Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 278 posts

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

#101

Post by FooHentai »

debacle wrote: post #23
FredPret wrote: post #5

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.

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.

I don't believe that's accurate. The main issue or limitation of hydroponics/aquaponics is that many types of vegetables cannot be grown via the method. It's suited to leafy greens and not, for example, root vegetables.

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

#102

Post by CuriouslyC »

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 gets eroded by wind and water, with the end result being at the bottom of oceans and lakes.

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

#103

Post by failrate »

ljm wrote: post #59
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.

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…

The settlers had every opportunity to learn local farming practices from the Native Americans.

Instead, they did everything in their power to force their farming practices onto the land where they occupied.

Native Americans farmed. They farmed different crops that were actually suited to the local biome.

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

#104

Post by FredPret »

FooHentai wrote: post #101
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.

I don't believe that's accurate. The main issue or limitation of hydroponics/aquaponics is that many types of vegetables cannot be grown via the method. It's suited to leafy greens and not, for example, root vegetables.

I googled "hydroponic potatoes" and I kid you not, the first words in the results were "Potatoes are one of the easiest crops to grow with a hydroponics system".

I've also had grown and eaten hydroponic potatoes myself and they were great.

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

#105

Post by drawkbox »

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…

Agriculture also reduces the root depth as crops are harvested fast and regular iterations. This was a large cause of the Dust Bowl issue. There was a great post on this on reddit that has photo for reference. [1][2][3]

Cover crops help this now to prevent Dust Bowl like conditions and bad soil where possible [4].

Side note: Most carbon capture also happens in the root of wild grasses and plants. It isn't just agriculture but all our landscaping types that prevent root depth. We need more trees, and more wild growing but we cull it all back for the Stepford style perfect landscaping. HOAs in Arizona for instance hate wild grass and wild flowers, but they capture more carbon and can look amazing. Planting trees and plants that are more natural with deeper roots can help climate change and help the Gray-Green divide that highlights inequality on the amount of green in urban areas [5].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/mdocyn/c...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/microgrowery/comments/mdyb3h/compar...

[3] https://preview.redd.it/sp1n9tf6hdp61.jpg?width=509&auto=web...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/business/cover-crops-a-fa...

[5] https://www.geographyrealm.com/gray-green-urban-divide-wealt...

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

#106

Post by CuriouslyC »

99_00 wrote: post #68

Right now there is no financial incentive to preserve topsoil. In the future there will be. 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?

Topsoil takes a long time to build up. If you wait until it's an emergency to start trying to change farming practices, it'll take 10 years for farming practices to change, then another 10 years to build topsoil, and a lot of people will starve.

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

#107

Post by smegger001 »

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.

is it bad of me that I want this to happen to end the madness. I can just imagine Iowa trying to sue another state for doing this.

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

#108

Post by meowkit »

99_00 wrote: post #68

Right now there is no financial incentive to preserve topsoil. In the future there will be. 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?

Same problem with climate change.

1) You assume technology will be better. There is no guarantee that this will be true.

2) Externalities like mass migration or civil unrest that could occur from food shortages would mean we don’t have a chance in the future to tackle the problem effectively.

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

#109

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

#110

Post by 99_00 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #106
99_00 wrote: post #68

Right now there is no financial incentive to preserve topsoil. In the future there will be. 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?

Topsoil takes a long time to build up. If you wait until it's an emergency to start trying to change farming practices, it'll take 10 years for farming practices to change, then another 10 years to build topsoil, and a lot of people will starve.

>“In 150 years or so, we’ve lost over half of that rich topsoil—if not all in some places.”

If the timescale of the solution is decades we are good, because the time scale of the problem is centuries.

Post reply on HN