6 ms·

Over 95% of a plant is just hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon that it pulled from the air or water. Only a very small percentage of the material in a plant is actual

Over 95% of a plant is just hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon that it pulled from the air or water. Only a very small percentage of the material in a plant is actually from the soil, so most of the activity on a farm is not fundamentally a form of mining.

jelliclesfarm 7y ago
I disagree. Farming is surface mining. Maybe aquaponics and hydroponics are only reliant on water and nutrients. And we should probably switch to soilless farming more..but soil based farming is most certainly surface mining and the most destructive thing we can do to this planet.
- gleapsite 7y ago
  Certainly prevalent forms of argiculture are akin to surface mining. My property is surrounded on three sides by a rotated field (corn, wheat, soy etc) and there's a 12-18" drop along those edges of my property line, persumably as the soil was extracted in plant form. However I believe there are forms of soil agriculture that aren't surface mining such as a short rotation coppice. The primary molecular structures being extracted are lignin and cellulose, which are comprised of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (that is, water and air sources).
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    I agree. But industrial fossil fuel based global Ag is brutal on the soil..top soil once gone will take years and years to form..if at all it does ..
  - schiffern 7y ago
    >there's a 12-18" drop along those edges of my property line, persumably as the soil was extracted in plant form. This presumption is incorrect. Do the math: 99+% of that mass loss is because of wind and water erosion, not plant growth.
    - lovich 7y ago
      Would his property not also experience the same erosion? I could see irrigation from the farming causing extra water erosion but wouldn't that ultimately be the same as when mining operations remove whatever minerals they consider waste?
      - schiffern 7y ago
        The acceleration of erosion on farms is mainly caused by tillage (plowing), the building of fast farm drainage networks (vs infiltrating water to recharge aquifers), lack of trees to block surface-level winds (vs winrows), and heavy biocide application which kills the plant roots/fungal hyphae/bacterial aggregates that hold soil together. >wouldn't that ultimately be the same as when mining operations remove whatever minerals they consider waste? No because soil isn't waste, it's a valuable material.
      - RhodesianHunter 7y ago
        No, because presumably his property has permanent plants with roots that retain the soil, while his neighbors are constantly tilling the land making it easily blown or washed away.
        lovich 7y ago
        I don't see how this isn't analogous to mining still. Coal mines clear cut mountains. A smaller portion of the mountain in the form of coal is kept and shipped. The other materials of the mountain are blown away as a side affect of the clear cutting operation. Farmers harvest crops from their land. A smaller portion of the land in the form of crops is kept and shipped. The other materials of the land are blown away as a side affect of the farming operation. Why are these functionality different other than one operation wants a mineral in the ground and one operation wants freshly harvested plants?
        thatcat 7y ago
        You don't actually have to till, you just make slightly more money in the short term by doing that.
  - robocat 7y ago
    I wonder how much of that is your land gaining dirt, building up from the wind erosion around you.
- 11235813213455 7y ago
  Permaculture is not, it's actually enriching the soil (in terms of living organisms) and the local ecosystem, it's a sustainable farming method gaining popularity with the decreasing productivity of common intensives monocultures
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    I agree. But yield is much less. Especially considering land mass for Ag is shrinking and we will likely face an uncertain future because of climate change. Indoor Ag can be controlled. I use permaculture and biodynamic methods for orchards and perennials but annual row crops, tillage methods seem to be the best option so far. I am a fan of permaculture but I don’t know if it’s feasible everywhere and for all kinds of crops.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  No. That’s an incredibly ignorant statement that is unfortunately commonly believed by many people these days. We currently subsidize a type of agriculture that is very extractive. But farming isn’t inherently that way, and has only been that way for a few decades. I’ve seen the right way — working on a midsize farm that was producing a variety of crops and dairy from the late 1600s until around 2006. Techniques like crop diversification, rotation, low-tillage, etc it is very feasible to create a sustainable agricultural environment. Think about the tragedy of all of the incredibly fertile and water-rich land that fed NYC in New Jersey that is now subdivisions. Now “environmentally concerned” people are drinking half gallons of crushed almonds, sugar and water grown in arid areas with threatened water supplies. It does mean that you need to roll back the direct and indirect subsidy that creates exploitive markets. That means you don’t grow lettuce in the California desert. It also means seasonal vegetables and smaller scale farms.
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    well.. world population in 1600 = 500 million current world population = 7.5ish billion expected population 2050 = 10 billion subsidies wont make a huge dent. population reduction might. ..but that would take 150-200 years if everyone stopped procreating after half a surviving child.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      None of this has anything to do with population. It’s all about money and short term gain. If you’ve ever been to UMass Amherst, it’s in in the middle of the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, a fertile and lovely area of the country. There’s a series of strip malls there that were mostly farms not long ago. What is now a Home Depot was a hothouse that grew flowers all year long. That land fell in value because the US government invested billions to turn California into a farmers market for the world. That land is an asphalt parking lot because tax policy makes it easy for big box stores to be built for little or no investment. For example, Dollar General stores get thrown up for about $300k and the company invests something like $30k, that’s it. That’s why you can be in a place like Georgia or South Carolina in the harvest season and walk out the door with peaches from 3,000 miles away.
devoply 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsoil#Erosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsoil#Erosion > A major environmental concern known as topsoil erosion occurs when the topsoil layer is blown or washed away. Without topsoil, little plant life is possible. The estimated annual costs of public and environmental health losses related to soil erosion exceed $45 billion. Conventional agriculture encourages the depletion of topsoil because the soil must be plowed and replanted each year. Sustainable techniques attempt to slow erosion through the use of cover crops in order to build organic matter in the soil. The United States alone loses almost 3 tons of topsoil per acre per year.[10] This is of great ecological concern as one inch of topsoil can take between 500 and 1,000 years to form naturally. > Based on 2014 trends, the world has about 60 years of topsoil left. So yeah go ahead feed the overpopulation of the hungry, hopefully in 60 years there is tech to replace all the plants that can no longer be grown. In 60 years this is going to be another global warming situation that we have known about but yet let continue until we could no longer do so.
- fao_ 7y ago
  > Based on 2014 trends, the world has about 60 years of topsoil left. Playing devil's advocate, there's no guarantee that these trends will continue. For a related example of this go and look up the Malthusian catastrophe
  - devoply 7y ago
    I am going to live forever, so far I am doing fine... See most life extinct on planet... like 99%.
- schiffern 7y ago
  >hopefully in 60 years there is tech to replace all the plants that can no longer be grown. And if it turns out the cheapest and best "tech" is soil conservation, what then? "Tech" tends to mean high-tech, but high-tech is also high cost (see vertical farming). It's quite possible that low tech / appropriate tech solutions will win in the end. Also, how many decades of R&D delay for this (rather... ambitious) Replace All The Plants Project are you asking for? The whole 60 years? Or should we tap the brakes (ie implement known soil conservation techniques) before going off the cliff?
fao_ 7y ago
> Only a very small percentage of the material in a plant is actually from the soil, so most of the activity on a farm is not fundamentally a form of mining. This is demonstratably false, you only have to look at Hydroponics to see that. A lot of plants are difficult to grow via Hydroponics, and Hydroponicists go to a lot of trouble to put nutrients in the water that they use, despite the fact that _not_ doing so would allow the Hydroponics system to be more efficient and need less maintenance (the latter of which is the main barrier to general-use Hydroponics). If one looks at spray-based systems, the main cost there is the nutrients clogging the spray heads. However, without those nutrients, the plant will literally not grow. The microorganisms, metals, and NPK in the soil are hugely important to the growth and nutrition of the resulting product.
- quixoticelixer- 7y ago
  That's not what he is saying, he is saying that most of the biomass is from hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, which it is.
  - stevenhuang 7y ago
    Which is true but not too relevant, as he explains the limiting factor is not that the biomass is mostly hydrogen/oxygen/carbon, it is the lack of nutrients. And as cited elsewhere, see Liebig's law of the minimum.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Liebig's law of the minimum Liebig law of the minimum, often simply called Liebig's law or the law of the minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Carl Sprengel (1828) and later popularized by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). The law has also been applied to biological populations and ecosystem models for factors such as sunlight or mineral nutrients. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum

jelliclesfarm 7y ago

I disagree. Farming is surface mining. Maybe aquaponics and hydroponics are only reliant on water and nutrients. And we should probably switch to soilless farming more..but soil based farming is most certainly surface mining and the most destructive thing we can do to this planet.

gleapsite 7y ago
Certainly prevalent forms of argiculture are akin to surface mining. My property is surrounded on three sides by a rotated field (corn, wheat, soy etc) and there's a 12-18" drop along those edges of my property line, persumably as the soil was extracted in plant form. However I believe there are forms of soil agriculture that aren't surface mining such as a short rotation coppice. The primary molecular structures being extracted are lignin and cellulose, which are comprised of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (that is, water and air sources).
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  I agree. But industrial fossil fuel based global Ag is brutal on the soil..top soil once gone will take years and years to form..if at all it does ..
- schiffern 7y ago
  >there's a 12-18" drop along those edges of my property line, persumably as the soil was extracted in plant form. This presumption is incorrect. Do the math: 99+% of that mass loss is because of wind and water erosion, not plant growth.
  - lovich 7y ago
    Would his property not also experience the same erosion? I could see irrigation from the farming causing extra water erosion but wouldn't that ultimately be the same as when mining operations remove whatever minerals they consider waste?
    - schiffern 7y ago
      The acceleration of erosion on farms is mainly caused by tillage (plowing), the building of fast farm drainage networks (vs infiltrating water to recharge aquifers), lack of trees to block surface-level winds (vs winrows), and heavy biocide application which kills the plant roots/fungal hyphae/bacterial aggregates that hold soil together. >wouldn't that ultimately be the same as when mining operations remove whatever minerals they consider waste? No because soil isn't waste, it's a valuable material.
    - RhodesianHunter 7y ago
      No, because presumably his property has permanent plants with roots that retain the soil, while his neighbors are constantly tilling the land making it easily blown or washed away.
      - lovich 7y ago
        I don't see how this isn't analogous to mining still. Coal mines clear cut mountains. A smaller portion of the mountain in the form of coal is kept and shipped. The other materials of the mountain are blown away as a side affect of the clear cutting operation. Farmers harvest crops from their land. A smaller portion of the land in the form of crops is kept and shipped. The other materials of the land are blown away as a side affect of the farming operation. Why are these functionality different other than one operation wants a mineral in the ground and one operation wants freshly harvested plants?
        thatcat 7y ago
        You don't actually have to till, you just make slightly more money in the short term by doing that.
- robocat 7y ago
  I wonder how much of that is your land gaining dirt, building up from the wind erosion around you.
11235813213455 7y ago
Permaculture is not, it's actually enriching the soil (in terms of living organisms) and the local ecosystem, it's a sustainable farming method gaining popularity with the decreasing productivity of common intensives monocultures
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  I agree. But yield is much less. Especially considering land mass for Ag is shrinking and we will likely face an uncertain future because of climate change. Indoor Ag can be controlled. I use permaculture and biodynamic methods for orchards and perennials but annual row crops, tillage methods seem to be the best option so far. I am a fan of permaculture but I don’t know if it’s feasible everywhere and for all kinds of crops.
Spooky23 7y ago
No. That’s an incredibly ignorant statement that is unfortunately commonly believed by many people these days. We currently subsidize a type of agriculture that is very extractive. But farming isn’t inherently that way, and has only been that way for a few decades. I’ve seen the right way — working on a midsize farm that was producing a variety of crops and dairy from the late 1600s until around 2006. Techniques like crop diversification, rotation, low-tillage, etc it is very feasible to create a sustainable agricultural environment. Think about the tragedy of all of the incredibly fertile and water-rich land that fed NYC in New Jersey that is now subdivisions. Now “environmentally concerned” people are drinking half gallons of crushed almonds, sugar and water grown in arid areas with threatened water supplies. It does mean that you need to roll back the direct and indirect subsidy that creates exploitive markets. That means you don’t grow lettuce in the California desert. It also means seasonal vegetables and smaller scale farms.
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  well.. world population in 1600 = 500 million current world population = 7.5ish billion expected population 2050 = 10 billion subsidies wont make a huge dent. population reduction might. ..but that would take 150-200 years if everyone stopped procreating after half a surviving child.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    None of this has anything to do with population. It’s all about money and short term gain. If you’ve ever been to UMass Amherst, it’s in in the middle of the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, a fertile and lovely area of the country. There’s a series of strip malls there that were mostly farms not long ago. What is now a Home Depot was a hothouse that grew flowers all year long. That land fell in value because the US government invested billions to turn California into a farmers market for the world. That land is an asphalt parking lot because tax policy makes it easy for big box stores to be built for little or no investment. For example, Dollar General stores get thrown up for about $300k and the company invests something like $30k, that’s it. That’s why you can be in a place like Georgia or South Carolina in the harvest season and walk out the door with peaches from 3,000 miles away.

devoply 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsoil#Erosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsoil#Erosion > A major environmental concern known as topsoil erosion occurs when the topsoil layer is blown or washed away. Without topsoil, little plant life is possible. The estimated annual costs of public and environmental health losses related to soil erosion exceed $45 billion. Conventional agriculture encourages the depletion of topsoil because the soil must be plowed and replanted each year. Sustainable techniques attempt to slow erosion through the use of cover crops in order to build organic matter in the soil. The United States alone loses almost 3 tons of topsoil per acre per year.[10] This is of great ecological concern as one inch of topsoil can take between 500 and 1,000 years to form naturally. > Based on 2014 trends, the world has about 60 years of topsoil left. So yeah go ahead feed the overpopulation of the hungry, hopefully in 60 years there is tech to replace all the plants that can no longer be grown. In 60 years this is going to be another global warming situation that we have known about but yet let continue until we could no longer do so.

fao_ 7y ago
> Based on 2014 trends, the world has about 60 years of topsoil left. Playing devil's advocate, there's no guarantee that these trends will continue. For a related example of this go and look up the Malthusian catastrophe
- devoply 7y ago
  I am going to live forever, so far I am doing fine... See most life extinct on planet... like 99%.
schiffern 7y ago
>hopefully in 60 years there is tech to replace all the plants that can no longer be grown. And if it turns out the cheapest and best "tech" is soil conservation, what then? "Tech" tends to mean high-tech, but high-tech is also high cost (see vertical farming). It's quite possible that low tech / appropriate tech solutions will win in the end. Also, how many decades of R&D delay for this (rather... ambitious) Replace All The Plants Project are you asking for? The whole 60 years? Or should we tap the brakes (ie implement known soil conservation techniques) before going off the cliff?

fao_ 7y ago

> Only a very small percentage of the material in a plant is actually from the soil, so most of the activity on a farm is not fundamentally a form of mining. This is demonstratably false, you only have to look at Hydroponics to see that. A lot of plants are difficult to grow via Hydroponics, and Hydroponicists go to a lot of trouble to put nutrients in the water that they use, despite the fact that _not_ doing so would allow the Hydroponics system to be more efficient and need less maintenance (the latter of which is the main barrier to general-use Hydroponics). If one looks at spray-based systems, the main cost there is the nutrients clogging the spray heads. However, without those nutrients, the plant will literally not grow. The microorganisms, metals, and NPK in the soil are hugely important to the growth and nutrition of the resulting product.

quixoticelixer- 7y ago
That's not what he is saying, he is saying that most of the biomass is from hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, which it is.
- stevenhuang 7y ago
  Which is true but not too relevant, as he explains the limiting factor is not that the biomass is mostly hydrogen/oxygen/carbon, it is the lack of nutrients. And as cited elsewhere, see Liebig's law of the minimum.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Liebig's law of the minimum Liebig law of the minimum, often simply called Liebig's law or the law of the minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Carl Sprengel (1828) and later popularized by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). The law has also been applied to biological populations and ecosystem models for factors such as sunlight or mineral nutrients. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum