12 ms·

Can American soil be brought back to life?

207 points by clumsysmurf 9y ago

alexnewman 9y ago
Not until we figure out what's killing it
- reefoctopus 9y ago
  > the main change from one year to the next was intensively planting more and more acres of corn and soy, churning up the soil and using ever more chemical fertilizers and herbicides to try and turn a profit.
nameisu 9y ago
add more corn to it
AFNobody 9y ago
Well the obvious answer is "Yes" but I am honestly uncertain whether it can be done while maintaining current profit margins which is was always the real issue. A well-educated farmer, focused on a plot of land that is meant to be kept for generations without a profit focus can certainly do it. I suspect if you try to scale this process up, the issue is its more expensive if you were a corporation who has to pay a better educated class of labor to maintain soil quality. Till, fertilize, water is alot simpler than trying to build an ecosystem that spans a 4000 acre plot of land. I think until society values externalities more accurately, it is unlikely to catch on like so many other things that cost even a tenth of a percent of the overall corporate profit margin.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  This is also a society that happily wastes a vast amount of food which is produced based on conformity issues, and other nonsense designed to maximize profits in supermarkets. At every level, we’re deeply complicit, and our revealed preferences are clear.
  - AFNobody 9y ago
    I think the majority's preferences as a society is clear. I also believe there is a substantial minority that would prefer a more sustainable approach to many things in the interest of long term sustainability. The reality is our level of infrastructure spending, to the way we produce power, to the condition of the majority of the arable land is fundamentally unsustainable for more than another 50 years without substantial technological change. This does not even get into climate change related impacts on agriculture.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Absolutely, we are all very screwed, but that still won’t empower a minority to save the majority from itself.
      - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        A good first step would involve avoiding (a) casting these events as species- or civilisation-ending events (they’re not) and (b) condescension towards the majority.
        sneak 9y ago
        Willful ignorance of destruction and waste and inequality to perpetuate convenience is always worthy of condescension.
        QAPereo 9y ago
        I don’t think the big problems facing us are tone, and underestimating the long term consequences.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      We've historically often engaged in unsustainable practices, like: 1. hunting whales for lamp oil 2. cutting down trees for fuel to make glass and build ships 3. using natural rubber 4. no sanitation in the cities 5. using horses for transportation 6. using well water in cities As these became unsustainable, alternatives were discovered and developed.
- bluGill 9y ago
  In fact big farmers are building the soil on their land. When you have a lot of land it is easy to do a scientific comparison of different farming methods and discover which yield better profits. When you have a small farm it is easy to ignore (if you want to) research. An extra $10 per acre over 80 acres is only $800, while that same $10/acre over 3000 acres is $30000. The $800 won't make the payment on the different equipment needed for best practice, while $30000 makes the payment and leaves a nice chunk on the bottom line. The other part of the above is getting that extra $10/year in profits needs 7 years of investment, until year for you make less profit, and the next 3 years you are more or less even (obviously each farming practice has a different payoff period, the above example is for no-till). Again, big farmers have the money to spare to try the new practice and when they see results they turn more fields over to the new system. The only time it pays in the long run to mine the soil is when the land will go to someone else in a couple years. A farmer who sees the big city wanting his land for a new development in a couple years should mine his soil. In all other cases farmers who care for the soil as an investment will make more money in the long run than farmers who mine the soil.
Overtonwindow 9y ago
Not likely, unless we turn away from corn and abusive practices. Farming has become such a money-losing venture that the only way to survive is to increase yield, and try to squeeze more out of the same acre of land. This, imo, leads to abuse.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  People consume too much meat and dairy, which requires lots of corn and soy for feed. Thats one reason why corn and soy is so heavily subsidized.
  - kwhitefoot 9y ago
    Why does that make the production heavily subsidized? Surely the state doesn't need to subsidize what is already very popular?
    - bluGill 9y ago
      The state has a different concern: making sure you have enough to eat. One crop failure and people starve to death. We as a society have chosen to solve this problem by subsidizing farming ensuring that there are more crops grown every year than is strictly needed. As such farmers plant more crops than people will eat. This ensures that in bad years there is still enough food. You can argue that there is a better solution to the problem, but don't argue against subsidizes without a different solution.
  - mod 9y ago
    You're right, but it doesn't have to. Switch to rabbit meat, for instance.
seiferteric 9y ago
What about the fact that our agriculture system is (mostly) open loop? Every time you harvest food and consume it, where do the waste products end up? I think we need to also work on closing this loop.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  sounds like a startup in the making.
  - sschueller 9y ago
    There are some 'closed loop' farming startups: https://urbanfarmers.com/ https://urbanfarmers.com/
  - seiferteric 9y ago
    I have heard of a seaweed farming company on here recently. The idea is you can harvest seaweed that absorbs nutrients from the sea, and use that for fertilizer. This is an ancient idea, but hopefully it could become common again.
- abhinavkulkarni 9y ago
  @seiferteric: Can you please explain this more? I don't quite understand what you mean by 'open loop'. Thanks.
  - mikekchar 9y ago
    Not the OP, but essentially you take vegetables out of a field. You eat the vegetables. You poop. Your poop ends up in a sewage treatment plant. Nothing ends up back in the field. Instead we add fertilisers that we have mined out of the earth for the macro nutrients. It's not just sewage either. Every time you till the earth, you expose it to the air. This oxidises the minerals and often makes them unavailable for the plants. Because the fertiliser we add is very water soluble it drains through the water table and ends up in the rivers and eventually washes out to sea (or just clogs the rivers with algae). Tilling and pesticides also kill the organisms that are responsible for moving nutrients around under the earth. Additionally, we tend to plant mono-culture crops with short root structures. This stops a variety of plants from breaking down nutrients in the soil and moving them to the top layer of humus. So either we till deeper (exacerbating the problem) or we essentially lock all of the nutrients below the level that the plants can access. In the end, you basically are slowly extracting all of the bioavailable nutrients out of the soil, and depositing them in the sewage treatment fields. At the same time you are oxidising what's left and washing everything else out to the sea. Any fertility that remains is below the access of the plant roots (and probably not in a form that can be utilised right away). "Closing the loop" means looking at the places where we are losing fertility and making sure that it is looping back. So, if you take nutrients out in the form of food, we return it in the form of sewage. You avoid tilling and you plant a variety of crop varieties that circulate the nutrients in the soil layer. You avoid adding highly water soluble salts that simply leach out of the soil and into the water table. It sounds simple-ish, but it's actually quite a bit challenge. We don't really do a lot of research in this area (as far as I can tell). Most agricultural research is geared toward increasing yields and reducing costs as opposed to sustainability.
wavefunction 9y ago
I am doing my part in my backyard as I'm fortunate to live in an extra-judicial territory of my municipality so the regulations are sparse at the moment. Mulch, sun and water. I also dug a large bio-char pit I've been using to reduce wood-stuff into carbon and potash. I am eventually going to ammoniate these products and redistribute throughout the plot. I also underestimated the biochar hell-pit and buried and hosed-down a hot-burning pyre and one week later woke up to a tendril of smoke curling up from the pit which later turned back into a fire with additional fuel. I found it alarming and remarkable so be sure to be safe with pyrolysis, folks!
- Sophistifunk 9y ago
  I would like to know more about this "bio-char pit" could you point me to a URL or three?
  - debacle 9y ago
    A good video series on the topic: http://skillcult.com/biochar-and-charcoal/ http://skillcult.com/biochar-and-charcoal/
    - Sophistifunk 9y ago
      Thanks!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
sampl 9y ago
Here's a great book on the subject, "New Roots for Agriculture" by Wes Jackson (forward by Wendell Berry) https://www.amazon.com/New-Roots-Agriculture-Farming-Ranching/dp/0803275625 https://www.amazon.com/New-Roots-Agriculture-Farming-Ranchin...
jfarlow 9y ago
Check out Trace Genomics [1] for a new company at QB3 that is taking a stab at quantifying what organisms are part of a particular farm's microbiome. They sequence the DNA of everything in a given soil sample, then figure out who's DNA is who's - providing a snapshot of what life is living in that soil. And with enough snapshots, a farmer can actually start to develop a quantitative picture of the web of inhabitants in a given parcel of land. And then act on that information. [1] https://www.tracegenomics.com https://www.tracegenomics.com
oldandtired 9y ago
Like a lot of things, soil infertility is a symptom of a much larger societal problem. Within society, there are many different competing groups that have "the answer". Progressives want a specific list, conservatives want another list, city dwellers want a list (irrespective of being progressive or conservative), country dwellers want another, business owners want their own list, workers want another, government wants a list, law enforcement wants one, radicals want one, etc., stc., etc. All of these lists of wants are at cross purposes. All of it is based on self-interest. Very little of it is based on a wider responsibility for all citizens and the country that supports them. This won't change as people won't give up on their list of wants. The attitude of "us and them" just reinforces the basic problems. Is there a solution? Most certainly. But it requires a change in the basic attitudes of every citizen and most will object to having to face who and what they are. When a society is focus on "rights" instead of responsibilities then the society loses its ability to think in the large. When a government is focussed on it continuation and power it loses sight of its responsibility to build society. There is no short term solution that is a quick fix. In the case of America, it is heading down the path of civil war and devastation because pretty well every level in the American society is in the mindset of "them and us". This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes. Law enforcement has forgotten that they are there to serve and protect the citizenry and not themselves. Government is self-serving. Corporations are treating their customers as slaves and a resource to control. The general population is focussed on their own little problems of day to day self-gratification.
- closeparen 9y ago
  I'd even say the absence of a socially constructed responsibility to sacrifice and conform for the sake of tradition and stability are what make us uniquely American, and I'm damn proud of it. Responsibility, sacrifice, conformity, keeping your head down, deferring to your betters on questions of government policy and administration... these features have been dominant in human societies across the globe and over millennia. Maybe because it's the only enduring architecture. Still, I have to admire the American experiment in saying "fuck all that."
  - oldandtired 9y ago
pdfernhout 9y ago
It's long been known how to fix soil; see for example from 1987: "Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach" by R.W. Widdowson: https://www.elsevier.com/books/towards-holistic-agriculture/widdowson/978-0-08-034211-5 https://www.elsevier.com/books/towards-holistic-agriculture/... Or from 1911: https://permaculturenews.org/files/farmers_of_forty_centuries.pdf https://permaculturenews.org/files/farmers_of_forty_centurie... More: http://soilandhealth.org/ http://soilandhealth.org/ Adding rock dust works wonders too: https://remineralize.org/ https://remineralize.org/ My wife and I wrote a FOSS garden simulator in the 1990s (a six+ person-year labor of love) to help people understand some of this: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html I got the idea while working as the Program Administrator on summer for the NOFA-NJ Organic Farm Certification Program in the later 1980s, but it took many years (including more education in grad school in biology) to make the software. See especially from the help system of that software on how conventional agriculture destroys the soil: http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/help100/00000385.htm http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/help100/00000385.htm "In the soil, tiny charged particles called micelles usually have many areas of negative charge (called sites) on their surfaces. Positively charged ions (cations) are drawn to these negative charge sites and stick to the clay particles (are adsorbed). In most soils, 99% of soil cations can be found attached to micelles (clay particles and organic matter) and 1% can be found in solution. Mineral cations in the soil (mainly Ca2+, Mg2+, K+ and Na+) maintain an equilibrium between adsorption to the negative sites and solution in the soil water. This equilibrium produces exchanges -- when one cation detaches from a site (leaving it free), another cation attaches to it. Therefore the negatively charged sites are called cation exchange sites. The number of these sites per unit weight of dry soil is called the cation exchange capacity, or the capacity of the soil to hold cations. Because any cations loose in the soil solution are vulnerable to leaching as water flows out of the soil, a high cation exchange capacity is always desirable. Cation exchange sites act as a sort of mineral buffer for the soil, storing minerals important to plant and animal growth for long periods of time. The attraction of cations to cation exchange sites is strongest for H+ ions (which make the soil acidic) and for polyvalent ions such as Ca2+ and Al3+. The weakest attraction is for monovalent ions such as K+. When ammonium nitrate fertilizers are added to the soil, the ammonium ions (NH4+) are strongly attracted to cation exchange sites because of their high valence (4). The ammonium ions displace many other cations which are then leached out of the soil and lost to plants. Some of the ammonium ions are converted to nitrate during nitrification (by aerobic soil bacteria); the process produces excess H+ ions which acidify the soil (causing earthworms and other soil organisms to die or desert the area). (For an excellent description of cation exchange capacity, see Widdowson's Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach.)" That's a big reason why organic agriculture which focuses on building up organic matter in the soil (which increases cation exchange capacity) is better for soil health (and human health too, as the plants are better fed). That's reflected in the article when it describes two lumps of soil put on wire mesh that behave differently -- one falling apart as dust (from lack of organic matter and so not much CEC) and one clumped together (more organic matter and CEC). Wish I had time to bring that Delphi app to the web as a JavaScript app... And improve it further. I don't know the exact numbers to completely quantify this, but I suspect poor farming practices on the US prairies that have reduced (in some places) six feet of topsoil to six inches of top soil have released a vast amount of carbon from lost organic matter into the air and contributed to climate change.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Twirrim 9y ago
What's somewhat amusing is this is essentially talking about a variation on the four course crop rotation, a farming practice that dates back to the 17th century, and at one stage dominated the farming practices of Europe. from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system > In the Norfolk four-course system, wheat was grown in the first year, turnips in the second, followed by barley, with clover and ryegrass undersown, in the third. The clover and ryegrass were grazed or cut for feed in the fourth year. The turnips were used for feeding cattle and sheep in the winter. This new system was cumulative in effect, for the fodder crops eaten by the livestock produced large supplies of previously scarce animal manure, which in turn was richer because the animals were better fed. When the sheep grazed the fields, their waste fertilized the soil, promoting heavier cereal yields in following years.
- nhebb 9y ago
  It's been used state-side for a few hundred years as well. I learned about it in my high school American history class. Colonial era tobacco farmers experienced deleted soil conditions, so they turned to 4 crop rotations. My dad had a farm back in the 70's, and he rotated crops for this reason. It's not a lost art among farmers.
  - kwhitefoot 9y ago
    > My dad had a farm back in the 70's, and he rotated crops for this reason. It's not a lost art among farmers. Unfortunately that sounds a bit like 'no true Scotsman'.
- stinos 9y ago
  > dates back to the 17th century Note that crop rotation itself (2 course/3 course) is much, much older. And Wikipedia claims it was first done in the 16th century in what now is Belgium. Actually, there are a bunch of things presented as 'new' in the article while I read nothing which I never read before, and many of the solutions bascialy come down to 'do it as our ancestors did it' so it's not all that new either. The vast scale of it though is new. And the rigid economic system attached to it.
bostik 9y ago
Regenerating soil is nothing new, really. The Amazonian tribes learned how to cultivate a rich black soil[0] long time ago. There is ongoing research on how to make that work again on an industrial scale - and with sufficiently short timespans. The article mentions that even common composting helps, but the problem tends to be how to prevent it from running off. No wonder. As anything in biology, soil regeneration takes time. Having your fresh biomass flow elsewhere runs counter to the purpose. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
- sigmaprimus 9y ago
  I agree this is nothing new, and although I tend to believe that no till is an essential part of healing the soil it will not work alone if nothing is done to break up the agricultural economic complex controlled by the multinational companies only interested in profit. A good book published in 1975 written by Masanobu Fukuoka called "One Straw Revolution" is very informative on this subject easy reading and obtainable for free by searching it's title followed by .pdf in your favorite S.E.
MisterBastahrd 9y ago
We could probably simply compost the produce and meat that gets thrown away from grocery stores and fix that problem. A moderate sized grocery store in a small town is going to throw away a ton or two of compostable material a month. This all goes into a landfill. Most of these stores are very good about recycling dry paper waste... but do nothing about the rest of their waste sans cooking oil.
beautifulfreak 9y ago
Paul Stamets has studied the soil restorative effects of mycellium mushroom and published a number of videos. In this Ted Talk at the 10 minute mark, there's a demonstration of just how rapidly a patch of ground can be transformed compared to other commonly used methods, even land polluted with diesel fuel, which the mycellium rapidly breaks down into harmless compounds. All the videos are fascinating. https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world/transcript#t-452343 https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_c...
exDM69 9y ago
I recently took part in a course on doing farm work with horses. It was a large garden where all the farm work had been done exclusively with horses for about 10 years, after decades of using tractors. The tractors had turned the soil into hard, clumpy clay which yielded bad crops and required more and more fertilizers every year. In about a decade of using horses, manure and traditional methods, the topsoil had turned nice and soft and nutrient-rich. Not at all like the hard clay my grandparents' farm and the owners of the garden were more than happy with the results. Working with horses was slow, hard and laborious work but it was a lot of fun! Much more fun than doing the same with tractors (which I also think is quite fun). Unfortunately, going back to horses or oxen never going to be viable in a large scale. The recent trends in agriculture have been making machines larger and larger to reduce the amount of labor required, causing the soil to be packed even harder, requiring more tilling for the next crop. Maybe autonomous farm equipment could reverse the trend, as machines could be made smaller without increasing the amount of human labor.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I've been looking into the history and mechanisation of agriculture over the past 200 years or so, it's a pretty fascinating history. As of 1800, you still had largely wooden plough, with an iron ploughshare, drawn by a horse or oxen. The acre is actually a unit of work -- the amount of land a man and horse could work in a day, and the German term, Tagwerk (literally, "day's work") directly reflects that. The working time wasn't a full 8-hour day, as the animals would both tire and needed to forage. I believe ~4 hours was more typical. By the mid-19th century, all-iron, and finally, steel, ploughs were available. In the United States, the first combination ("combine") harversters were drawn by teams of up to 40 horses. (Simply managing the daught of those animals, distributed through swingletrees, was a significant undertaking.) As of 1900 or so, the U.S. had a population of ~20 million horses, peaking at 25 million by 1920. These consumed 20% of the agricultural production of the country. Cities such as New York had populations upwards of 200,000 horses, with concommitant impacts on street pollution and hygiene. (Interestingly: railroads increased the demand for horses and mules as these were the best solution to the "last mile" problem of bringing goods and people to and from railway depots.) http://www.cowboyway.com/What/HorsePopulation.htm http://www.cowboyway.com/What/HorsePopulation.htm The first viable tractors started appearing shortly after 1900, and didn't have tremendous power by modern standards (20hp is pretty common). (There were some earlier mobile designs, and even stationary traction distribution systems based on steam power.) Once reliable, these were popular as they could be worked all day, fuel was cheaper than feed, and there were no vet bills. I find the history of this (and other ag elements) pretty fascinating. Much of the information is drawn from Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History (1992) which discusses the evolution of history from a lens of energy and fuel sources. He's revised the book tremendously with Energy and Civilization, out just this year. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization
madshiva 9y ago
Can half of America be given back to native American?
kwhitefoot 9y ago
> Promoting soil health comes down to three basic practices: Make sure the soil is covered with plants at all times, diversify what it grows and don’t disrupt it. What this means in practice is rotating crops, so fields aren’t trying to support the same plant year after year. And it means using techniques like “cover-cropping”–planting a secondary plant like grasses, legumes or vegetables–between rows of crops or on other exposed soil instead of leaving it bare. This is hardly news. How come Norfolk crop rotation has been 'forgotten'? See this Britannica article: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system
kwhitefoot 9y ago
The problem is not going to be really solved until we get rid of the idea that a corporation can own land. The big agribusinesses don't value the land as much as society needs them too so of course they don't look after it. Land is a common resource and no one business should have unfettered control of it.
- bluGill 9y ago
  That is false. Big business cares about land more than the small farmers It is the big farmers that care the most for the land. They are big enough that they have collected the data and seen that investments in the land pay off. When you have one field it is really hard to test for yourself how different practices pay off. The university will tell you "go no till, after 7 years your yields will be bigger than if you till the land every year", but small farmers generally think "yeah right, it works for your soils over there, but here we have different soils and so that won't work". By contrast the large farmers have enough fields that they are willing to try every new practice in a couple places to see if it really works for them. The largest farms are now able to scientifically show that they are building soil every year. Second, in Iowa corporations are banned form owning farms. There are exceptions for seed companies and equipment manufactures, but those are specific loopholes with limits to what can be done. I work for John Deere (but of course do not speak for them), and we have to be very careful that the places where we test our prototypes does not count as farms. (generally the crop is destroyed before harvest - I don't know how the harvester division does their testing though)
  - kwhitefoot 9y ago
    I was not contrasting big and small farmers. I was contrasting big business behaviour with what society needs.
    - bluGill 9y ago
      True, but big business behavior is often closer aligned with what society needs than small farmers.
- 9y ago
escape_goat 9y ago
> The federal crop insurance program is based on farmers planting the same crop in the same place each year to have a record for production, and it is not flexible enough to account for practices like cover crops. If you want to take an actionable item away from this article that fits (potentially) the skillsets of your friends and neighbours on Hacker News, it is this one. This is a data problem and an actuarial problem. Solving it can result in net social benefit disproportionate to the investment in infrastructure, politicial capital (to change legislation), and (already existing) government programs required. I don't know if, politically, there are any groups who would be organized to swing into action in opposition to federal crop insurance reform, but they or any who may shake out of the math (presumably there's some practices and crops cough corn that benefit from less information, relatively speaking) have an uphill battle to fight against a variety of constituent-motivating narratives. It's hard to argue against big government spending when tens of millions of dollars is at stake.
- 24gttghh 9y ago
  So, after the Dust Bowl, there were all kinds of things promoted by the Federal Gov't like crop rotation, contour farming, and planting wind breaks to keep the soil from blowing away. When did we forget that lesson? And I looked up what I think is an actual rule regarding Crop Rotation when it comes to the FCIC[0]: >(B) ASSIGNED YIELD.—If the producer does not provide satisfactory evidence of the yield of a commodity under subparagraph (A), the producer shall be assigned— (i) a yield that is not less than 65 percent of the transitional yield of the producer (adjusted to reflect actual production reflected in the records acceptable to the Corporation for continuous years), as specified in regulations issued by the Corporation based on production history requirements; (ii) a yield determined by the Corporation, in the case of— (I) a producer that has not had a share of the production of the insured crop for more than two crop years, as determined by the Secretary; (II) a producer that produces an agricultural commodity on land that has not been farmed by the producer; or (III) a producer that rotates a crop produced on a farm to a crop that has not been produced on the farm; Just search the doc for "rotate". It is only mentioned once. I think the FCIC only applies to wheat and some other grains. [0]https://www.agriculture.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/75-30%20-%20Agricultural%20Adjustment%20Act%20Of%201938%20&%20Federal%20Crop%20Insurance%20Act1.pdf https://www.agriculture.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/75-30%20-%2...
martin_a 9y ago
Has anybody already tried to put Brawndo on the fields? I think it got electrolytes, that should help!
mmagin 9y ago
As has been hinted at by other commenters, I think the big thing that's wrong with modern industrial agriculture (including some "organic" agriculture) is that it typically does not add carbon to the soil (via composted plant matter, manure, etc) and it also unnecessarily disturbs the soil structure, allowing the organic carbon compounds in the soil to become excessively exposed to the atmosphere where they'll break down or be eroded. (No, I don't have specific sources for this, it's mostly a combination of what I've read from the Permaculture folks and personal observation in my own garden over the past 5 years.)
vram22 9y ago
As a teenager, I had read this book called The Forest and The Sea, by Marston Bates, which explains many of the fundamental principles of ecology that underlie these issues. https://www.google.co.in/search?q=book+the+forest+and+the+sea& https://www.google.co.in/search?q=book+the+forest+and+the+se... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marston_Bates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marston_Bates I thought it was a pretty good and informative book.

207 points by clumsysmurf 9y ago

alexnewman 9y ago

Not until we figure out what's killing it

reefoctopus 9y ago
> the main change from one year to the next was intensively planting more and more acres of corn and soy, churning up the soil and using ever more chemical fertilizers and herbicides to try and turn a profit.

nameisu 9y ago

add more corn to it

AFNobody 9y ago

Well the obvious answer is "Yes" but I am honestly uncertain whether it can be done while maintaining current profit margins which is was always the real issue. A well-educated farmer, focused on a plot of land that is meant to be kept for generations without a profit focus can certainly do it. I suspect if you try to scale this process up, the issue is its more expensive if you were a corporation who has to pay a better educated class of labor to maintain soil quality. Till, fertilize, water is alot simpler than trying to build an ecosystem that spans a 4000 acre plot of land. I think until society values externalities more accurately, it is unlikely to catch on like so many other things that cost even a tenth of a percent of the overall corporate profit margin.

QAPereo 9y ago
This is also a society that happily wastes a vast amount of food which is produced based on conformity issues, and other nonsense designed to maximize profits in supermarkets. At every level, we’re deeply complicit, and our revealed preferences are clear.
- AFNobody 9y ago
  I think the majority's preferences as a society is clear. I also believe there is a substantial minority that would prefer a more sustainable approach to many things in the interest of long term sustainability. The reality is our level of infrastructure spending, to the way we produce power, to the condition of the majority of the arable land is fundamentally unsustainable for more than another 50 years without substantial technological change. This does not even get into climate change related impacts on agriculture.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Absolutely, we are all very screwed, but that still won’t empower a minority to save the majority from itself.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      A good first step would involve avoiding (a) casting these events as species- or civilisation-ending events (they’re not) and (b) condescension towards the majority.
      - sneak 9y ago
        Willful ignorance of destruction and waste and inequality to perpetuate convenience is always worthy of condescension.
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        I don’t think the big problems facing us are tone, and underestimating the long term consequences.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    We've historically often engaged in unsustainable practices, like: 1. hunting whales for lamp oil 2. cutting down trees for fuel to make glass and build ships 3. using natural rubber 4. no sanitation in the cities 5. using horses for transportation 6. using well water in cities As these became unsustainable, alternatives were discovered and developed.
bluGill 9y ago
In fact big farmers are building the soil on their land. When you have a lot of land it is easy to do a scientific comparison of different farming methods and discover which yield better profits. When you have a small farm it is easy to ignore (if you want to) research. An extra $10 per acre over 80 acres is only $800, while that same $10/acre over 3000 acres is $30000. The $800 won't make the payment on the different equipment needed for best practice, while $30000 makes the payment and leaves a nice chunk on the bottom line. The other part of the above is getting that extra $10/year in profits needs 7 years of investment, until year for you make less profit, and the next 3 years you are more or less even (obviously each farming practice has a different payoff period, the above example is for no-till). Again, big farmers have the money to spare to try the new practice and when they see results they turn more fields over to the new system. The only time it pays in the long run to mine the soil is when the land will go to someone else in a couple years. A farmer who sees the big city wanting his land for a new development in a couple years should mine his soil. In all other cases farmers who care for the soil as an investment will make more money in the long run than farmers who mine the soil.

Overtonwindow 9y ago

Not likely, unless we turn away from corn and abusive practices. Farming has become such a money-losing venture that the only way to survive is to increase yield, and try to squeeze more out of the same acre of land. This, imo, leads to abuse.

devmunchies 9y ago
People consume too much meat and dairy, which requires lots of corn and soy for feed. Thats one reason why corn and soy is so heavily subsidized.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  Why does that make the production heavily subsidized? Surely the state doesn't need to subsidize what is already very popular?
  - bluGill 9y ago
    The state has a different concern: making sure you have enough to eat. One crop failure and people starve to death. We as a society have chosen to solve this problem by subsidizing farming ensuring that there are more crops grown every year than is strictly needed. As such farmers plant more crops than people will eat. This ensures that in bad years there is still enough food. You can argue that there is a better solution to the problem, but don't argue against subsidizes without a different solution.
- mod 9y ago
  You're right, but it doesn't have to. Switch to rabbit meat, for instance.

seiferteric 9y ago

What about the fact that our agriculture system is (mostly) open loop? Every time you harvest food and consume it, where do the waste products end up? I think we need to also work on closing this loop.

devmunchies 9y ago
sounds like a startup in the making.
- sschueller 9y ago
  There are some 'closed loop' farming startups: https://urbanfarmers.com/ https://urbanfarmers.com/
- seiferteric 9y ago
  I have heard of a seaweed farming company on here recently. The idea is you can harvest seaweed that absorbs nutrients from the sea, and use that for fertilizer. This is an ancient idea, but hopefully it could become common again.
abhinavkulkarni 9y ago
@seiferteric: Can you please explain this more? I don't quite understand what you mean by 'open loop'. Thanks.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  Not the OP, but essentially you take vegetables out of a field. You eat the vegetables. You poop. Your poop ends up in a sewage treatment plant. Nothing ends up back in the field. Instead we add fertilisers that we have mined out of the earth for the macro nutrients. It's not just sewage either. Every time you till the earth, you expose it to the air. This oxidises the minerals and often makes them unavailable for the plants. Because the fertiliser we add is very water soluble it drains through the water table and ends up in the rivers and eventually washes out to sea (or just clogs the rivers with algae). Tilling and pesticides also kill the organisms that are responsible for moving nutrients around under the earth. Additionally, we tend to plant mono-culture crops with short root structures. This stops a variety of plants from breaking down nutrients in the soil and moving them to the top layer of humus. So either we till deeper (exacerbating the problem) or we essentially lock all of the nutrients below the level that the plants can access. In the end, you basically are slowly extracting all of the bioavailable nutrients out of the soil, and depositing them in the sewage treatment fields. At the same time you are oxidising what's left and washing everything else out to the sea. Any fertility that remains is below the access of the plant roots (and probably not in a form that can be utilised right away). "Closing the loop" means looking at the places where we are losing fertility and making sure that it is looping back. So, if you take nutrients out in the form of food, we return it in the form of sewage. You avoid tilling and you plant a variety of crop varieties that circulate the nutrients in the soil layer. You avoid adding highly water soluble salts that simply leach out of the soil and into the water table. It sounds simple-ish, but it's actually quite a bit challenge. We don't really do a lot of research in this area (as far as I can tell). Most agricultural research is geared toward increasing yields and reducing costs as opposed to sustainability.

wavefunction 9y ago

I am doing my part in my backyard as I'm fortunate to live in an extra-judicial territory of my municipality so the regulations are sparse at the moment. Mulch, sun and water. I also dug a large bio-char pit I've been using to reduce wood-stuff into carbon and potash. I am eventually going to ammoniate these products and redistribute throughout the plot. I also underestimated the biochar hell-pit and buried and hosed-down a hot-burning pyre and one week later woke up to a tendril of smoke curling up from the pit which later turned back into a fire with additional fuel. I found it alarming and remarkable so be sure to be safe with pyrolysis, folks!

Sophistifunk 9y ago
I would like to know more about this "bio-char pit" could you point me to a URL or three?
- debacle 9y ago
  A good video series on the topic: http://skillcult.com/biochar-and-charcoal/ http://skillcult.com/biochar-and-charcoal/
  - Sophistifunk 9y ago
    Thanks!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

sampl 9y ago

Here's a great book on the subject, "New Roots for Agriculture" by Wes Jackson (forward by Wendell Berry) https://www.amazon.com/New-Roots-Agriculture-Farming-Ranching/dp/0803275625 https://www.amazon.com/New-Roots-Agriculture-Farming-Ranchin...

jfarlow 9y ago

Check out Trace Genomics [1] for a new company at QB3 that is taking a stab at quantifying what organisms are part of a particular farm's microbiome. They sequence the DNA of everything in a given soil sample, then figure out who's DNA is who's - providing a snapshot of what life is living in that soil. And with enough snapshots, a farmer can actually start to develop a quantitative picture of the web of inhabitants in a given parcel of land. And then act on that information. [1] https://www.tracegenomics.com https://www.tracegenomics.com

oldandtired 9y ago

Like a lot of things, soil infertility is a symptom of a much larger societal problem. Within society, there are many different competing groups that have "the answer". Progressives want a specific list, conservatives want another list, city dwellers want a list (irrespective of being progressive or conservative), country dwellers want another, business owners want their own list, workers want another, government wants a list, law enforcement wants one, radicals want one, etc., stc., etc. All of these lists of wants are at cross purposes. All of it is based on self-interest. Very little of it is based on a wider responsibility for all citizens and the country that supports them. This won't change as people won't give up on their list of wants. The attitude of "us and them" just reinforces the basic problems. Is there a solution? Most certainly. But it requires a change in the basic attitudes of every citizen and most will object to having to face who and what they are. When a society is focus on "rights" instead of responsibilities then the society loses its ability to think in the large. When a government is focussed on it continuation and power it loses sight of its responsibility to build society. There is no short term solution that is a quick fix. In the case of America, it is heading down the path of civil war and devastation because pretty well every level in the American society is in the mindset of "them and us". This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes. Law enforcement has forgotten that they are there to serve and protect the citizenry and not themselves. Government is self-serving. Corporations are treating their customers as slaves and a resource to control. The general population is focussed on their own little problems of day to day self-gratification.

closeparen 9y ago
I'd even say the absence of a socially constructed responsibility to sacrifice and conform for the sake of tradition and stability are what make us uniquely American, and I'm damn proud of it. Responsibility, sacrifice, conformity, keeping your head down, deferring to your betters on questions of government policy and administration... these features have been dominant in human societies across the globe and over millennia. Maybe because it's the only enduring architecture. Still, I have to admire the American experiment in saying "fuck all that."
- oldandtired 9y ago

pdfernhout 9y ago

It's long been known how to fix soil; see for example from 1987: "Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach" by R.W. Widdowson: https://www.elsevier.com/books/towards-holistic-agriculture/widdowson/978-0-08-034211-5 https://www.elsevier.com/books/towards-holistic-agriculture/... Or from 1911: https://permaculturenews.org/files/farmers_of_forty_centuries.pdf https://permaculturenews.org/files/farmers_of_forty_centurie... More: http://soilandhealth.org/ http://soilandhealth.org/ Adding rock dust works wonders too: https://remineralize.org/ https://remineralize.org/ My wife and I wrote a FOSS garden simulator in the 1990s (a six+ person-year labor of love) to help people understand some of this: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html I got the idea while working as the Program Administrator on summer for the NOFA-NJ Organic Farm Certification Program in the later 1980s, but it took many years (including more education in grad school in biology) to make the software. See especially from the help system of that software on how conventional agriculture destroys the soil: http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/help100/00000385.htm http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/help100/00000385.htm "In the soil, tiny charged particles called micelles usually have many areas of negative charge (called sites) on their surfaces. Positively charged ions (cations) are drawn to these negative charge sites and stick to the clay particles (are adsorbed). In most soils, 99% of soil cations can be found attached to micelles (clay particles and organic matter) and 1% can be found in solution. Mineral cations in the soil (mainly Ca2+, Mg2+, K+ and Na+) maintain an equilibrium between adsorption to the negative sites and solution in the soil water. This equilibrium produces exchanges -- when one cation detaches from a site (leaving it free), another cation attaches to it. Therefore the negatively charged sites are called cation exchange sites. The number of these sites per unit weight of dry soil is called the cation exchange capacity, or the capacity of the soil to hold cations. Because any cations loose in the soil solution are vulnerable to leaching as water flows out of the soil, a high cation exchange capacity is always desirable. Cation exchange sites act as a sort of mineral buffer for the soil, storing minerals important to plant and animal growth for long periods of time. The attraction of cations to cation exchange sites is strongest for H+ ions (which make the soil acidic) and for polyvalent ions such as Ca2+ and Al3+. The weakest attraction is for monovalent ions such as K+. When ammonium nitrate fertilizers are added to the soil, the ammonium ions (NH4+) are strongly attracted to cation exchange sites because of their high valence (4). The ammonium ions displace many other cations which are then leached out of the soil and lost to plants. Some of the ammonium ions are converted to nitrate during nitrification (by aerobic soil bacteria); the process produces excess H+ ions which acidify the soil (causing earthworms and other soil organisms to die or desert the area). (For an excellent description of cation exchange capacity, see Widdowson's Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach.)" That's a big reason why organic agriculture which focuses on building up organic matter in the soil (which increases cation exchange capacity) is better for soil health (and human health too, as the plants are better fed). That's reflected in the article when it describes two lumps of soil put on wire mesh that behave differently -- one falling apart as dust (from lack of organic matter and so not much CEC) and one clumped together (more organic matter and CEC). Wish I had time to bring that Delphi app to the web as a JavaScript app... And improve it further. I don't know the exact numbers to completely quantify this, but I suspect poor farming practices on the US prairies that have reduced (in some places) six feet of topsoil to six inches of top soil have released a vast amount of carbon from lost organic matter into the air and contributed to climate change.

deleted 9y ago

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Twirrim 9y ago

What's somewhat amusing is this is essentially talking about a variation on the four course crop rotation, a farming practice that dates back to the 17th century, and at one stage dominated the farming practices of Europe. from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system > In the Norfolk four-course system, wheat was grown in the first year, turnips in the second, followed by barley, with clover and ryegrass undersown, in the third. The clover and ryegrass were grazed or cut for feed in the fourth year. The turnips were used for feeding cattle and sheep in the winter. This new system was cumulative in effect, for the fodder crops eaten by the livestock produced large supplies of previously scarce animal manure, which in turn was richer because the animals were better fed. When the sheep grazed the fields, their waste fertilized the soil, promoting heavier cereal yields in following years.

nhebb 9y ago
It's been used state-side for a few hundred years as well. I learned about it in my high school American history class. Colonial era tobacco farmers experienced deleted soil conditions, so they turned to 4 crop rotations. My dad had a farm back in the 70's, and he rotated crops for this reason. It's not a lost art among farmers.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  > My dad had a farm back in the 70's, and he rotated crops for this reason. It's not a lost art among farmers. Unfortunately that sounds a bit like 'no true Scotsman'.
stinos 9y ago
> dates back to the 17th century Note that crop rotation itself (2 course/3 course) is much, much older. And Wikipedia claims it was first done in the 16th century in what now is Belgium. Actually, there are a bunch of things presented as 'new' in the article while I read nothing which I never read before, and many of the solutions bascialy come down to 'do it as our ancestors did it' so it's not all that new either. The vast scale of it though is new. And the rigid economic system attached to it.

bostik 9y ago

Regenerating soil is nothing new, really. The Amazonian tribes learned how to cultivate a rich black soil[0] long time ago. There is ongoing research on how to make that work again on an industrial scale - and with sufficiently short timespans. The article mentions that even common composting helps, but the problem tends to be how to prevent it from running off. No wonder. As anything in biology, soil regeneration takes time. Having your fresh biomass flow elsewhere runs counter to the purpose. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

sigmaprimus 9y ago
I agree this is nothing new, and although I tend to believe that no till is an essential part of healing the soil it will not work alone if nothing is done to break up the agricultural economic complex controlled by the multinational companies only interested in profit. A good book published in 1975 written by Masanobu Fukuoka called "One Straw Revolution" is very informative on this subject easy reading and obtainable for free by searching it's title followed by .pdf in your favorite S.E.

MisterBastahrd 9y ago

We could probably simply compost the produce and meat that gets thrown away from grocery stores and fix that problem. A moderate sized grocery store in a small town is going to throw away a ton or two of compostable material a month. This all goes into a landfill. Most of these stores are very good about recycling dry paper waste... but do nothing about the rest of their waste sans cooking oil.

beautifulfreak 9y ago

Paul Stamets has studied the soil restorative effects of mycellium mushroom and published a number of videos. In this Ted Talk at the 10 minute mark, there's a demonstration of just how rapidly a patch of ground can be transformed compared to other commonly used methods, even land polluted with diesel fuel, which the mycellium rapidly breaks down into harmless compounds. All the videos are fascinating. https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world/transcript#t-452343 https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_c...

exDM69 9y ago

I recently took part in a course on doing farm work with horses. It was a large garden where all the farm work had been done exclusively with horses for about 10 years, after decades of using tractors. The tractors had turned the soil into hard, clumpy clay which yielded bad crops and required more and more fertilizers every year. In about a decade of using horses, manure and traditional methods, the topsoil had turned nice and soft and nutrient-rich. Not at all like the hard clay my grandparents' farm and the owners of the garden were more than happy with the results. Working with horses was slow, hard and laborious work but it was a lot of fun! Much more fun than doing the same with tractors (which I also think is quite fun). Unfortunately, going back to horses or oxen never going to be viable in a large scale. The recent trends in agriculture have been making machines larger and larger to reduce the amount of labor required, causing the soil to be packed even harder, requiring more tilling for the next crop. Maybe autonomous farm equipment could reverse the trend, as machines could be made smaller without increasing the amount of human labor.

dredmorbius 9y ago
I've been looking into the history and mechanisation of agriculture over the past 200 years or so, it's a pretty fascinating history. As of 1800, you still had largely wooden plough, with an iron ploughshare, drawn by a horse or oxen. The acre is actually a unit of work -- the amount of land a man and horse could work in a day, and the German term, Tagwerk (literally, "day's work") directly reflects that. The working time wasn't a full 8-hour day, as the animals would both tire and needed to forage. I believe ~4 hours was more typical. By the mid-19th century, all-iron, and finally, steel, ploughs were available. In the United States, the first combination ("combine") harversters were drawn by teams of up to 40 horses. (Simply managing the daught of those animals, distributed through swingletrees, was a significant undertaking.) As of 1900 or so, the U.S. had a population of ~20 million horses, peaking at 25 million by 1920. These consumed 20% of the agricultural production of the country. Cities such as New York had populations upwards of 200,000 horses, with concommitant impacts on street pollution and hygiene. (Interestingly: railroads increased the demand for horses and mules as these were the best solution to the "last mile" problem of bringing goods and people to and from railway depots.) http://www.cowboyway.com/What/HorsePopulation.htm http://www.cowboyway.com/What/HorsePopulation.htm The first viable tractors started appearing shortly after 1900, and didn't have tremendous power by modern standards (20hp is pretty common). (There were some earlier mobile designs, and even stationary traction distribution systems based on steam power.) Once reliable, these were popular as they could be worked all day, fuel was cheaper than feed, and there were no vet bills. I find the history of this (and other ag elements) pretty fascinating. Much of the information is drawn from Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History (1992) which discusses the evolution of history from a lens of energy and fuel sources. He's revised the book tremendously with Energy and Civilization, out just this year. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization

madshiva 9y ago

Can half of America be given back to native American?

kwhitefoot 9y ago

> Promoting soil health comes down to three basic practices: Make sure the soil is covered with plants at all times, diversify what it grows and don’t disrupt it. What this means in practice is rotating crops, so fields aren’t trying to support the same plant year after year. And it means using techniques like “cover-cropping”–planting a secondary plant like grasses, legumes or vegetables–between rows of crops or on other exposed soil instead of leaving it bare. This is hardly news. How come Norfolk crop rotation has been 'forgotten'? See this Britannica article: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system

kwhitefoot 9y ago

The problem is not going to be really solved until we get rid of the idea that a corporation can own land. The big agribusinesses don't value the land as much as society needs them too so of course they don't look after it. Land is a common resource and no one business should have unfettered control of it.

bluGill 9y ago
That is false. Big business cares about land more than the small farmers It is the big farmers that care the most for the land. They are big enough that they have collected the data and seen that investments in the land pay off. When you have one field it is really hard to test for yourself how different practices pay off. The university will tell you "go no till, after 7 years your yields will be bigger than if you till the land every year", but small farmers generally think "yeah right, it works for your soils over there, but here we have different soils and so that won't work". By contrast the large farmers have enough fields that they are willing to try every new practice in a couple places to see if it really works for them. The largest farms are now able to scientifically show that they are building soil every year. Second, in Iowa corporations are banned form owning farms. There are exceptions for seed companies and equipment manufactures, but those are specific loopholes with limits to what can be done. I work for John Deere (but of course do not speak for them), and we have to be very careful that the places where we test our prototypes does not count as farms. (generally the crop is destroyed before harvest - I don't know how the harvester division does their testing though)
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  I was not contrasting big and small farmers. I was contrasting big business behaviour with what society needs.
  - bluGill 9y ago
    True, but big business behavior is often closer aligned with what society needs than small farmers.
9y ago

escape_goat 9y ago

> The federal crop insurance program is based on farmers planting the same crop in the same place each year to have a record for production, and it is not flexible enough to account for practices like cover crops. If you want to take an actionable item away from this article that fits (potentially) the skillsets of your friends and neighbours on Hacker News, it is this one. This is a data problem and an actuarial problem. Solving it can result in net social benefit disproportionate to the investment in infrastructure, politicial capital (to change legislation), and (already existing) government programs required. I don't know if, politically, there are any groups who would be organized to swing into action in opposition to federal crop insurance reform, but they or any who may shake out of the math (presumably there's some practices and crops cough corn that benefit from less information, relatively speaking) have an uphill battle to fight against a variety of constituent-motivating narratives. It's hard to argue against big government spending when tens of millions of dollars is at stake.

24gttghh 9y ago
So, after the Dust Bowl, there were all kinds of things promoted by the Federal Gov't like crop rotation, contour farming, and planting wind breaks to keep the soil from blowing away. When did we forget that lesson? And I looked up what I think is an actual rule regarding Crop Rotation when it comes to the FCIC[0]: >(B) ASSIGNED YIELD.—If the producer does not provide satisfactory evidence of the yield of a commodity under subparagraph (A), the producer shall be assigned— (i) a yield that is not less than 65 percent of the transitional yield of the producer (adjusted to reflect actual production reflected in the records acceptable to the Corporation for continuous years), as specified in regulations issued by the Corporation based on production history requirements; (ii) a yield determined by the Corporation, in the case of— (I) a producer that has not had a share of the production of the insured crop for more than two crop years, as determined by the Secretary; (II) a producer that produces an agricultural commodity on land that has not been farmed by the producer; or (III) a producer that rotates a crop produced on a farm to a crop that has not been produced on the farm; Just search the doc for "rotate". It is only mentioned once. I think the FCIC only applies to wheat and some other grains. [0]https://www.agriculture.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/75-30%20-%20Agricultural%20Adjustment%20Act%20Of%201938%20&%20Federal%20Crop%20Insurance%20Act1.pdf https://www.agriculture.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/75-30%20-%2...

martin_a 9y ago

Has anybody already tried to put Brawndo on the fields? I think it got electrolytes, that should help!

mmagin 9y ago

As has been hinted at by other commenters, I think the big thing that's wrong with modern industrial agriculture (including some "organic" agriculture) is that it typically does not add carbon to the soil (via composted plant matter, manure, etc) and it also unnecessarily disturbs the soil structure, allowing the organic carbon compounds in the soil to become excessively exposed to the atmosphere where they'll break down or be eroded. (No, I don't have specific sources for this, it's mostly a combination of what I've read from the Permaculture folks and personal observation in my own garden over the past 5 years.)

vram22 9y ago

As a teenager, I had read this book called The Forest and The Sea, by Marston Bates, which explains many of the fundamental principles of ecology that underlie these issues. https://www.google.co.in/search?q=book+the+forest+and+the+sea& https://www.google.co.in/search?q=book+the+forest+and+the+se... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marston_Bates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marston_Bates I thought it was a pretty good and informative book.