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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

#131

Post by pm90 »

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 farming practices in the Indian Subcontinent are not as mechanized and not as geared towards profit maximization, which certainly helps.

However, the main reason why that region is always fertile is the immense amount of rich soil brought by the Indus River from its origins in the Himalayas. There is no such replacement mechanism for the US Midwestern plains; the soil was created over millennia and once it’s gone it’s gone forever.

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

#132

Post by Spooky23 »

failrate wrote: post #43
Spooky23 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I worked on a farm in my teens in 90s upstate ny that was like the last dying breath of the traditional family farm. It was a property that was intact since a land grant from a Dutch patroon and continuously farmed until around 2000. Today the family still owns it, and boards a few horses to pay the taxes. The farmer was an old-school conservative farmer. He was a local Republican Party leader for awhile, a…

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.

Not at all. My respect for my late friend and employer may sound romanticized, but the business was a real and practical thing.

I think a farm being a vital business since the 1670s qualifies as adapted to the local climate.

In my region of the country, water and topsoil is abundant. But you can’t compete with massive western operations.

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

#133

Post by tofof »

DoctorNick wrote: post #128
awillen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GMO crops allow us to grow more food with less space/nutrients/etc. They are a solution, not a problem, and when people fear monger about them it hurts everyone.

So you'd prefer that farmers get screwed by the onerous IP clauses surrounding them?

This is a false dichotomy, and really just a red herring.

GP claimed "GMOs ... will kill the best farming land we have"

The parent you replied to refuted that point. Onerous IP clauses surrounding crop seeds is an IP issue, not one of agriculture and topsoil quality.

And quite frankly, if onerous IP was the cost we HAD to pay, compared to the depletion of a resourse that is "non-renewable in human timescales," [1][2] yes, that's easily worth it.

1: Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN, http://www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-detai... "Soil is a finite resource, meaning its loss and degradation is not recoverable within a human lifespan."

2: US Forest Service, way back in 2003 https://web.archive.org/web/20170531160340/https://www.fs.fe... Section 11.2 "On human time scales, fertile topsoil is not a renewable resource."

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

#134

Post by idownvoted »

Always be wary of studies conducted by people taking a political assumption and turning it into the basis of their paper.

It's not coincidal that said studies either lack specifics in some areas, while being over-specific in others or are cited in the same manner (leaving out details where it helps the political camp, being over-specific in others).

One can already see this turning up in general rebuttals of agriculture, or citations that leave out the critical detail that soil erosion is caused by corn specifically, not crops in general. Or which kind of geographic reagion was used. Or how well farmes tilled their land (see the picture about erosion down-hill: its just a question of the right tilling-technique to prevent that from happening).

And as a last resort you can always toss it into some meta study to "prove" your point.

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

#136

Post by vkou »

gumby wrote: post #74
dcolkitt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting factor is electricity. And renewables continue to deliver Moore's law like improvements in the price and quantity of electricity, without any environmental externalities.

> 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.

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

#137

Post by titzer »

anonporridge wrote: post #113
titzer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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, Earth's ecosystems are the result of surviving cataclysm after cataclysm, from volcanism to asteroid strikes to climate change, to invasive species after invasive species. It's got a lot of experience dealing with giant debris piles left over from one shitstorm after another, be that a biological plague or the ash of an impact event.

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

#138

Post by tkinom »

briga wrote: post #28

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…

When spaceX arrive in Mars, I am sure "Google Mars" will start logging time lapse for Mars.

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

#139

Post by datavirtue »

idownvoted wrote: post #134

Always be wary of studies conducted by people taking a political assumption and turning it into the basis of their paper. It's not coincidal that said studies either lack specifics in some areas, while being over-specific in others or are cited in the same manner (leaving out details where it helps the political camp, being over-specific in others). One can already see this turning up in general rebuttals of agricult…

I have lived in the corn belt my whole life. I was just surprised that anyone might think there is significant topsoil left. The average field is continually beat to hell by machines that create magnificent dust storms twice each season--spraying glyphosate and planting, and then harvest.

All the major farmers in my region use no-till but they dump lots of fertilizers and/or must rotate between corn and soya (beans create and accumulate nitrogen at the roots, leaving it behind in the soil for the next crop).

All the fields I'm used to are very pale and clayish. Dark soils in newish-virginish soils stand out like a sore thumb and can really only be found in small non-factory fields.

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

#140

Post by a9h74j »

dagss wrote: post #111
titzer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Makes me think of easter island. When our civilization perishes, money will seem as useful as those statues.

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