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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

#181

Post by mountainriver »

koolba wrote: post #161
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HOAs are a scourge. I’d love to see more states scale back the power of HOAs.

I doubt there’s much State’s can do to stop HOAs from existing. It’s a contract between the homeowners. There’s a lot of economy of scale for group maintenance as well (e.g. landscaping costs are significantly less for adjacent properties). Like most things in the USA, you can vote with your wallet and live somewhere that doesn’t have an HOA.

States like Colorado require all new subdivisions to have HOAs

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

#182

Post by ls612 »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #123
Veserv wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desalination is sufficiently cheap to not be a material problem for US consumers (or other developed countries). State-of-the-art desalination plants in Israel are fulfilling contracts at ~$0.40/m^3 [1] and the per-capita water usage in the US is ~1200 m^3/yr [2]. Even if we assumed that the current price of water is $0, this would only amount to a $480/yr increase in expenditure per American which would constitute a…

Your analysis above is remarkably detailed, but it misses the point. When I used the term "sustainable" I was speaking of resource usage and environmental impact, not whether the practice was affordable.

We aren’t going to run out of seawater anytime soon

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

#183

Post by ta988 »

devmunchies wrote: post #172
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…

i see neighbors using Glyphosate all the time. don't know how its even still sold in stores.

Really simple. Heavy lobying and no public opposition.

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

#184

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

redisman wrote: post #77
markdown wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does the topsoil go? Doesn't it, by definition, just become topsoil somewhere else?

Well no. Just like a rainforest doesn't just fly in the wind to become a rainforest somewhere else if you burn it. Soil is a ecosystem, not a raw material.

That was a spectacular analogy.

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

#185

Post by activehuman »

To me this is just another example of how humanity often doesn't think and act for the long term until its too late- along with the problems of our poor planning for climate change, pandemics, plastic pollution, and consistently choosing to invest in shiny new things versus investing in maintaining current infrastructure.

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

#186

Post by briga »

seiferteric wrote: post #148
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…

I have heard that the creeks in the central valley used to run most/all of the year because the water table was practically at the surface. This also allowed for the healthy salmon runs we used to have. Now all the creeks are dry by early/mid summer.

That's true in silicon valley too, I remember seeing fish drowning in tiny pools of water because the creeks dry up so much. The floodplain of the san francisco bay has just been so heavily developed that there's just not enough water to go around.

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

#187

Post by koolba »

mountainriver wrote: post #181
koolba wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt there’s much State’s can do to stop HOAs from existing. It’s a contract between the homeowners. There’s a lot of economy of scale for group maintenance as well (e.g. landscaping costs are significantly less for adjacent properties). Like most things in the USA, you can vote with your wallet and live somewhere that doesn’t have an HOA.

States like Colorado require all new subdivisions to have HOAs

Is that a State law or just a common practice for most suburban development?

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

#188

Post by bluGill »

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…

Instead of repeating lies you can look this up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate half life is between 4 and 197 days.

Glyphosate binds strongly to soil, so even when there is glyphosate in the soil it doesn't affect seeds in the ground but not growing yet.

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

#189

Post by TaylorAlexander »

hinkley wrote: post #79
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #21

If anyone is curious I am working on an open source farming robot meant to be used for regenerative agriculture techniques. My hope is that we can build robotic tools that work the land more like human hands do instead of the big tools and poisons we use today. If you like that kind of thing please take a look: https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...

On the plus side, your rover is going to work better with contour planting, which is part of the solution to our problems. The downside is that most of the post-modern agricultural variants embrace observation as being critical, and we of all people should know that statistics and graphs are not a substitute for actually looking at things. Having a robot phone home is not the same as knowing what's going on. As an as…

Thanks!

Yes I do dream of contours cut all through a town where small robots can tend to locally grown food. And of course for large farms it’s still a help if there are any hills.

Having people on the ground is very important. Sometimes in my mind I imagine a fully automated farm but I try to push back against myself and think more of how this can be a tool to help people do their work. For observation I do want to be able to provide high resolution images stitched together and geolocated so that a record of observations is available for review now and for posterity. There’s no substitute for walking the field and observing with human eyes. Bending down and looking close. Picking a leaf, breaking it open, and smelling it. I do think we will need great optics and high resolution imagers, plus a high res imager on an arm for detailed remote views. I do want to teach these machines to do some diagnosis on their own. But ultimately this will be a tool to aid a farmer, not replace them.

I have a new video coming soon that shows our replacement drive system. You’re right that the system shown in that video was susceptible to mud. The new system has operated for weeks in the rain and mud and done well. It’s a fully sealed geared hubmotor system.

Rake is on our minds too. I think we might move to a custom fork soon.

Thanks for your comments!

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

#190

Post by bluGill »

devmunchies wrote: post #172
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…

i see neighbors using Glyphosate all the time. don't know how its even still sold in stores.

It is about the safest chemical gardeners use. Check the safety data on the fertilizers they apply sometime.
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