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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

#91

Post by fiftyfifty »

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…

It would probably be worth contacting someone at the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which is part of the USDA. It was literally created as a response to the soil lost during the dustbowl and was originally called the "Soil Conservation Service". They may already have studies that cover exactly what you are asking about:

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/abou...

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

#92

Post by hinkley »

okareaman wrote: post #8

I guess we'll have to replace it "Artificial soil: quick and dirty" https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526161-700-artifici...

Requires a subscription.

'Replace it' is a little imprecise here, allowing for substitutes. I'm sure some people are trying to make substitutes but we know a lot more about how soil becomes these days and we're able, to an extent, to create it by introducing food to the right food chains.

Unfortunately for perennial crops, you have to build that food chain up orders of magnitude more than you do just for annual plants. At the same time the carbon content and resiliency are much much better.

Elaine Ingham is worth some time in a search engine.

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

#93

Post by aaron695 »

Luck the environmental lobbyist have got the suckers into only caring about CO2 levels, and not harming the planet.

That said, if this reduces productivity that would mean more forests to cut down but I'd need to see a more full report on what is happening.

Loss in land value and productivity should also be happening to back this up. The entire region will not suddenly become useless at once.

And if there's anyone left who cares about the environment not CO2, helping quantify this at land sale level would help push some market forces.

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

#94

Post by Veserv »

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?

Desalination is sufficiently cheap to not be a material problem for US consumers (or other developed countries). State-of-the-art desalination plants in Israel are fulfilling contracts at ~$0.40/m^3 [1] and the per-capita water usage in the US is ~1200 m^3/yr [2]. Even if we assumed that the current price of water is $0, this would only amount to a $480/yr increase in expenditure per American which would constitute a one-time 1.4% increase of yearly expenditure for the median American. Note that this accounts for all agricultural production in the US; if we consider just water for domestic use such as drinking, bathing, and watering the lawn the average person only uses ~100 m^3/yr [3] which is ~$40/yr which is within reach of every household. This also assumes that increased water prices will not result in changes to water usage which is very doable as the US uses ~3-4x as much water per capita as other peer countries such as France and Germany and 10x the water of Israel which already needed to adjust to a regime of desalination water prices.

All in all, considered merely in economic terms, desalination is a perfectly viable solution to the water crisis in developed countries and would incur at most a relatively minor economic impact by this analysis. Note that this does not necessarily apply to developing countries where a $40/yr expenditure increase could be catastrophic. I am also not making any statement about non-economic considerations such as possible effects on the environment that may occur as a result of the need for increased power generation for mass desalination.

[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/05/27/203950...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263156/water-consumption...

[3] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts

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

#95

Post by tastyfreeze »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #10

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.

> The soil is basically a growing medium.

This is absolutely false and is the idea that got us to where we are today with heavy tillage, fertilizer application and biocide application. Those practices are demonstrably destroying our environment and are wholly unnecessary.

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

#96

Post by haberman »

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.

Why does desalination produce brackish water (this is a new term to me)? From context I expected "brackish water" to mean water that is saltier than seawater. But when I look it up, it's apparently water with salinity between fresh water and seawater.

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

#97

Post by jagger27 »

sjg007 wrote: post #42
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s a brilliant chapter in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind about how as we domesticated wheat, it domesticated humans in return. Grains are thought to have been dropped along trade routes which allowed for humans to be less nomadic as crops became established. Then we got comfortable. Fascinating to think about.

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

#98

Post by retzkek »

fzzzy wrote: post #83
CountSessine wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

#99

Post by CuriouslyC »

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.

If you don't have topsoil you don't have water retention and you don't have organisms and structure that avoids the need to till for aeration and mineral movement. That means the garbage soil we're left with must be watered from aquifers when it's not constantly raining, and we must till the soil then work in fertilizers, which wastes gas and time.

The path you say has "no cause for panic" is a path to cyclical famine in 50-100 years.

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

#100

Post by failrate »

dijit wrote: post #47
failrate wrote: post #43

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.

Can you explain all of the people who were living and farming here prior to the European invasion?

The land in the US is fertile. The prairies were incredibly fertile.

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