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

221–230 of 278 posts

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

#221

Post by jws »

hourislate wrote: post #169

Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil. Don't know if it's true but someone once told me nothing will grow in a corn field for 5 years afterwards unless it is roundup ready. There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... *Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years* We are f...ed the…

The recommendation is to wait one to three days after applying glyphosate to plant grass, herbs, or fruit. It mostly depends on what else is in the herbicide.

You might wait a week for the previous plants to really die before cutting them off.

When replacing areas of random noxious weeds with grain I wait three days after the glyphosate and have no problems with my regular old, low tech oats or barley.

(I do grain because it gets tall kind of fast and helps choke out the next batch of weed seeds waiting to sprout, the birds like it, and it’s pretty when it gets dry and wavy.)

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

#222

Post by tastyfreeze »

fy20 wrote: post #205

I was watching a video about regenerative agriculture the other day (I can't remember which one) and one of its claims was that food isn't as nutritious as it used to be because of current farming practices. The theory was that when farmers fertilize crops the fertilizer only has common nutrients like nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, but like us plants need a wide variety of nutrients, and those don't exist in the…

Yes it is true. But, its not that the nutrients dont exist. It is that there is no life in the soil to make them available to plants.

https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/blog/nutrie...

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

#223

Post by tastyfreeze »

hourislate wrote: post #169

Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil. Don't know if it's true but someone once told me nothing will grow in a corn field for 5 years afterwards unless it is roundup ready. There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... *Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years* We are f...ed the…

Three centimeters in a thousand years is without any management. All soil is built through the process of succession. We can drastically speed up that process with regenerative ag practices.

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

#224

Post by selimthegrim »

nobrains wrote: post #115

I think everyone needs to learn from the ancient wisdom on the Punjab province in India and Pakistan. Open Google earth and zoom into Punjab. It is the greenest agriculture zone in the entire world. Just look at it yourself. Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive for…

Indian Punjab has used tube wells and free/low cost electricity to drain and deplete its aquifers far more efficiently than Pakistani Punjab (which has its own problems with waterlogging, salinity, maintenance of British canal system and lack of catchment for rain and floodwaters). Kalabagh Dam will probably get built the fifth of never if Sindh has any say about it.

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

#225

Post by tastyfreeze »

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?

Where everything eventually ends up. In the ocean!

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

#226

Post by inter_netuser »

julianlam wrote: post #121
nobrains wrote: post #115

I think everyone needs to learn from the ancient wisdom on the Punjab province in India and Pakistan. Open Google earth and zoom into Punjab. It is the greenest agriculture zone in the entire world. Just look at it yourself. Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive for…

You seem to think that GMOs mean scientists are injecting mutant genes into corn and wheat in order to increase yield. This is wrong. GMO means the crop itself has been selectively bred over time to increase desirable qualities, yield being one of them. Taste, perhaps another. Are you afraid of GMO foods? Perhaps you should avoid orange carrots, and sweet corn, then.

A genetically modified organism (GMO) is any organism whose genetic material has been altered using *genetic engineering* techniques.

Selective breeding is something else. It is very difficult to somehow selectively breed a marine mollusk gene into a carrot.

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

#227

Post by durovo »

nobrains wrote: post #115

I think everyone needs to learn from the ancient wisdom on the Punjab province in India and Pakistan. Open Google earth and zoom into Punjab. It is the greenest agriculture zone in the entire world. Just look at it yourself. Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive for…

Yes, the Punjab region is beautiful. But maybe you should read about it more: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/parched-punjab-20535 http://water.columbia.edu/research-themes/water-food-energy-... https://theprint.in/india/governance/save-punjab-from-desert... The region is not green because of the agricultural practices, it was always green and is now dying due to the destructive agriculture.

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

#228

Post by selimthegrim »

durovo wrote: post #227
nobrains wrote: post #115

I think everyone needs to learn from the ancient wisdom on the Punjab province in India and Pakistan. Open Google earth and zoom into Punjab. It is the greenest agriculture zone in the entire world. Just look at it yourself. Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive for…

Yes, the Punjab region is beautiful. But maybe you should read about it more: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/parched-punjab-20535 http://water.columbia.edu/research-themes/water-food-energy-... https://theprint.in/india/governance/save-punjab-from-desert... The region is not green because of the agricultural practices, it was always green and is now dying due to the destructive agriculture.

Thank you for the context.

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

#229

Post by tern »

carapace wrote: post #179

It doesn't have to be this way. E.g. "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A Regenerative agriculture is profitable (Brown makes money) and build soil volume and fertility year on year.

Case study of large-scale profitable regenerative agriculture in Brazil: https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/regenerative-or...

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

#230

Post by cdash »

javajosh wrote: post #158
_carbyau_ wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, mother earth is fine. Whether humanity will suffer a catastrophe of our own making is another question.

"Mother earth is fine." I think this ignores the human status as a thinking animal, and the glaringly obvious responsibility we collectively share for keeping our biosphere in good condition. That is, that we keep the remarkable diversity of life intact, and do not pointlessly throw the most unique and precious part of our universe in a chipper to make more particle board furniture. It is interesting that by incremen…

We don't have any "responsbility" to anyone or anything but our own desires.
Post reply on HN