8 ms·

This happened due to extermination of soil life through modern farming practices of heavy tilling, fertilizing and monoculture crops. Dead soil is more suscept

This happened due to extermination of soil life through modern farming practices of heavy tilling, fertilizing and monoculture crops. Dead soil is more susceptible to erosion and requires ever increasing amounts of synthetic fertilizer to grow anything. More soil has been lost from the US than the amount of food that has been produced. Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices to make living soil. The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility, water infiltration, moisture retention, and nutrient availability as well as decreasing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer requirements. https://theweek.com/articles/554677/america-running-soil https://theweek.com/articles/554677/america-running-soil This is a long video but it has completely changed my home gardening practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A

dv_dt 7y ago
Healthier soil may also capture carbon. There are many reasons to look at optimization of farming and food production for a whole range of concerns beyond profits. The question is how to broadly incentivize and fund those concerns - reinvigorating agricultural dept programs with a wider focus at a federal and state level is one way to do that; others would likely come up under a Green New Deal type framework too. https://e360.yale.edu/features/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new_weapon_in_climate_fight https://e360.yale.edu/features/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new...
- tastyfreeze 7y ago
  Aside from a few farmers that are motivated by ideology, profit is the only motivation that will change practices. I have recently been researching biochar(biologically charged charcoal). Use of biochar is a form of carbon sequestration that reduces nutrient leaching and provides immense surface area for bacterial and fungal life to thrive in soil.
  - samvher 7y ago
    Yeah biochar is very interesting. We definitely shouldn't massively start using it in the short term though - its effects are not so well understood. Most "knowledge" is based on terra preta, Amazonian dark soil which is hundreds of years old and man-made with charcoal, pottery shards, bones and other organic matter. There have been field trials but many of them by biochar organizations/companies who might not be completely objective and once we put it in the soil we can't really take it out anymore. I think the evidence suggests that turning waste into biochar and applying it to fields at a local scale has a lot of potential. Growing trees for the purpose of biochar might be a different story (this has many of the downsides of biofuel production).
  - cmroanirgo 7y ago
    I met a potato farmer whose primary crop is for a large chain supermarket. He produces almost double his required yield, doesn't use fertilizer nor pesticides... and has been so for a decade. To use his words: he's a potato farmer, but spends most of his time preparing the soil for the next year. He's right into cover crops (ie not leaving the soil exposed), and several 'rotational' crops that assist in root and nutrient management, as well as pesticide control (yes, plants to control pests). These rotational crops are generally 'terminated' early by finely mulching them back into the earth while simultaneously seeding the next preparatory crop. His biggest expense, fuel, is reduced with a smaller tractor, which also assists in minimising soil compaction.
- abakker 7y ago
  the free carbon soil test is used by many farmers to evaluate the amount of microbial life in their soils. Several I have spoken to have expressed interest for a more reliable field test for microbial health in their soils. One side effect is that microbes in soil tend to help soils hold more water. OP is right, though. Net mass lost is still a major problem.
01100011 7y ago
Not exactly disagreeing with you, but it seems like increasing yields and inadequate fertilization focusing on macronutrients would also explain the drop. If I grow crops that preferentially absorb certain minerals and then take away most of the vegetable matter from the plot, the soil content of the absorbed minerals is going to drop without something to replenish it. Now, I'm not saying soil bacteria and mychorrhizal networks can't pull minerals from the underlying bedrock and transport it to the top layer, but even assuming they did, I would think high-yield farming would tax their ability to keep up with mineral outflows.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Not even focusing on macronutrients. We’re just focussing in mass. I’m not looking forward to the end of tomato season and the inevitable disappointment when I buy them from the grocery store.
  - philipov 7y ago
    The worst is strawberries. The huge strawberries you can buy in the store have the same flavor content as the tiny ones you can grow in your yard, but it's completely diluted with water. They're disgusting.
    - fiblye 7y ago
      Where I live, I can buy tiny fruits and vegetables from local farmers, or I can buy imported ones that are 3x as large and get twice as much for half the price. The difference in fruit flavor is unbelievable. Tiny strawberries grown on a couple acres of land versus mega farm strawberries aren’t even in the same flavor category. The tiny ones taste almost identical to strawberry candies, but large ones that draw people in with the wow factor are like firm lumps of sour water.
      - markdown 7y ago
        > but large ones that draw people in with the wow factor are like firm lumps of sour water. Sounds like they were grown hydroponically. I can't stand hydroponically grown tomatoes for the same reason. Just bags of water.
mythrwy 7y ago
I think it also happens because of synthetic fertilizers (and possibly modern genetics). It's a race to grow as big a product in as short of time as possible which causes the mineral ratios to be different. A tomato which takes months to grow and ripens on the vine has more time to assimilate minerals than a tomato that is "pushed" with synthetic fertilizers, then snatched off the vine unripened and ripened with ethylene gas in transport.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Must be one hell of a tomato if it takes multiple months to grow. I’ve only grown ones that take a few weeks.
  - mythrwy 7y ago
    (pasted from the webz) Standard-sized tomatoes take 20 to 30 days from blossom set to reach full size–commonly called “mature green”; they take another 20 to 30 days to ripen, that is begin to change color.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility This is a pretty interesting (and correct) point, and there's a lot to say about it from a few different perspectives. You get much higher all-inclusive yields from a unit of land by growing several different crops in the same space. They (can) complement each other, using different resources from the ground and providing resources to each other. American agriculture is not set up to do this. Instead of optimizing yield as a function of land input, we optimize yield as a function of labor input, because we have tons and tons of fertile land relative to our small-for-the-size-of-the-country population. If you have one person growing food on a thousand acres of land (remember, one acre is originally "the amount of land one man can plow in a day"), it makes more sense to give that one person just one thing to do. There's no way they're going to be able to care for 5 different crops simultaneously, or even adjust their practices to better suit the specifics of individual fields. We prefer to get a lot of land under low-labor cultivation, even though the cultivation isn't very effective, because our tiny population doesn't require high agricultural yields per unit land. A more traditional model involves starving peasants intensively cultivating scarce land. With cheap and abundant labor inputs, you can get much more from one unit of land. But most of that increase goes to feeding the peasants who provide the labor. This is similar to how models of the effect of immigration on American GDP tend to show large increases in GDP -- the benefits of which, if you account for them, mostly accrue to the new immigrants. I don't think there's an easy way to combine the ideas of "infinite cheap peasant labor gives us higher agricultural yields" and "a middle-class lifestyle should be in reach for everybody". Americans are rich, from a historical and current-rest-of-the-world perspective, specifically because we use so few people to grow food. One guy with enough food to feed three million people is a huge benefit to the rest of the country, and he's personally stinking rich. Five million peasants in huts who collectively produce enough food to feed 5,100,000 people are all dirt poor, and they produce only a minor benefit to the rest of the country.
- dv_dt 7y ago
  It's pretty bizzare to me to say we can't. Perhaps the statement is better that we can't under inflexible solution points of our current technology. However, with impending sensor & robotization of agriculture other models are foreseeable.
kraig911 7y ago
There is also evidence due to higher concentrations of CO2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6104417/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6104417/ Essentially there's around the same mineral content it's just the vegetables are also on average larger in size and mass - yet yield the same mineral content.
feedbeef 7y ago
To learn more about soil health, watch Dr. Elaine Ingham's talks available on YouTube. Also see: https://permies.com/wiki/redhawk-soil https://permies.com/wiki/redhawk-soil
samstave 7y ago
Exactly. Rock dust, nitrogen etc... I work in cannabis tech, and there is a really interesting farm i work with. They have been using / revitalizing the same soil for a decade. Here is what is really interesting, they grow their cannabis on top of an 18” thick mycelium fungus bed. They mulch out their detritus and then keep growing their cannabis in that same soil - and their quality levels are top fucking notch. Big ag is like FB of agra: trying way to hard to scale and quality is near zero.
schaefer 7y ago
Thanks for sharing, Tastyfreeze.
atomi 7y ago
+1 on Living Web Farms. They have a lot of great videos about sustainable farming practices. I've learned a lot from the whole gang there - but especially from Mr. Pat Battle. If you have any interest in learning how to grow some of your own food, you should check them out.
mbell 7y ago
> Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices to make living soil. Seems easier to just add the missing minerals/chemicals to the soil.
- bad_user 7y ago
  Isn't that kind of thinking what got us here in the first place? We may not even know the full range of micro-nutrients that the soil has been depleted of.
  - mbell 7y ago
    > We may not even know the full range of micro-nutrients that the soil has been depleted of. You may not know the full range of micro-organisms needed or how to care for them to achieve this 'living soil'. Taking agriculture backward a hundred years isn't a path forward.
LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
Biological farming was the reason WW2 occured.

dv_dt 7y ago

Healthier soil may also capture carbon. There are many reasons to look at optimization of farming and food production for a whole range of concerns beyond profits. The question is how to broadly incentivize and fund those concerns - reinvigorating agricultural dept programs with a wider focus at a federal and state level is one way to do that; others would likely come up under a Green New Deal type framework too. https://e360.yale.edu/features/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new_weapon_in_climate_fight https://e360.yale.edu/features/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new...

tastyfreeze 7y ago
Aside from a few farmers that are motivated by ideology, profit is the only motivation that will change practices. I have recently been researching biochar(biologically charged charcoal). Use of biochar is a form of carbon sequestration that reduces nutrient leaching and provides immense surface area for bacterial and fungal life to thrive in soil.
- samvher 7y ago
  Yeah biochar is very interesting. We definitely shouldn't massively start using it in the short term though - its effects are not so well understood. Most "knowledge" is based on terra preta, Amazonian dark soil which is hundreds of years old and man-made with charcoal, pottery shards, bones and other organic matter. There have been field trials but many of them by biochar organizations/companies who might not be completely objective and once we put it in the soil we can't really take it out anymore. I think the evidence suggests that turning waste into biochar and applying it to fields at a local scale has a lot of potential. Growing trees for the purpose of biochar might be a different story (this has many of the downsides of biofuel production).
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  I met a potato farmer whose primary crop is for a large chain supermarket. He produces almost double his required yield, doesn't use fertilizer nor pesticides... and has been so for a decade. To use his words: he's a potato farmer, but spends most of his time preparing the soil for the next year. He's right into cover crops (ie not leaving the soil exposed), and several 'rotational' crops that assist in root and nutrient management, as well as pesticide control (yes, plants to control pests). These rotational crops are generally 'terminated' early by finely mulching them back into the earth while simultaneously seeding the next preparatory crop. His biggest expense, fuel, is reduced with a smaller tractor, which also assists in minimising soil compaction.
abakker 7y ago
the free carbon soil test is used by many farmers to evaluate the amount of microbial life in their soils. Several I have spoken to have expressed interest for a more reliable field test for microbial health in their soils. One side effect is that microbes in soil tend to help soils hold more water. OP is right, though. Net mass lost is still a major problem.

01100011 7y ago

Not exactly disagreeing with you, but it seems like increasing yields and inadequate fertilization focusing on macronutrients would also explain the drop. If I grow crops that preferentially absorb certain minerals and then take away most of the vegetable matter from the plot, the soil content of the absorbed minerals is going to drop without something to replenish it. Now, I'm not saying soil bacteria and mychorrhizal networks can't pull minerals from the underlying bedrock and transport it to the top layer, but even assuming they did, I would think high-yield farming would tax their ability to keep up with mineral outflows.

Scoundreller 7y ago
Not even focusing on macronutrients. We’re just focussing in mass. I’m not looking forward to the end of tomato season and the inevitable disappointment when I buy them from the grocery store.
- philipov 7y ago
  The worst is strawberries. The huge strawberries you can buy in the store have the same flavor content as the tiny ones you can grow in your yard, but it's completely diluted with water. They're disgusting.
  - fiblye 7y ago
    Where I live, I can buy tiny fruits and vegetables from local farmers, or I can buy imported ones that are 3x as large and get twice as much for half the price. The difference in fruit flavor is unbelievable. Tiny strawberries grown on a couple acres of land versus mega farm strawberries aren’t even in the same flavor category. The tiny ones taste almost identical to strawberry candies, but large ones that draw people in with the wow factor are like firm lumps of sour water.
    - markdown 7y ago
      > but large ones that draw people in with the wow factor are like firm lumps of sour water. Sounds like they were grown hydroponically. I can't stand hydroponically grown tomatoes for the same reason. Just bags of water.

mythrwy 7y ago

I think it also happens because of synthetic fertilizers (and possibly modern genetics). It's a race to grow as big a product in as short of time as possible which causes the mineral ratios to be different. A tomato which takes months to grow and ripens on the vine has more time to assimilate minerals than a tomato that is "pushed" with synthetic fertilizers, then snatched off the vine unripened and ripened with ethylene gas in transport.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
Must be one hell of a tomato if it takes multiple months to grow. I’ve only grown ones that take a few weeks.
- mythrwy 7y ago
  (pasted from the webz) Standard-sized tomatoes take 20 to 30 days from blossom set to reach full size–commonly called “mature green”; they take another 20 to 30 days to ripen, that is begin to change color.

thaumasiotes 7y ago

> The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility This is a pretty interesting (and correct) point, and there's a lot to say about it from a few different perspectives. You get much higher all-inclusive yields from a unit of land by growing several different crops in the same space. They (can) complement each other, using different resources from the ground and providing resources to each other. American agriculture is not set up to do this. Instead of optimizing yield as a function of land input, we optimize yield as a function of labor input, because we have tons and tons of fertile land relative to our small-for-the-size-of-the-country population. If you have one person growing food on a thousand acres of land (remember, one acre is originally "the amount of land one man can plow in a day"), it makes more sense to give that one person just one thing to do. There's no way they're going to be able to care for 5 different crops simultaneously, or even adjust their practices to better suit the specifics of individual fields. We prefer to get a lot of land under low-labor cultivation, even though the cultivation isn't very effective, because our tiny population doesn't require high agricultural yields per unit land. A more traditional model involves starving peasants intensively cultivating scarce land. With cheap and abundant labor inputs, you can get much more from one unit of land. But most of that increase goes to feeding the peasants who provide the labor. This is similar to how models of the effect of immigration on American GDP tend to show large increases in GDP -- the benefits of which, if you account for them, mostly accrue to the new immigrants. I don't think there's an easy way to combine the ideas of "infinite cheap peasant labor gives us higher agricultural yields" and "a middle-class lifestyle should be in reach for everybody". Americans are rich, from a historical and current-rest-of-the-world perspective, specifically because we use so few people to grow food. One guy with enough food to feed three million people is a huge benefit to the rest of the country, and he's personally stinking rich. Five million peasants in huts who collectively produce enough food to feed 5,100,000 people are all dirt poor, and they produce only a minor benefit to the rest of the country.

dv_dt 7y ago
It's pretty bizzare to me to say we can't. Perhaps the statement is better that we can't under inflexible solution points of our current technology. However, with impending sensor & robotization of agriculture other models are foreseeable.

kraig911 7y ago

There is also evidence due to higher concentrations of CO2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6104417/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6104417/ Essentially there's around the same mineral content it's just the vegetables are also on average larger in size and mass - yet yield the same mineral content.

feedbeef 7y ago

To learn more about soil health, watch Dr. Elaine Ingham's talks available on YouTube. Also see: https://permies.com/wiki/redhawk-soil https://permies.com/wiki/redhawk-soil

samstave 7y ago

Exactly. Rock dust, nitrogen etc... I work in cannabis tech, and there is a really interesting farm i work with. They have been using / revitalizing the same soil for a decade. Here is what is really interesting, they grow their cannabis on top of an 18” thick mycelium fungus bed. They mulch out their detritus and then keep growing their cannabis in that same soil - and their quality levels are top fucking notch. Big ag is like FB of agra: trying way to hard to scale and quality is near zero.

schaefer 7y ago

Thanks for sharing, Tastyfreeze.

atomi 7y ago

+1 on Living Web Farms. They have a lot of great videos about sustainable farming practices. I've learned a lot from the whole gang there - but especially from Mr. Pat Battle. If you have any interest in learning how to grow some of your own food, you should check them out.

mbell 7y ago

> Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices to make living soil. Seems easier to just add the missing minerals/chemicals to the soil.

bad_user 7y ago
Isn't that kind of thinking what got us here in the first place? We may not even know the full range of micro-nutrients that the soil has been depleted of.
- mbell 7y ago
  > We may not even know the full range of micro-nutrients that the soil has been depleted of. You may not know the full range of micro-organisms needed or how to care for them to achieve this 'living soil'. Taking agriculture backward a hundred years isn't a path forward.

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago

Biological farming was the reason WW2 occured.