The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by jon_richards » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

CountSessine wrote: post #86

consensusform wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This claim, often repeated, is misleading to the point of dishonesty. Corn isn't really subsidized, and iowa corn farmers are not the benefactors of the agricultural bills. Cattle producers and chemical corporations are subsidized, and the way they're subsidized is by a myriad set of policies which encourage grain prices to stay very low. This makes cattle feed cheap and corn and soy inputs to chemical plants cheap.…

I'm kind of puzzled by this. Your post defies conventional wisdom (which you say is misleading). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because conventional wisdom is often misleading. But these links seem to indicate that in fact corn farmers ARE directly subsidized, both in terms of crop insurance (cheaper than market insurance is clearly a subsidy), as well as price protection. See that second link, especially AR…

Subsidies have transitioned away from direct payments to subsidized insurance. The insurance isn’t just about natural disasters or crop loss, it guarantees minimum revenue based on farmed area, basically resulting in direct payments whenever prices are low. That has been successfully rebranded as “not a subsidy”.

https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn

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

#262

Post by javajosh » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

cdash wrote: post #230

javajosh wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The problem with psychological egoism is that it doesn't say anything.

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

#263

Post by consensusform » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

CountSessine wrote: post #86

consensusform wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This claim, often repeated, is misleading to the point of dishonesty. Corn isn't really subsidized, and iowa corn farmers are not the benefactors of the agricultural bills. Cattle producers and chemical corporations are subsidized, and the way they're subsidized is by a myriad set of policies which encourage grain prices to stay very low. This makes cattle feed cheap and corn and soy inputs to chemical plants cheap.…

I'm kind of puzzled by this. Your post defies conventional wisdom (which you say is misleading). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because conventional wisdom is often misleading. But these links seem to indicate that in fact corn farmers ARE directly subsidized, both in terms of crop insurance (cheaper than market insurance is clearly a subsidy), as well as price protection. See that second link, especially AR…

The second link here is a deeply biased political position advocacy opinion piece, so it's a little bit onerous to 'refute' because every section is sort of a misleading half-truth. (I'm not sure what the best example would be, but I'm sure you've read something before where an author was cherry-picking statistics or casting factual elements in dishonest light so that they could support their stance, whether that was about vaccines or immigration or encryption or guns or whatever).

One thing that it does get right, is the section "they induce overproduction, inflate land prices, and harm the environment" which is absolutely true. My point in my previous post was that this systemic overproduction is to the benefit of corn buyers (cattle production, food processors, etc) and the detriment of corn producers.

In essence, the aggregate result of the myriad laws and programs impacting agricultural production is that grain producing farmers are left sitting helpless on a knife's edge. The only way to avoid bankruptcy is to pump your land full of petrochemicals to maximize yield. ARC is based on revenue, not profitability- it's encouraging high-cost, high-yield farming practices to guarantee plentiful grain supply to buyers. PLC is even more brazen- after completely distorting the true market price for animal feed by forcing grain growers to overproduce, we let them buy corn for less than it costs to grow and then force the farmers to rely on an insurance payment that's just enough to cover their debt & tax payments.

Basically, the grain producers are pawns in the ag subsidy game and the grain buyers are the kings.

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

#264

Post by titzer » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

_carbyau_ wrote: post #208

javajosh wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's about money, per se. Consider all the societies that had money and didn't get as "successful" as the current one, not anywhere close. The culprit is the scientific method, and in particular it's ability to give people repeatable, inhuman action-at-a-distance that amplified moral hazard 10000-fold. The longer the distance between extraction and consumption the more fucked your civilization is. As hor…

I see it as a conjunction of the two. Science is a good tool for getting things done. The how. Money is the motivation for getting them done. The why. You've both got good points. Scientific capability enables fucked because money.

It's very curious to me, the connection between science, mind, learning, and economy. They are all optimization processes; narrowing the gap between the model of the world and the actual world, with science being a method of modeling and validating models, a method of learning. Minds are collections of learned models, and economy is the actualization of those models to accomplish the acquisition and use of resources.

I used the word "machine" before, and also the word "superorganism". I get this creepy feeling we're part of a cybernetic superorganism more akin to a slime mold, digesting the world not with funky stomach acids, but the humming sounds of a million bulldozers, pile-drivers, hammers breaking down and building up again. And now, in the 21st century, some kind of Star Trek computer sounds as the digitized stock market whirs away at a speed incomprehensible to these little pink-gray bundles of nerves prone to chemical stimulation.

All of those learning and optimization processes are harnessed, in bulk, towards the economy--harnessing the energy and mineral resources of this planet to create "wealth" for the value system of that machine. Even as just a software person, being light-years away from a bulldozer or a harvester, everything I have done inevitably feeds into making that machine more "efficient". I am rewarded, so my little life is improved. (I guess I shouldn't complain, the machine has made me relatively wealthy so far!?)

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

#265

Post by 99_00 » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

yco29 wrote: post #215

99_00 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power can solve climate change now. Technology doesn't need to be better. People don't want to solve the problem now because 1) We don't need to solve it now 2) Fear of impending doom is a great way to push a wide array of agendas (ideological, economic, political) forward.

" Why can't we just wait until some magical future time when technology has fixed everything? " Exactly the type of do-nothing idiocy I'd expect from this place. What exactly do you think you're contributing here? On every single important topic, HN consistently pushes to the top whatever sentiment contains the least actionable information. People here are simpletons that can't even fathom anything other than the sta…

Insults are not an argument.

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

#266

Post by supernovae » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

markdown wrote: post #232

supernovae wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they? It's common vernacular to say we lost something even if it isn't "i lost my keys" but "We lost the last dodo bird"... doesn't mean we can't find it, but, what we had will never be again.

Why would it never be again? The ingredients to making good topsoil aren't a mystery. The topsoil can be fixed.

In many cases of periods of time longer than humans live...

We're shitty stewards... I've seen jeepers drive over tundra and do donuts not realizing their burnouts won't recover in a lifetime and other morons see them out there and think it means they can follow suit and before long the entire basin is destroyed...

sure... it will recover... when humans are dead, or when we pull our heads out of our asses :)

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

#267

Post by 99_00 » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

ecf wrote: post #236

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?

Why force future generations to solve a life-or-death problem and rob them of freedoms that people enjoy today? I hope in 50 years the entire adult generation of today is mocked and ridiculed for how they destroyed the only known inhabitable planet for our specifies.

Because over time humans get better at solving problems.

Are you predicting the earth will become uninhabitable in 50 years?

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

#268

Post by vkou » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

tpxl wrote: post #250

vkou wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There is just so much land, we can't possibly deplete all of it.

Given that we are currently using 40% of the world's land area for agriculture, and that we are using ~0.0003% of the world's water, I don't think this is a fair criticism of my post. Only a fool would think that former isn't something to keep an eye on.

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

No, we got here in the first place by messing with carbon and water and nutrient cycles that take tens of millions and hundreds of thousands of years to cycle through.

The atmospheric water cycle, on the other hand, operates on a scale of weeks. Seawater gets separated into brine and fresh water, fresh water irrigates crops, fresh water evaporates into clouds, clouds precipitate over the ocean. All of humanity's historic water consumption is quite literally a drop in the ocean. [1]

The volume of the oceans is 1.3 * 10^18 m^3. Humanity's annual consumption of fresh water is 4 * 10^12 m^3. Annual worldwide precipitation is ~5 * 10^14 m^3.

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

[1] Meanwhile, all of humanity's carbon emissions dwarf the ability of natural carbon sinks to absorb - because in hundreds of years, we have released carbon that took tens of millions of years to accumulate. The atmospheric water cycle operates on an entirely different scale. [2]

[2] The orders of magnitude between the unsustainability of , , , and are each ~two orders of magnitude removed from eachother.

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

#269

Post by 99_00 » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 11:36 PM UTC

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…

The Green Revolution in India refers to a period in India when agriculture was converted into an industrial system due to the adoption of modern methods and technology, such as the use of high yielding variety (HYV) seeds, tractors, irrigation facilities, pesticides, and fertilizers.

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

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

#270

Post by javajosh » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:25 AM UTC

titzer wrote: post #264

_carbyau_ wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it as a conjunction of the two. Science is a good tool for getting things done. The how. Money is the motivation for getting them done. The why. You've both got good points. Scientific capability enables fucked because money.

It's very curious to me, the connection between science, mind, learning, and economy. They are all optimization processes; narrowing the gap between the model of the world and the actual world, with science being a method of modeling and validating models, a method of learning. Minds are collections of learned models, and economy is the actualization of those models to accomplish the acquisition and use of resources.…

Well, you and I are just two tiny specks of the traveling wavefront of "Life" that started some billions of years ago, and which includes everything currently living, on every timescale. (another way to think of it is that every individual is characterized by the 4D path of its center of mass, describing a world-line totally unique in the lifetime of the universe, and that these paths intersect and when you zoom out, speed up time, the network becomes invisible and you just see something like a time-lapse of slime mould growth. It's as beautiful an image as it is disturbing, for some.)

One element of the world which is clearly already a "cybernetic organism" is the everyday "Corporation" - it is an actual fusion of humans and machines to achieve a goal. Corps have many emergent properties, none of which have their root in any individual person or machine. And note that this was true pre-information revolution! (And note: corps ALSO have a center of mass! Although this usually isn't the most useful characterization, its accurate.)