie on Netflix - https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829):

https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/

Your dad might love it, even if just for the nostalgia.

That said, I think some of the lessons in there are awesome. Both the ones about biodiversity but also perseverance in the light of 'disaster' striking and staying strong and going on with the biodiversity path instead of just resigning and saying "yep, alright, Big Farmer is right, this doesn't work".

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

#83

Post by fzzzy »

CountSessine wrote: post #56
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?

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.

Infinite corecursion!

[edit] apparently corecursion isn't the correct term for when two functions call each other recursively? I thought there was a term for it

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

#84

Post by titzer »

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.

I think you're being ungenerous to settlers from Europe; my ancestors were some of them. Soil conditions varied a lot! In Indiana, where my ancestors settled, there was largely forest, and great soil for farming, but the plains weren't that way. But regardless, yes, humans have very radically changed not only the soil ecology, but the entire ecology of North America over our entire time. But it's really picked up in the last 50 years. We're way past sustainability now.

The practices of 100 or 200 years ago were much more sustainable than what we have now. They had no pesticides or fertilizers, and they couldn't till the soil so thoroughly. Farms were smaller and the increased biodiversity of "pests" was actually better for the soils, if not for yields.

What has really tipped the balance is the "amazing" 4x crop yield increase over the last century. It came at the expense of literally every other living thing associated with the land: pests, grasses, trees, animals, birds, you name it. And it required juicing everything up on steroids, genetically modifying and breeding different crop varieties, and carpet-bombing an entire phylum of life with chemical warfare.

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

#85

Post by supernovae »

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?

It doesn't have to go anywhere, it can just "die" - lose its ability to hold water, nutrients, fungus, microbes - everything necessary for it to be beneficial to plants.

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

#86

Post by CountSessine »

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'm kind of puzzled by this. Your post defies conventional wisdom (which you say is misleading). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because conventional wisdom is often misleading. But these links seem to indicate that in fact corn farmers ARE directly subsidized, both in terms of crop insurance (cheaper than market insurance is clearly a subsidy), as well as price protection. See that second link, especially ARC and PLC, which compensates farmers if their prices fall below benchmark rates set by Congress.

Is that not a direct subsidy? Are they wrong? (genuinely curious - your post is interesting enough that I felt I had to do some research to clarify my own thinking)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/examining-americas-farm-subs...

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

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

#87

Post by hangonhn »

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.

There's nothing bucolic about farming -- ever. Both my wife and I come from farming families. I lost a great grandfather who effectively worked himself to death in his early 30s and my wife had a great grandfather who died from being attacked by a bull. Farming has always been very hard work. I have friends in tech who grew up in farming families and they are the few people in tech who can easily get up early in the morning because that's also a part of farming life -- get up before the sun is even up.

I don't know where the romanticized idea of farming life came from because it was never that great. Historically, it was just a way to provide food for your family and maybe make a profit on the side if you're lucky.

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

#88

Post by tastyfreeze »

CountSessine wrote: post #52
snarf21 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

All the minerals needed for plant life are available in the sand, silt, and clay in soil. Soil life is the key to breaking down aggregate minerals into plant usable nutrients. In healthy soil fertilizing is not necessary.

It is hard to talk about soil life without sounding like a kook to most people. But, our practices of using synthetic fertilizers and spraying fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides are literally killing the soil's capacity to feed plants.

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

#89

Post by nradov »

gumby wrote: post #74
dcolkitt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most desalination plants do just inject saline water back into the ocean. There's no where else to put it. In most cases the outflow pipe runs some distance offshore into deeper water to reduce the environmental impact.

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

#90

Post by philipkglass »

analog31 wrote: post #71
corty wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Haber-Bosch reaction is what turns atmospheric dinitrogen (N2) into ammonia. Ammonia can be oxidized to make nitric acid and nitrate fertilizers, combined with carbon dioxide to make urea, or used as-is for fertilizer. The inputs to the Haber-Bosch reaction are hydrogen and nitrogen gases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

The nitrogen is easily separated from air. The hydrogen is the energetically expensive input. Most hydrogen is presently made by steam reforming fossil fuels. Hydrogen can also be produced from water and electricity via electrolysis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water

In the 20th century, surplus hydroelectric power from dams was used to electrolyze water for making ammonia. More direct demand for electricity and cheaper processes for making hydrogen from fossil fuels gradually eliminated it. Now people are planning to bring back large scale electrolytic hydrogen for fossil-free hydrogen from renewables:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/canada-is-set-to-have-one-th...

https://www.chemengonline.com/uniper-unveils-plans-for-germa...

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