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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

#241

Post by Melting_Harps »

failrate wrote: post #103
ljm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

But many didn't. and those that did were often captured and conquered by those that didn't. The Comanche were the best known ones, but their were others. [0] That omission alone is what allows for many people to romanticize the horrible warfare and slavery that took place amongst the native people's perpetual state of warfare.

Also, it's kind of hard to learn from a people who once exposed to European diseases were wiped out in absurd numbers long before the settlers and colonizers would actually arrive.

Colonialism happens in waves, and can span long periods; it's worth reminding that the the first wave were people not interested in establishing a homestead lifestyle and a family farm but abject conquest, for that required the more disenfranchised and honestly peasant/pleb classes to be able to get to the 'New World' much later.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nomadic_peoples#Americ...

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

#242

Post by corty »

markdown wrote: post #63
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.

Rapeseed oil isn't green energy. It's just more big-Ag.

With that attitude we can just go back to the caves. Big-anything is what makes our society and level of population work, without Big-Ag we couldn't feed everyone. Without Big-Trans we couldn't distribute the food. Without Big-Trade, you would have to inefficiently buy from 20 small shops selling one item each. Without Big-Industry, your kitchen implements would be a pot and a kettle above the fireplace.

Rapeseed oil maybe isn't a perfect solution. But whining about everything that makes headway just because it isn't perfect yet also holds us back.

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

#243

Post by corty »

analog31 wrote: post #212
philipkglass wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expe…

So the process can hypothetically run from renewable energy in the future, but the primary energy source and primary source of hydrogen are probably both methane right now.

Methane can be and sometimes is produced from biomass.

And there are a few plants in operation that produce without any fossil inputs, but most of them aren't switched over yet, mostly because green hydrogen production isn't at the necessary scale yet and will probably be used for steel making first.

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

#244

Post by Melting_Harps »

snarf21 wrote: post #19
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'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 soil, I'm worried about the water.

Then quite frankly,m you only understand half of the problem; water will always be an issue even in times of abundance, the fact that when California goes from drought to deluge conditions nothing has been done to try and build infrastructure to replenish the aquifers that have been drained for decades.

The best we get, for all the taxes and myopic city planning is black ping pong balls, and then diverting the water into the Pacific Ocean. In my entire lifetime I will never understand how infinitely stupid this state has been about water despite Central Valley being such a vital to not just the US' food supply chain, but also for a lot out the rest of the World.

Desalination was always thought to be untenable until the preiumus could justify it, but the truth is I forsee some very affluent communities in SoCal (Carlsbad) will be the biggest benefactors of a near monopoly for reliable water sources.

Worth noting is that many Pharma megacoprs are in Carlsbad and the greater San Diego area who have learned from Nestle's business model to water rights in the developing world.

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

#245

Post by corty »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #99
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.

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 famin…

The path to famine is exponential population growth. No need for agriculture to fail as well. We do have bigger fish to fry than worry about soil quality as long as it is still fixable with fertilizer.

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

#246

Post by dijit »

failrate wrote: post #100
dijit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The reason I brought it up was because most farms in Native American USA were largely unproductive, and even agriculturally heavy tribes had to supplement their farms with hunting in winter.

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

#247

Post by a9h74j »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #240
a9h74j wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modified meme caption: Yea, we destroyed the environment, but for a brief moment, we sure mined a lot of Bitcoin.

> Modified meme caption: Yea, we destroyed the environment, but for a brief moment, we sure mined a lot of Bitcoin. It's hysterical that Bitcoin is the punching bag, because when economies that are prone to hyper inflation give way, its BTC that is used in many of those same countries. Who also, resort back to subsistence or local Ag. And guess what, destroying your land is kind of antithetical to the whole farming t…

I agree that Bitcoin is too easy a punching bag, but "we found a lot of hashes with leading zeros" didn't have the same brevity to it.

I am open to wondering if CO2 emissions are also too easy a punching bag. Crops can go way nonlinear when lacking mined water, lacking fertilizer, and lacking soil/biomes etc. I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag.

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

#248

Post by belorn »

stakkur wrote: post #78
virtuallynathan wrote: post #66

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).

Are we talking about weight or by plant?

If a plant is 60% by-product is 40% human edible product, and we give all the by-product to animals and all the edible parts to humans, then 60% of the crop weight goes to the animals, while 100% of the crop goes to both animals and human.

As it is, there are four primary ways corn is used as feed.

1: Is to take the entire plant and chop it up and turn it to feed.

2: After harvesting the cobs for human consumption, the stalks, leaves, husks can be turned into feed.

3: The remaining stalks and left over cobs can be grazed on.

4: byproducts for ethanol or other refining processes can be turned into feed.

The only one which is an actually problem here is the first one where the human edible part get turned into animal feed. As I understand it is also the most expensive feed. The linked source does not seem to define how large percent of the yields are used in this way.

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

#249

Post by orlovs »

stakkur wrote: post #38

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.

Or ethanol. Same happens in part of Europe where I live. But in this case there is subsides rapseed being grown for additions to fosil fuel. Not forgeting to mention, that its being fertilized with petrochemical based fertilizers

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

#250

Post by tpxl »

vkou wrote: post #136
gumby wrote: post #74

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.

Actually, you can. It messes with very local ecology a bit, but is otherwise a drop in the ocean.

I love this comment :) Messing a bit with drops in the ocean is how we got here in the first place.

Aggressive farming messes with the environment a bit. There is just so much land, we can't possibly deplete all of it.

Did you see how much air we have? Yeah burning dirty stuff pollutes it, but then the wind blows and it's clean again.

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