9 ms·

Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues

100 points by a_imho 9y ago

nvahalik 9y ago
If I may, a wonderful book called “The Alchemy of Air” by Thomas Hager is a very enlightening book on this very same issue during the late 1800s. EDIT: I was mobile earlier but wanted to throw a bit of a teaser in here. This book (along with Hager's "The Demon Under the Microscope) are excellent reads and I high recommend them. Essentially, there were many "doomsday scenarios" wherein the context of the late 1800s was that vast supplies of natural fertilizer were used up and people were very worried about food supplies. Long story short, the "fixing" of nitrogen from the air not only alleviated the short term issues but also had a huge influence in wars and who was in power in the early 20th Century. Consequently, this books ends with some pretty questions surrounding the impact of what all of this extraneous nitrogen might do long term—the impacts of which are already seen in rivers and streams... but the ocean and other areas as well.
- Red_Tarsius 9y ago
  > Essentially, there were many "doomsday scenarios" wherein the context of the late 1800s was that vast supplies of natural fertilizer were used up and people were very worried about food supplies. Assuming scientists will come up with a new technology is a bad survival strategy. At this rate, we expect our children to find a way around climate change, ocean acidification and soil erosion. Mankind is one fat dude who'd rather dream about diet pills than stop eating.
  - workthrowaway27 9y ago
    I don't think we really expect our children to do that. It's just there aren't any good options right now. The world is so dependent on hydrocarbons and large scale agriculture that there is no viable alternative.
    - socialist_coder 9y ago
      Not viable? Just depends on who you ask or what your definition of viable is. We need to rip that bandage off now and reduce our standard of living by however much it takes to get into a sustainable symbiosis with our planet. Fossil fuel companies: bankrupt Cheap Chinese goods: gone Meat in every meal: nope Cheap processed foods: gone It would be a huge lifestyle change for everyone on the planet. Difficult, but certainly viable.
      - workthrowaway27 9y ago
        Fossil fuel companies being bankrupt is not viable. Fossil fuels allow the modern world to function. How are you going to get food distributed across the country without fossil fuels? How are you going to make sure critical infrastructure continues to run? Edit: I'm not saying fossil fuel dependency is a good thing, but it's a fact of life, and any realistic proposal for moving away from fossil fuels needs to start with accurately understanding just how important they are.
        socialist_coder 9y ago
        None of those problems are difficult to solve if we actually care. If we want to move off fossil fuels, we could do so in a couple decades. Also, maybe the fact that we have to distribute food across the country is part of the problem. If food prices in areas that can't grow food nearby go up 100x then people will move.
        workthrowaway27 9y ago
        Hmmmm, I mostly agree. Except I think our definitions of difficult are different. People are complaining about how hard it is to move out of the Bay Area, which they can't afford to live in. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to move millions of people so they can live closer to food sources. Those people also need jobs so they can afford food, and it's hard or impossible to move industries that are capital intensive or depend on natural resources. It's pretty obvious that eventually we'll have to deal with these problems, but I don't see how society will start the process voluntarily. It's too disruptive and there is no financial incentive to do so. (And even if one country decides to, then they lose out relative to every country that decides not to, so it really has to be an everyone or no one thing).
iamcasen 9y ago
Is organic farming all that much better? Are there any concrete numbers that indicate how that timeline of 60 years might be extended with different farming practices? It seems to me like we might have to make a big push towards solar-powered hydroponics or something of that nature. How depressing. Maybe soylent green is more of a realistic future than we thought...
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  In my personal experience, organic farming causes much more soil loss than conventional farming. Organic dryland cereal farming depends on tillage for weed & pest control. Not only is the land plowed during planting and after harvest, every third year the land is left fallow. While left fallow it is plowed monthly. Conventional farmers have substantially reduced their usage of tillage increasing their chemical usage instead. Those chemicals may be not be good for the ecosystem, but they result in orders of magnitude less soil loss.
  - nas 9y ago
    Speaking as someone who grew up on a grain farm and has owned a farm, this is correct. Obviously it is hard to generalize but low or no tillage farming has vastly lower soil erosion compared to conventional or organic tillage practices. For some reason, people have the set idea that organic practice must be good because its what our forefathers did. In reality, little we do regarding farming is actually sustainable. You are hauling tonnes of material away from the field every year. Those things are not going back, whether you are organic or conventional. Also, it is a matter of relative severity of problems. Soil loss is much worse than depletion of soil nutrients. As said, organic is potentially much worse for soil loss (although different practices like intensive use of cover crops can help).
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    no-till is incompatible with organic farming? Hadn't heard about that, a shame if true. I'm not a farmer, but I had heard there were a variety of strategies that would qualify as organic, e.g. cover crops that choke out the weeds, or plastic sheeting over the ground to bake the weeds & pests.
gumby 9y ago
You merely have to spend a brief time in California's Central Valley to realize that it's an extractive industry (consuming topsoil, water from a non-renewable aquifer, and oil) no different from mining. When you see orchards plowed up for replanting not only the old trees are removed but all the topsoil too. Robots are our only hope.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  We just need to grow things in sensible places with better water resources. There is plenty of unused land in the US to do that.
  - mythrwy 9y ago
    Most of places don't have suitable climates for the type of crops grown in CA though. It's a very special place. On the other hand you could fill an office full of programmers in North Dakota.
    - sliverstorm 9y ago
      Which is why in a sense it's a travesty that commodity crops are grown in CA with scarce water.
      - fjsolwmv 9y ago
        The nondesert part of CA ha plenty of water. but people insist on living in the desert.
  - hourislate 9y ago
    If you like to eat fruit and vegetables in the winter then you need to thank California. It has 6 growing seasons feeding a lot of the USA all year around with fresh produce. It is the breadbasket of North America.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    California has lots of water resources. Just a little bit better management and all those orchards can get watered. Nuts are high value in dollars, nutrition, and taste. We need something the Chinese want to trade for iPhones.
graeme 9y ago
Is there any counterpoint to this? My great worry about us (and capitalism) is that we are good at short term allocation, bad at long run planning. Is there a way around this soil problem, or some way in which the stat is misleading?
- mc32 9y ago
  Including capitalism on there seems gratuitous. USSR was no better at land stewardship than us. Cuba, N Korea, the same. It's more about human nature than capitalism or any economic system in particular. If anything capitalism is capable of including externalities, if we choose to. If we don't, eventually, we will face the issue, as many others. Not the ideal way to dal with issues which are decades in the future. Classical example is national debt and of course, climactic change.
  - evanlivingston 9y ago
    In my understanding Cuba has shown remarkable development in it's land stewardship after the collapse of their trade with the the USSR. They developed local and sustainable food distribution systems that don't rely on industrially produced herbicides and fertilizers.
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      Is that because they had nowhere to sell sugar anymore, nor money to afford herbicides and fertilizers?
  - Daishiman 9y ago
    It's funny that you mention Cuba because they actually do take care of preserving their soils, unlike most of the Caribbean which has completely degraded soild due to centuries of sugarcane plantations with no regards to the environment whatsoever. http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/08/sustainable-technologies-safeguard-the-soil-in-cuba/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/08/sustainable-technologies-safe...
    - 9y ago
abakker 9y ago
I've pitched this before, but here goes: If someone can come up with an adequate filter for pharmaceuticals, it seems that the recapture of human waste is our best path forward. Yes, there is a logistics problem for transferring it, potentially, dehydration is the best method, but we consume the output of our farms, and it seems that on a conservation of mass basis, we should be sending it back to the farms when we're done with it.
- j4ship 9y ago
  Or you can just account for not collecting waste of people that take drugs from a list ... you could have people that are part of the program and get some kind of crypto token for truning in their grade-A poo. Well call them the Elite Shitters
  - nkrisc 9y ago
    Well I don't think you'd collect waste at the individual level, that seems absurdly arduous. Most developed nations already have an excellent pipeline (literally) for collecting and centralizing human waste. It would probably make more sense to collect it somewhere along the line at sewage treatment facilities. There would still be many other challenges with that.
- mooman219 9y ago
  If by waste you mean excrement then this is not a good idea in the slightest. First you have bacteria, viruses, and parasites that must be killed off. If it isn't properly treated, you end up with a situation similar to that of what we saw in the recent North Korean refugee who suffered from parasites. After that, as you mentioned, there are pharmaceuticals which are notoriously hard to filter out. Next on the list is heavy metals that can become concentrated in excrement. Even after addressing these concerns, if the process to treat the waste is too costly, then there goes the benefit. I would compare some of the challenges this faces to those that are faced when turning salt water into fresh water through desalination (probably not a direct comparison).
  - 9y ago
macawfish 9y ago
tech enthusiasts need to seriously consider taking permaculture and polyculture out of the fringe bucket
JoeAltmaier 9y ago
The numbers are way off. It took around 10 years to get 4" of topsoil on my 80 acres of timber soil (clay). Not 1000 years. And we have 111ft of that kind of soil here in Iowa. It going to take a hell of a long time to go through that. Its been farmed since the early 1800's. And not all gone, not by far. I didn't read any further after that, maybe the article does have something to say. But I doubt it.
- Blazespinnaker 9y ago
  If the world comes knocking for your soil, you’ll go through it pretty fast.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  Sorry, but I'm leaning towards trusting the FAO as opposed to anonymous anecdotal evidence. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that you may be on the top end of the world-wide average, but how does your 80 acres of usable soil help the rest of the world when push comes to shove?
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Really? With the numbers so absolutely at odds, it only takes a single sample to disprove outrageous claims. So don't believe me if you like (though I could go dig a hole and take a picture of the black line that separates topsoil from subsoil), but its probably more outrageous to cling to the idea that somehow Iowa is at the top end of a curve that goes from 10 years to 1000 years.
- yungchin 9y ago
  The context for that quote was missing I think (that is, missing from the original article, not your comment), but it makes more sense if they're talking about turning rock into fertile soil. You would have had a whole succession of different types of plants to slowly work the rock surface. Then humans show up, rip out all the trees that kept that hard-won top soil in place, and it all runs off out to sea in no time. Basically it's about places like Iceland, not Iowa, I guess.
- 9y ago
CapitalistCartr 9y ago
I've been reading topsoil doomsday stories since the seventies. I've seen them written from the thirties. They completely ignore modern farming. We don't rely on topsoil, or care. Modern farming, especially since the fifties, is chemistry. The soil is merely a growing medium. We test it and add whatever is needed via petrochemical fertilizers. Better soil is better for the farmer, but far from necessary. And whomever says a millennium to make 30mm of topsoil knows nothing about the subject. I've seen nature make that much in less than a decade many times.
- vbuwivbiu 9y ago
  and minerals ?
  - CapitalistCartr 9y ago
    Yes, my mother's favorite fertilizer on the farm was 8-12-16 with micronutrients, which were mostly minerals.
  - pdfernhout 9y ago
    Ground-up rock dust works wonders: https://remineralize.org/ https://remineralize.org/ "Through our education and outreach, projects, research, and advocacy, Remineralize the Earth facilitates a worldwide movement that brings together gardeners and farmers, scientists and policymakers and the public to create better soils, better food, and a better planet. ... “Remineralization is one of the most important missions on the planet at this time. Together, we can remineralize gardens, farms, landscapes, and forests. We can grow nutrient-dense food and improve the nutrition and well-being of all life. And in the larger picture, it’s a key strategy to stabilize the climate!”"
    - vbuwivbiu 9y ago
      interesting, because the mineral content of food is a matter of chance usually. For example certain plants accumulate certain minerals more than others (e.g. brazil-nuts:selenium, cocoa:nickel) but the soil they're grown in may have more or less of those minerals, so it's hard to control one's intake
peterwwillis 9y ago
Apparently this same story has been circulating since at least 2014, using the same quotes from the same people and organizations, from some menial Googling. So far no sources for any claims in the article, though an agronomy student on Reddit appeared to back up the 30% number. This seems like clickbait to me. Edit: This article is from December 5, 2014. https://www.ashlandmass.com/DocumentCenter/Home/View/446 https://www.ashlandmass.com/DocumentCenter/Home/View/446
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gdubs 9y ago
If you're interested in looking deeply at alternative agricultural practices, I recommend "Restoration Agriculture". [1] It's rooted in permaculture, but more broadly about restoring biomes that are naturally abundant and diverse. The central hypothesis is that we've become far too invested in annual plants. They require and enormous amount of labor and petrochemicals to sustain. The book presents alternative methods that, like permaculture in general, look to harness natural processes and perennial trees and shrubs to great effect. 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16441733-restoration-agriculture https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16441733-restoration-agr...
JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Farming will be obsolete well within 60 years. Direct manufacture of foodstuffs will arrive before that. Already folks build machines that take in water and electricity and some organic components, and produce food. How long before a nano machine sews together C,H,O and N into carbohydrate chains on command? Then, electricity will equal food. Topsoil, climate will soon become irrelevant to producing foodstuffs.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  Modern agriculture is turning Oil into Foodstuff anyway. That's why Oil is so expensive while agriculture is universally subsidied.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Don't know about the expensive part. But it also requires farmland, soil, chemicals. The idea is, dispense with all that, including transportation, and create starch, sugar etc at the point of consumption directly. Or baby steps in that direction. Heck, even 'organic' farming can be seen as working in this direction if it wasn't so expensive otherwise.
- polotics 9y ago
  + Magnesium, Zinc, Calcium, Copper, etc all in bioavailable compounds? You got yourself a very expensive meal sir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability

100 points by a_imho 9y ago

If I may, a wonderful book called “The Alchemy of Air” by Thomas Hager is a very enlightening book on this very same issue during the late 1800s. EDIT: I was mobile earlier but wanted to throw a bit of a teaser in here. This book (along with Hager's "The Demon Under the Microscope) are excellent reads and I high recommend them. Essentially, there were many "doomsday scenarios" wherein the context of the late 1800s was that vast supplies of natural fertilizer were used up and people were very worried about food supplies. Long story short, the "fixing" of nitrogen from the air not only alleviated the short term issues but also had a huge influence in wars and who was in power in the early 20th Century. Consequently, this books ends with some pretty questions surrounding the impact of what all of this extraneous nitrogen might do long term—the impacts of which are already seen in rivers and streams... but the ocean and other areas as well.

Red_Tarsius 9y ago
> Essentially, there were many "doomsday scenarios" wherein the context of the late 1800s was that vast supplies of natural fertilizer were used up and people were very worried about food supplies. Assuming scientists will come up with a new technology is a bad survival strategy. At this rate, we expect our children to find a way around climate change, ocean acidification and soil erosion. Mankind is one fat dude who'd rather dream about diet pills than stop eating.
- workthrowaway27 9y ago
  I don't think we really expect our children to do that. It's just there aren't any good options right now. The world is so dependent on hydrocarbons and large scale agriculture that there is no viable alternative.
  - socialist_coder 9y ago
    Not viable? Just depends on who you ask or what your definition of viable is. We need to rip that bandage off now and reduce our standard of living by however much it takes to get into a sustainable symbiosis with our planet. Fossil fuel companies: bankrupt Cheap Chinese goods: gone Meat in every meal: nope Cheap processed foods: gone It would be a huge lifestyle change for everyone on the planet. Difficult, but certainly viable.
    - workthrowaway27 9y ago
      Fossil fuel companies being bankrupt is not viable. Fossil fuels allow the modern world to function. How are you going to get food distributed across the country without fossil fuels? How are you going to make sure critical infrastructure continues to run? Edit: I'm not saying fossil fuel dependency is a good thing, but it's a fact of life, and any realistic proposal for moving away from fossil fuels needs to start with accurately understanding just how important they are.
      - socialist_coder 9y ago
        None of those problems are difficult to solve if we actually care. If we want to move off fossil fuels, we could do so in a couple decades. Also, maybe the fact that we have to distribute food across the country is part of the problem. If food prices in areas that can't grow food nearby go up 100x then people will move.
        workthrowaway27 9y ago
        Hmmmm, I mostly agree. Except I think our definitions of difficult are different. People are complaining about how hard it is to move out of the Bay Area, which they can't afford to live in. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to move millions of people so they can live closer to food sources. Those people also need jobs so they can afford food, and it's hard or impossible to move industries that are capital intensive or depend on natural resources. It's pretty obvious that eventually we'll have to deal with these problems, but I don't see how society will start the process voluntarily. It's too disruptive and there is no financial incentive to do so. (And even if one country decides to, then they lose out relative to every country that decides not to, so it really has to be an everyone or no one thing).

iamcasen 9y ago

Is organic farming all that much better? Are there any concrete numbers that indicate how that timeline of 60 years might be extended with different farming practices? It seems to me like we might have to make a big push towards solar-powered hydroponics or something of that nature. How depressing. Maybe soylent green is more of a realistic future than we thought...

bryanlarsen 9y ago
In my personal experience, organic farming causes much more soil loss than conventional farming. Organic dryland cereal farming depends on tillage for weed & pest control. Not only is the land plowed during planting and after harvest, every third year the land is left fallow. While left fallow it is plowed monthly. Conventional farmers have substantially reduced their usage of tillage increasing their chemical usage instead. Those chemicals may be not be good for the ecosystem, but they result in orders of magnitude less soil loss.
- nas 9y ago
  Speaking as someone who grew up on a grain farm and has owned a farm, this is correct. Obviously it is hard to generalize but low or no tillage farming has vastly lower soil erosion compared to conventional or organic tillage practices. For some reason, people have the set idea that organic practice must be good because its what our forefathers did. In reality, little we do regarding farming is actually sustainable. You are hauling tonnes of material away from the field every year. Those things are not going back, whether you are organic or conventional. Also, it is a matter of relative severity of problems. Soil loss is much worse than depletion of soil nutrients. As said, organic is potentially much worse for soil loss (although different practices like intensive use of cover crops can help).
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  no-till is incompatible with organic farming? Hadn't heard about that, a shame if true. I'm not a farmer, but I had heard there were a variety of strategies that would qualify as organic, e.g. cover crops that choke out the weeds, or plastic sheeting over the ground to bake the weeds & pests.

gumby 9y ago

You merely have to spend a brief time in California's Central Valley to realize that it's an extractive industry (consuming topsoil, water from a non-renewable aquifer, and oil) no different from mining. When you see orchards plowed up for replanting not only the old trees are removed but all the topsoil too. Robots are our only hope.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
We just need to grow things in sensible places with better water resources. There is plenty of unused land in the US to do that.
- mythrwy 9y ago
  Most of places don't have suitable climates for the type of crops grown in CA though. It's a very special place. On the other hand you could fill an office full of programmers in North Dakota.
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    Which is why in a sense it's a travesty that commodity crops are grown in CA with scarce water.
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      The nondesert part of CA ha plenty of water. but people insist on living in the desert.
- hourislate 9y ago
  If you like to eat fruit and vegetables in the winter then you need to thank California. It has 6 growing seasons feeding a lot of the USA all year around with fresh produce. It is the breadbasket of North America.
- njarboe 9y ago
  California has lots of water resources. Just a little bit better management and all those orchards can get watered. Nuts are high value in dollars, nutrition, and taste. We need something the Chinese want to trade for iPhones.

graeme 9y ago

Is there any counterpoint to this? My great worry about us (and capitalism) is that we are good at short term allocation, bad at long run planning. Is there a way around this soil problem, or some way in which the stat is misleading?

mc32 9y ago
Including capitalism on there seems gratuitous. USSR was no better at land stewardship than us. Cuba, N Korea, the same. It's more about human nature than capitalism or any economic system in particular. If anything capitalism is capable of including externalities, if we choose to. If we don't, eventually, we will face the issue, as many others. Not the ideal way to dal with issues which are decades in the future. Classical example is national debt and of course, climactic change.
- evanlivingston 9y ago
  In my understanding Cuba has shown remarkable development in it's land stewardship after the collapse of their trade with the the USSR. They developed local and sustainable food distribution systems that don't rely on industrially produced herbicides and fertilizers.
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    Is that because they had nowhere to sell sugar anymore, nor money to afford herbicides and fertilizers?
- Daishiman 9y ago
  It's funny that you mention Cuba because they actually do take care of preserving their soils, unlike most of the Caribbean which has completely degraded soild due to centuries of sugarcane plantations with no regards to the environment whatsoever. http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/08/sustainable-technologies-safeguard-the-soil-in-cuba/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/08/sustainable-technologies-safe...
  - 9y ago

abakker 9y ago

I've pitched this before, but here goes: If someone can come up with an adequate filter for pharmaceuticals, it seems that the recapture of human waste is our best path forward. Yes, there is a logistics problem for transferring it, potentially, dehydration is the best method, but we consume the output of our farms, and it seems that on a conservation of mass basis, we should be sending it back to the farms when we're done with it.

j4ship 9y ago
Or you can just account for not collecting waste of people that take drugs from a list ... you could have people that are part of the program and get some kind of crypto token for truning in their grade-A poo. Well call them the Elite Shitters
- nkrisc 9y ago
  Well I don't think you'd collect waste at the individual level, that seems absurdly arduous. Most developed nations already have an excellent pipeline (literally) for collecting and centralizing human waste. It would probably make more sense to collect it somewhere along the line at sewage treatment facilities. There would still be many other challenges with that.
mooman219 9y ago
If by waste you mean excrement then this is not a good idea in the slightest. First you have bacteria, viruses, and parasites that must be killed off. If it isn't properly treated, you end up with a situation similar to that of what we saw in the recent North Korean refugee who suffered from parasites. After that, as you mentioned, there are pharmaceuticals which are notoriously hard to filter out. Next on the list is heavy metals that can become concentrated in excrement. Even after addressing these concerns, if the process to treat the waste is too costly, then there goes the benefit. I would compare some of the challenges this faces to those that are faced when turning salt water into fresh water through desalination (probably not a direct comparison).
- 9y ago

macawfish 9y ago

tech enthusiasts need to seriously consider taking permaculture and polyculture out of the fringe bucket

JoeAltmaier 9y ago

The numbers are way off. It took around 10 years to get 4" of topsoil on my 80 acres of timber soil (clay). Not 1000 years. And we have 111ft of that kind of soil here in Iowa. It going to take a hell of a long time to go through that. Its been farmed since the early 1800's. And not all gone, not by far. I didn't read any further after that, maybe the article does have something to say. But I doubt it.

Blazespinnaker 9y ago
If the world comes knocking for your soil, you’ll go through it pretty fast.
nxsynonym 9y ago
Sorry, but I'm leaning towards trusting the FAO as opposed to anonymous anecdotal evidence. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that you may be on the top end of the world-wide average, but how does your 80 acres of usable soil help the rest of the world when push comes to shove?
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Really? With the numbers so absolutely at odds, it only takes a single sample to disprove outrageous claims. So don't believe me if you like (though I could go dig a hole and take a picture of the black line that separates topsoil from subsoil), but its probably more outrageous to cling to the idea that somehow Iowa is at the top end of a curve that goes from 10 years to 1000 years.
yungchin 9y ago
The context for that quote was missing I think (that is, missing from the original article, not your comment), but it makes more sense if they're talking about turning rock into fertile soil. You would have had a whole succession of different types of plants to slowly work the rock surface. Then humans show up, rip out all the trees that kept that hard-won top soil in place, and it all runs off out to sea in no time. Basically it's about places like Iceland, not Iowa, I guess.
9y ago

CapitalistCartr 9y ago

I've been reading topsoil doomsday stories since the seventies. I've seen them written from the thirties. They completely ignore modern farming. We don't rely on topsoil, or care. Modern farming, especially since the fifties, is chemistry. The soil is merely a growing medium. We test it and add whatever is needed via petrochemical fertilizers. Better soil is better for the farmer, but far from necessary. And whomever says a millennium to make 30mm of topsoil knows nothing about the subject. I've seen nature make that much in less than a decade many times.

vbuwivbiu 9y ago
and minerals ?
- CapitalistCartr 9y ago
  Yes, my mother's favorite fertilizer on the farm was 8-12-16 with micronutrients, which were mostly minerals.
- pdfernhout 9y ago
  Ground-up rock dust works wonders: https://remineralize.org/ https://remineralize.org/ "Through our education and outreach, projects, research, and advocacy, Remineralize the Earth facilitates a worldwide movement that brings together gardeners and farmers, scientists and policymakers and the public to create better soils, better food, and a better planet. ... “Remineralization is one of the most important missions on the planet at this time. Together, we can remineralize gardens, farms, landscapes, and forests. We can grow nutrient-dense food and improve the nutrition and well-being of all life. And in the larger picture, it’s a key strategy to stabilize the climate!”"
  - vbuwivbiu 9y ago
    interesting, because the mineral content of food is a matter of chance usually. For example certain plants accumulate certain minerals more than others (e.g. brazil-nuts:selenium, cocoa:nickel) but the soil they're grown in may have more or less of those minerals, so it's hard to control one's intake

peterwwillis 9y ago

Apparently this same story has been circulating since at least 2014, using the same quotes from the same people and organizations, from some menial Googling. So far no sources for any claims in the article, though an agronomy student on Reddit appeared to back up the 30% number. This seems like clickbait to me. Edit: This article is from December 5, 2014. https://www.ashlandmass.com/DocumentCenter/Home/View/446 https://www.ashlandmass.com/DocumentCenter/Home/View/446

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gdubs 9y ago

If you're interested in looking deeply at alternative agricultural practices, I recommend "Restoration Agriculture". [1] It's rooted in permaculture, but more broadly about restoring biomes that are naturally abundant and diverse. The central hypothesis is that we've become far too invested in annual plants. They require and enormous amount of labor and petrochemicals to sustain. The book presents alternative methods that, like permaculture in general, look to harness natural processes and perennial trees and shrubs to great effect. 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16441733-restoration-agriculture https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16441733-restoration-agr...

JoeAltmaier 9y ago

Farming will be obsolete well within 60 years. Direct manufacture of foodstuffs will arrive before that. Already folks build machines that take in water and electricity and some organic components, and produce food. How long before a nano machine sews together C,H,O and N into carbohydrate chains on command? Then, electricity will equal food. Topsoil, climate will soon become irrelevant to producing foodstuffs.

thriftwy 9y ago
Modern agriculture is turning Oil into Foodstuff anyway. That's why Oil is so expensive while agriculture is universally subsidied.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Don't know about the expensive part. But it also requires farmland, soil, chemicals. The idea is, dispense with all that, including transportation, and create starch, sugar etc at the point of consumption directly. Or baby steps in that direction. Heck, even 'organic' farming can be seen as working in this direction if it wasn't so expensive otherwise.
polotics 9y ago
+ Magnesium, Zinc, Calcium, Copper, etc all in bioavailable compounds? You got yourself a very expensive meal sir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability