141–150 of 278 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"We've got 100 years left before we have to worry about this!"
100 years from now
"We've got 50 years left before we have to worry about this!"
145 years from now
"This is a crisis, if only we had 150 years to work on this maybe we could get somewhere, but as it is..."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
it's a wonderful feel-good movie (i loved it), but i'm not sure whether this is actually a sustainable farming solution. afaik they make the farm profitable tourism, i.e. the guided tours, which wouldn't scale.
It's a shame we don't have satellite imagery dating back to when Europeans first arrived on the continent. I suspect the whole western US was once far more lush and green than it is today. The central valley in California, for example, used to have several natural lakes. Who knows how much impact the damming the Colorado river has on the ecology of the southwestern deserts. I can't imagine that concentrating water in…
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self sustaining societies will always be out competed and subsumed by extractive ones.
Extractive ones will always burn out in the long run as they will run out of resources to extract. They either learn to live in the waste they've produced, i.e. they become recyclers , or they simply die off. It's a question of how much collateral damage they do over their lifetime. No matter how bad they screw up, in the very long run, Earth has a tendency to figure out how to recycle the raw materials. After all, E…
Whether humanity will suffer a catastrophe of our own making is another question.