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

rootsudo 6y ago
So we short or long soy/corn? Insurance regarding farming crops and futures though is a very interesting topic, one that I wish to have learned more about. Tons of big things.
gumby 6y ago
Modern farming is not the bucolic system drawn on the food packages in the supermarket. It's an extractive industry little different from mining or oil drilling. In fact industrial food is largely eating oil, both in energy intensity itself and the use of oil as feedstock for fertilizers and food additives.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Exactly. I worked on a farm in my teens in 90s upstate ny that was like the last dying breath of the traditional family farm. It was a property that was intact since a land grant from a Dutch patroon and continuously farmed until around 2000. Today the family still owns it, and boards a few horses to pay the taxes. The farmer was an old-school conservative farmer. He was a local Republican Party leader for awhile, a conservationist and just overall hardworking guy. The modern farm is more like an oil company. I think that 75 years from now, when we lament the fate of the impoverished Midwest Desert and will see the 1970s/1980s as a watershed moment where we flipped our entire governance philosophy to short term P&L, despite then obvious and already learned lessons of the past.
  - failrate 6y ago
    This is a romanticized view of the small family farm. Our farmibg practices in the US were imported from Europe and were not adapted to our climates. Settlers spread like locusts across land that was so fertile that even if they didn't know what to do, the soil would rescue them. Until it was finally so used up that it couldn't support crops.
    - dijit 6y ago
      This is a weird take on history, it contradicts directly what I was taught and understood to be true. The dust bowl was pretty bad but as far as I understood it there was very little fertility to much of the land in what we now call the USA, which is why life was difficult for the early European settlers.
      - supernovae 6y ago
        I saw something recently that showed the dustbowl was from loss of native grasses that had deep roots to crops that couldn't contain the soils and hold the bio-mass... Eventually without the root mass of the native grasses, it withered away... The treatment of the soil as if it is infinite and something purely to be extract is exactly like oil and mineral mining no matter the scale... Regardless of the dust bowl and the types of farmers that caused it, the hopes are that we learned how to farm within the ecology of the region(s) we live in and how those regions may vary from one another and we should build adaptive farms that work in harmony...
      - failrate 6y ago
        Can you explain all of the people who were living and farming here prior to the European invasion? The land in the US is fertile. The prairies were incredibly fertile.
        dijit 6y ago
        The reason I brought it up was because most farms in Native American USA were largely unproductive, and even agriculturally heavy tribes had to supplement their farms with hunting in winter.
    - ljm 6y ago
      Settlers didn't intuitively know how to farm the land at home, whether that was in the Mediterranean climate of the south of Europe or the temperate one in central Europe, or the colder one further north. And it's certainly not as if the European continent is somehow especially farmable without knowing anything about farming. The wikipedia article on crop rotation[1] explains quite plainly that this has been evolving over eight thousand years, with a recent development pre-WW2 being in the southern US, and the most recent one being a shift to stopping crop rotation and instead switching to chemicals. That last particular update should be setting the alarm bells ringing. The evidence doesn't really support your claim unless you think the entirety of Northern America had no concept of farming until colonialism arrived a few hundred years ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation#History
  - monkeybutton 6y ago
    This makes me think of the Grapes of Wrath: >Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. >You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it. The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.
- nuisance-bear 6y ago
  Maybe we shouldn't burn ethanol in cars. Maybe we shouldn't load up every food product with corn syrup.
  - slt2021 6y ago
    if you think about it, it is ridiculous that we burn food as fuel in our cars and add unhealthy amount of sugar syrup into everything
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Food is fuel, always has been. An internal combustion engine is efficent compared to biological processes of motion.
  - AceJohnny2 6y ago
    Corn in the US is heavily subsidized. It's why corn syrup is so prevalent in US foods, because the subsidies mean it's cheaper than any other sources of sugar. In the US, Iowa is the largest producer of corn [1] (producing nearly 40% more than the next, Illinois,) and thus the greatest beneficiary of those corn subsidies. Could we reduce those corn subsidies? No, it's politically nonviable, in part because Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must have the first primaries in the US [2][3]. No candidate that has ever said anything against corn subsidies has won a primary. [1] https://www.cropprophet.com/what-state-produces-the-most-corn/ https://www.cropprophet.com/what-state-produces-the-most-cor... [2] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-iowa-and-new-hampshire-go-first https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-iowa-and-new-hampshi... [3] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/01/why-the-iowa-caucus-comes-first.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/01/why-the-iowa-cau...
    - AceJohnny2 6y ago
      And if you believe in a link between obesity, diabetes, and the prevalence of corn products in our food, the chain of causality looks even worse.
      - 6y ago
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Sarah Taber covers this very well on her Twitter (even though she has a particular anti-dairy ax to grind)
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    There is more than one twitter account that comes up when you search for that name. I assume you mean this one (whom I happen to be following already and didn't realize it): https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      Yes that’s her.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    From what I understand we probably all should. Mark Shepard also complains from time to time that dairy supply is outstripping demand to the point where farmers can't make money off of it. That's dumb in it's own right but if you consider the ecological footprint, then we have a problem.
- corty 6y ago
  Most important is nitrogen-based fertilizer, that can easily be produced from any kind of electricity. Most of the other stuff are minerals that are cheaply mined anywhere and won't run out for the next few thousand years. The most important oil consumption is for driving farm implements, but that can easily be changed to rapeseed oil in the short term and other green energy in the long term. So no cause for panic.
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    Well I agree that the oil argument isn’t very good. But I don’t think the conclusion is “no cause for panic.” I think water loss (especially from aquifers but also just drought and river diversion in California), soil erosion, habitat loss, and homogenisation are big worries. We’ve seen big problems from soil loss before in America where the prairie grass with its deep root systems holding the soil together was replaced by cereal crops with short roots and plowing exposing the soil. The result was the dust bowl.
  - markdown 6y ago
    Rapeseed oil isn't green energy. It's just more big-Ag.
    - corty 6y ago
      With that attitude we can just go back to the caves. Big-anything is what makes our society and level of population work, without Big-Ag we couldn't feed everyone. Without Big-Trans we couldn't distribute the food. Without Big-Trade, you would have to inefficiently buy from 20 small shops selling one item each. Without Big-Industry, your kitchen implements would be a pot and a kettle above the fireplace. Rapeseed oil maybe isn't a perfect solution. But whining about everything that makes headway just because it isn't perfect yet also holds us back.
      - markdown 6y ago
        What a strange stance to take in a thread about how big-Ag has destroyed a third of US topsoil. You've been brainwashed.
- snarf21 6y ago
  I'm not worried about the soil, I'm worried about the water. The Ogallala Aquifer is shrinking. The more it shrinks, the more there will be compaction preventing it from refilling to previous states. We can always grow food in water but getting clean water will be an increasingly difficult task. Look how bad it already is in CA.
  - nradov 6y ago
    We can grow crops with far less water. Look at farms in Israel. The problem is that water prices don't account for externalities or sustainability, so in the short term farmers have little incentive to conserve.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      How much of the water that Israel’s farms consume, depends on desalination? So, if it really long-term sustainable?
      - dcolkitt 6y ago
        Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting factor is electricity. And renewables continue to deliver Moore's law like improvements in the price and quantity of electricity, without any environmental externalities.
        gumby 6y ago
        > Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting factor is electricity. Disposal of the extracted salt is a serious issue. You can’t just inject brackish water back into he ocean as it screws up the ecology of the near shore environment (or wherever else you’re willing to squirt it.
        nradov 6y ago
        Most desalination plants do just inject saline water back into the ocean. There's no where else to put it. In most cases the outflow pipe runs some distance offshore into deeper water to reduce the environmental impact.
- titzer 6y ago
  I come from a long line of farmers. My father was the last of our family to try to hold onto the farming tradition. He grew up on a farm, along with all my aunts and uncles. His generation was the first go to college. He chose business. He made a ton of money, and hated it. After leaving the business world in the mid 1980s to return to farming, it was not the same, and he soon returned to what was effectively day trading in the early to mid 1990s. The transformation of farming is a direct result of corporatization and globalization, like almost every other sector of the economy. It's just more of the machine eating the world. Small, family farms, the kind that my ancestors toiled on, since unrecorded history, literally centuries, back to central Europe, were chewed up and spit out by the machine. The forests, the land, the local wildlife, now, too, the soil, all chewed up and digested in the pursuit of the one thing that the machine really craves: money. It's the legacy of our entire economic focus on profit, growth, scale. No big conspiracy, no evil bad actors you can hate forever, just the summation of our value system expressed in the invisible hand of the market, jostled or cajoled here and there by policy, or retarded briefly by it, but always pointing in the same direction, eventually to consume all the natural resources, dipping over the threshold of sustainability to the reservoir of resources behind it, extracting and emptying it, until eventually there is nothing left.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tharkun__ 6y ago
    I'm not sure how much this actually scales and makes enough money but it sure is an awesome tale (saw the movie on Netflix - https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829 https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829): https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ Your dad might love it, even if just for the nostalgia. That said, I think some of the lessons in there are awesome. Both the ones about biodiversity but also perseverance in the light of 'disaster' striking and staying strong and going on with the biodiversity path instead of just resigning and saying "yep, alright, Big Farmer is right, this doesn't work".
    - stefs 6y ago
- hangonhn 6y ago
  There's nothing bucolic about farming -- ever. Both my wife and I come from farming families. I lost a great grandfather who effectively worked himself to death in his early 30s and my wife had a great grandfather who died from being attacked by a bull. Farming has always been very hard work. I have friends in tech who grew up in farming families and they are the few people in tech who can easily get up early in the morning because that's also a part of farming life -- get up before the sun is even up. I don't know where the romanticized idea of farming life came from because it was never that great. Historically, it was just a way to provide food for your family and maybe make a profit on the side if you're lucky.
makerofspoons 6y ago
We're ~60 years from running out of topsoil globally if we continue degrading it at the current rate: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
- FredPret 6y ago
  We’ll probably be eating lab-grown meat and hydroponically-grown vegetables by then. If we’re not all uploaded to a server embedded in the planet’s core or orbiting the sun.
  - neonnoodle 6y ago
    Good news! we're orbiting the sun now, well ahead of target date
    - FredPret 6y ago
      Didn’t think the words “in an artificial sattelite” were really needed to convey the idea.
  - debacle 6y ago
    Hydroponically grown vegetables tend to be nutrientless sponges. Hydroponically grown celery tastes like water. Fresh, dirt-grown celery is nearly inedible because of how sharp and metallic the flavor is. Industrial and lab-grown meat will face the same problems.
    - sp332 6y ago
      I've heard exactly the opposite about hydroponic vegetables. I suppose it depends on what nutrients the plants are given in the water. What is your experience?
      - debacle 6y ago
        It's 100% the nutrients + minerals. When you get right down to it, you're just trading one growing medium for another. That said, hydroponics allows for a level of control in nutrients that soil does not, generally leading to weighty, tasteless veggies.
okareaman 6y ago
I guess we'll have to replace it "Artificial soil: quick and dirty" https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526161-700-artificial-soil-quick-and-dirty/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526161-700-artifici...
- hinkley 6y ago
  Requires a subscription. 'Replace it' is a little imprecise here, allowing for substitutes. I'm sure some people are trying to make substitutes but we know a lot more about how soil becomes these days and we're able, to an extent, to create it by introducing food to the right food chains. Unfortunately for perennial crops, you have to build that food chain up orders of magnitude more than you do just for annual plants. At the same time the carbon content and resiliency are much much better. Elaine Ingham is worth some time in a search engine.
  - okareaman 6y ago
    I don't have a subscription. I found it by googling, maybe that gives you a one time pass
CapitalistCartr 6y ago
These topsoil crisis stories have been running since the 1930s, and are still nonsense. Modern farming doesn't depend on soil nutrients. The soil is tested, then minerals and petrochemical fertilizers are added. The soil is basically a growing medium.
- merpnderp 6y ago
  Funny because when I saw the headline it reminded me of the same crisis in the 80’s that never came to pass. I sometimes wonder if these crisis stories are just written by journalists he need to meet their clickbate quota for the week in this Google Adsense driven industry… naaaaa
- milkytron 6y ago
  Wasn't the dust bowl caused by topsoil degradation? That seemed like a very substantial crises for wide swaths of the country's population.
  - searine 6y ago
    >Wasn't the dust bowl caused by topsoil degradation? No. It was caused by extensive deep tillage as method of pest control. We have better tools and methods now.
  - sp332 6y ago
    It was caused by lack of cover plants. Farms are using cover crops like ryegrass more because it helps keep water in the soil better.
  - Edman274 6y ago
    "These topsoil crisis stories have been running ever since that time that topsoil crisis killed thousands and caused widespread food insecurity. Utter hogwash. Well, it would be hogwash if any of the hogs had anything to eat."
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    The chemical fertilizer revolution happened in the 1950s. (which didn't disconnect productivity from soil condition, but it loosened the relationship)
ciconia 6y ago
It's as if humanity is squeezing the planet like a lemon for every last drop. There's not much left...
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  The planet will be fine, but we are sawing off the branch we are sitting on
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
If anyone is curious I am working on an open source farming robot meant to be used for regenerative agriculture techniques. My hope is that we can build robotic tools that work the land more like human hands do instead of the big tools and poisons we use today. If you like that kind of thing please take a look: https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-precision-farming-rover-from-twisted-fields/17 https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...
- hinkley 6y ago
  On the plus side, your rover is going to work better with contour planting, which is part of the solution to our problems. The downside is that most of the post-modern agricultural variants embrace observation as being critical, and we of all people should know that statistics and graphs are not a substitute for actually looking at things. Having a robot phone home is not the same as knowing what's going on. As an aside, I think you're going to need chonkier wheels on that thing, and better resistance to mud (what are those boxes right above the wheels?) Also you should research fork rake, and how it relates to the tendency of a wheeled vehicle to maintain or change direction. There may be a wheel design that affords you more cycles for other activities besides keeping the vehicle tracking straight.
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    Thanks! Yes I do dream of contours cut all through a town where small robots can tend to locally grown food. And of course for large farms it’s still a help if there are any hills. Having people on the ground is very important. Sometimes in my mind I imagine a fully automated farm but I try to push back against myself and think more of how this can be a tool to help people do their work. For observation I do want to be able to provide high resolution images stitched together and geolocated so that a record of observations is available for review now and for posterity. There’s no substitute for walking the field and observing with human eyes. Bending down and looking close. Picking a leaf, breaking it open, and smelling it. I do think we will need great optics and high resolution imagers, plus a high res imager on an arm for detailed remote views. I do want to teach these machines to do some diagnosis on their own. But ultimately this will be a tool to aid a farmer, not replace them. I have a new video coming soon that shows our replacement drive system. You’re right that the system shown in that video was susceptible to mud. The new system has operated for weeks in the rain and mud and done well. It’s a fully sealed geared hubmotor system. Rake is on our minds too. I think we might move to a custom fork soon. Thanks for your comments!
DoreenMichele 6y ago
I have done a little quick and dirty looking around, trying to get an idea of how much damage was done in the Dust Bowl and what the long term consequence were (as a point of comparison/trying to find a thing that might help mentally model where this is going). Here are a couple of links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl#Long-term_economic_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl#Long-term_economic_i... https://www.softschools.com/facts/us_history/dust_bowl_facts/814/ https://www.softschools.com/facts/us_history/dust_bowl_facts... I run r/UrbanForestry and have recently posted some soil-related pieces there and I'm trying to get a handle on a complex topic without having to get a PhD in it. If anyone can suggest some good sources for me, I would appreciate it.
- tastyfreeze 6y ago
  YouTube soil health videos has all you need. Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta presentations are easy to consume. Dr. Elaine Ingham focuses more on the soil life in greater detail than most care about but she does provide some important to understand details on rhizosphere interactions. Living Web Farms has quite a lot of lectures about regenerative practices. There are also a myriad of academic papers on soil health as well. This video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A , by Gabe Brown set me on the regenerative path. If you dont want to consume hours of information here is the gist. The soil is alive. Plants use microbes and fungus as an external stomach. Direct sun and disruption/tilling kill the soil life. Without life in the soil you eventually have a desert as the organics are sifted out of the sand by weathering.
- meristohm 6y ago
  Thanks for your efforts. Here’s a podcast[1] episode about regenerative farming, with an anecdote from a farming couple in MN who note lower cost per bushel of corn and soybeans over the past seven years after transitioning to no-till. They also observe more birds on their farm, presumably eating more insects, eating more-numerous smaller life forms supported by the soil which is up from 1-2% organic material to 5% (previous prairie, under management by pre-colonial humans, had about 12%)[1]. One of the podcast hosts is Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, editor of a recent book[2] about actions we can take as the climate changes. [1] How to Save a Planet, episode 2021-01-07 titled “Soil: The Dirty Climate Solution” [2] Johnson and Wilkinson, editors (2020); All We Can Save: truth, courage, and solutions for the climate crisis; ISBN 978-0-593-23706-9
briga 6y ago
It's a shame we don't have satellite imagery dating back to when Europeans first arrived on the continent. I suspect the whole western US was once far more lush and green than it is today. The central valley in California, for example, used to have several natural lakes. Who knows how much impact the damming the Colorado river has on the ecology of the southwestern deserts. I can't imagine that concentrating water into man-made reservoirs combined with intensive agriculture has done much to help the drought conditions we see today across the US.
- tkinom 6y ago
  When spaceX arrive in Mars, I am sure "Google Mars" will start logging time lapse for Mars.
- seiferteric 6y ago
  I have heard that the creeks in the central valley used to run most/all of the year because the water table was practically at the surface. This also allowed for the healthy salmon runs we used to have. Now all the creeks are dry by early/mid summer.
  - briga 6y ago
    That's true in silicon valley too, I remember seeing fish drowning in tiny pools of water because the creeks dry up so much. The floodplain of the san francisco bay has just been so heavily developed that there's just not enough water to go around.
stakkur 6y ago
Yes. But most of the crop grown in that 'corn belt' is not for human consumption, it's for feeding livestock. We're destroying farmland to feed our need for meat. The rest of the crop in the Corn Belt--soybeans--is mostly exported abroad.
- virtuallynathan 6y ago
  I don't believe that's fully the case: https://www.sacredcow.info/blog/qz6pi6cvjowjhxsh4dqg1dogiznou6 https://www.sacredcow.info/blog/qz6pi6cvjowjhxsh4dqg1dogizno... Lot of corn and soybean oil produced, animals get whats left, generally.
  - stakkur 6y ago
    I believe it is, as does the USDA: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgrains/feedgrains-sector-at-a-glance/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgra... Ethanol is a factor, but again--most production overwhelmingly ends up as livestock feed (as the USDA points out).
    - edgyquant 6y ago
      Where I’m from in the Midwest it’s nothing but corn fields, but the farmers themselves claim that most of it goes into horse feed and the rest is pop corn (which until I was an adult I didn’t realize was actually a type of really hard corn that is grown, not normal corn that is then dried.)
    - belorn 6y ago
      Are we talking about weight or by plant? If a plant is 60% by-product is 40% human edible product, and we give all the by-product to animals and all the edible parts to humans, then 60% of the crop weight goes to the animals, while 100% of the crop goes to both animals and human. As it is, there are four primary ways corn is used as feed. 1: Is to take the entire plant and chop it up and turn it to feed. 2: After harvesting the cobs for human consumption, the stalks, leaves, husks can be turned into feed. 3: The remaining stalks and left over cobs can be grazed on. 4: byproducts for ethanol or other refining processes can be turned into feed. The only one which is an actually problem here is the first one where the human edible part get turned into animal feed. As I understand it is also the most expensive feed. The linked source does not seem to define how large percent of the yields are used in this way.
mberning 6y ago
Here in SW Ohio I’m not sure there ever was an abundance of rich topsoil. I have 5 acres which has never been farmed and the native soil is dense, sticky clay. It is hard to get anything other than weeds to grow in it. Yet the corn farms around here always seem to produce.
- hinkley 6y ago
  > I have 5 acres which has never been farmed If your records don't go back to the 1700's then you don't know that for sure. SW Ohio was the eastern tip of the savannas, so even if it wasn't farmed, someone busted the sod for your forebears to stake a claim.
99_00 6y ago
Right now there is no financial incentive to preserve topsoil. In the future there will be. So why artificially create incentive to pay the higher cost now when we can punt to the future where technology will be so much better and the cost will probably be lower?
- CuriouslyC 6y ago
  Topsoil takes a long time to build up. If you wait until it's an emergency to start trying to change farming practices, it'll take 10 years for farming practices to change, then another 10 years to build topsoil, and a lot of people will starve.
  - 99_00 6y ago
    >“In 150 years or so, we’ve lost over half of that rich topsoil—if not all in some places.” If the timescale of the solution is decades we are good, because the time scale of the problem is centuries.
    - evan_ 6y ago
      50 years from now "We've got 100 years left before we have to worry about this!" 100 years from now "We've got 50 years left before we have to worry about this!" 145 years from now "This is a crisis, if only we had 150 years to work on this maybe we could get somewhere, but as it is..."
- meowkit 6y ago
  Same problem with climate change. 1) You assume technology will be better. There is no guarantee that this will be true. 2) Externalities like mass migration or civil unrest that could occur from food shortages would mean we don’t have a chance in the future to tackle the problem effectively.
  - 99_00 6y ago
    Nuclear power can solve climate change now. Technology doesn't need to be better. People don't want to solve the problem now because 1) We don't need to solve it now 2) Fear of impending doom is a great way to push a wide array of agendas (ideological, economic, political) forward.
aaron695 6y ago
Luck the environmental lobbyist have got the suckers into only caring about CO2 levels, and not harming the planet. That said, if this reduces productivity that would mean more forests to cut down but I'd need to see a more full report on what is happening. Loss in land value and productivity should also be happening to back this up. The entire region will not suddenly become useless at once. And if there's anyone left who cares about the environment not CO2, helping quantify this at land sale level would help push some market forces.
nobrains 6y ago
I think everyone needs to learn from the ancient wisdom on the Punjab province in India and Pakistan. Open Google earth and zoom into Punjab. It is the greenest agriculture zone in the entire world. Just look at it yourself. Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive for the world. And one more thing. The GMO crops being introduced I that region needs to STOP. It will kill the best farming land we have and then there will be no ability to rewind time. Read about the recent farmers protests there to also know more about the problems the farmers are facing.
- awillen 6y ago
  GMO crops allow us to grow more food with less space/nutrients/etc. They are a solution, not a problem, and when people fear monger about them it hurts everyone.
  - DoctorNick 6y ago
    So you'd prefer that farmers get screwed by the onerous IP clauses surrounding them?
    - pm90 6y ago
      No, just remove the onerous clauses rather than GMO crops.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        The most interesting patents have already expired. Most of the clauses you think of as onerous are non issues to real farmers. Hybrid seeds don't breed true, so no farmer is saving their seed in the first place.
    - tofof 6y ago
      This is a false dichotomy, and really just a red herring. GP claimed "GMOs ... will kill the best farming land we have" The parent you replied to refuted that point. Onerous IP clauses surrounding crop seeds is an IP issue, not one of agriculture and topsoil quality. And quite frankly, if onerous IP was the cost we HAD to pay, compared to the depletion of a resourse that is "non-renewable in human timescales," [1][2] yes, that's easily worth it. 1: Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN, http://www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-details/en/c/278954/ http://www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-detai... "Soil is a finite resource, meaning its loss and degradation is not recoverable within a human lifespan." 2: US Forest Service, way back in 2003 https://web.archive.org/web/20170531160340/https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fia/local-resources/pdf/field_manuals/2003_manual_supplement_cover_p3.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170531160340/https://www.fs.fe... Section 11.2 "On human time scales, fertile topsoil is not a renewable resource."
idownvoted 6y ago
Always be wary of studies conducted by people taking a political assumption and turning it into the basis of their paper. It's not coincidal that said studies either lack specifics in some areas, while being over-specific in others or are cited in the same manner (leaving out details where it helps the political camp, being over-specific in others). One can already see this turning up in general rebuttals of agriculture, or citations that leave out the critical detail that soil erosion is caused by corn specifically, not crops in general. Or which kind of geographic reagion was used. Or how well farmes tilled their land (see the picture about erosion down-hill: its just a question of the right tilling-technique to prevent that from happening). And as a last resort you can always toss it into some meta study to "prove" your point.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  I have lived in the corn belt my whole life. I was just surprised that anyone might think there is significant topsoil left. The average field is continually beat to hell by machines that create magnificent dust storms twice each season--spraying glyphosate and planting, and then harvest. All the major farmers in my region use no-till but they dump lots of fertilizers and/or must rotate between corn and soya (beans create and accumulate nitrogen at the roots, leaving it behind in the soil for the next crop). All the fields I'm used to are very pale and clayish. Dark soils in newish-virginish soils stand out like a sore thumb and can really only be found in small non-factory fields.
throwaway210401 6y ago
Tangentially related, I want a dataset of all cultivated lands and what crops they are growing? Is there a dataset for it? I mean, I give GPS coordinates and I get back crops growing there.
- bluGill 6y ago
  General data is in government reports. The farmer who owns that GPS coordinate has it, but considers it sensitive data and won't tell you. There are big databases, but they respect the farmers not wanting to share and won't talk. The admins of those database are registered with the SEC as having inside information and so they cannot trade in relavent markets.
  - throwaway210401 6y ago
    Interesting. I can't imagine it being so sensitive. Someone can look at satellite imagery and figure out what those crops are, even on a country wide scale.
- jointpdf 6y ago
  You want the Cropland Data Layer from USDA/NASS. 30m resolution, updated yearly: - https://nassgeodata.gmu.edu/CropScape/ https://nassgeodata.gmu.edu/CropScape/ - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Cropland/Release/index.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Cropland/Rele... - https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/USDA_NASS_CDL https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/...
  - throwaway210401 6y ago
    Thx. This looks cool.
boringg 6y ago
Does anyone know if land application end use of biosolids can convert to top soil?
thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
Us gardeners topdress our soil with organic matter to prevent topsoil loss and erosion. Personally, I often use unfinished compost because my compost is usually not done yet.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Many farms use a hydrogen-fixing cover crop, but they probably don’t let it live long enough to get the full benefit.
hourislate 6y ago
Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil. Don't know if it's true but someone once told me nothing will grow in a corn field for 5 years afterwards unless it is roundup ready. There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... *Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years* We are f...ed the way things are going. Might have to start gardening locally (back yard) or hope Indoor vertical farming takes off.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  > Might have to start gardening locally (back yard) No reason not to start now depending on where you are. I grow for flavour and value not calories.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  i see neighbors using Glyphosate all the time. don't know how its even still sold in stores.
  - ta988 6y ago
    Really simple. Heavy lobying and no public opposition.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    It is about the safest chemical gardeners use. Check the safety data on the fertilizers they apply sometime.
- giantg2 6y ago
  I believe it takes 4 years after the end of applications before it can be certified organic. Stuff will grow the following year or so. I think the half life is 90 days. Plus farmers have to pay for the chemicals they spray and try to apply the right amount since over application would cost more. So it should resolve itself fairly fast.
- 6y ago
sjtindell 6y ago
This is probably in part because so much of it is nothing but corn.
carapace 6y ago
It doesn't have to be this way. E.g. "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A Regenerative agriculture is profitable (Brown makes money) and build soil volume and fertility year on year.
- tern 6y ago
  Case study of large-scale profitable regenerative agriculture in Brazil: https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/regenerative-organic-can-feed-the-world-1d7a410d0441 https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/regenerative-or...
activehuman 6y ago
To me this is just another example of how humanity often doesn't think and act for the long term until its too late- along with the problems of our poor planning for climate change, pandemics, plastic pollution, and consistently choosing to invest in shiny new things versus investing in maintaining current infrastructure.
- pwr33 6y ago
  It's more than that. Look no further than this forum to find people who revel in thwarting any progress on issues that are vital to our very existence. These people are traitors to humanity and need to be stopped at whatever cost.
terramars 6y ago
this is a terrible title. what the article says is, a third of the corn belt has lost all of its topsoil. the rest of it has lost a large percentage of it (some of which may just have migrated). so the situation is actually quite a bit worse than the top line. of course the good thing is all of that is repairable, the bad thing is it will take centuries to fully restore the grassland if you leave it alone - which of course can't happen!
inter_netuser 6y ago
corn-derived ethanol is an environmental crime.
fy20 6y ago
I was watching a video about regenerative agriculture the other day (I can't remember which one) and one of its claims was that food isn't as nutritious as it used to be because of current farming practices. The theory was that when farmers fertilize crops the fertilizer only has common nutrients like nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, but like us plants need a wide variety of nutrients, and those don't exist in the soil anymore. Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? (i.e. links to papers)
- tastyfreeze 6y ago
  Yes it is true. But, its not that the nutrients dont exist. It is that there is no life in the soil to make them available to plants. https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/blog/nutrient-density.shtml https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/blog/nutrie...
sthnblllII 6y ago
>Settlers began systemically clearing the Great Plains prairie in the early 1800s as the John Deere plow became a staple of conventional tilling, which is the practice of digging up the topsoil to plant seeds. Later, gas-powered tractors made ripping up fields even easier. Here's how this would read without the emotionally manipulative language: > The Great Plains prairie was first tilled by European settlers from the United States in the early 1800s with animal-drawn cast iron ploughs like the ones designed by John Deer. In the 20th century, tractors replaced horses and oxen for pulling ploughs. I'm not sure what purpose demonizing farmers is serving here but I don't like it.
exabrial 6y ago
Corn is one of the worst crops... water intensive, land intensive, and bad for your health too.
sabujp 6y ago
Google earth timelapse now confirms this, just put the camera over the US, push play and watch how brown/desert looking middle america becomes.
ksec 6y ago
The next wave of VC and Tech companies should be in Bio and Food Tech. There is so much that needs to be done.
Borrible 6y ago
Ah, no problem. Just exchange it with micro plastics https://soil.copernicus.org/articles/6/649/2020/ https://soil.copernicus.org/articles/6/649/2020/ In case that is not enough, there still is Soylent Green. Did you know, before the introduction of artifial fertilizers, they used the human bones from Napoleonic battlefields? https://medium.com/study-of-history/the-bones-of-waterloo-a3beb35254a3 https://medium.com/study-of-history/the-bones-of-waterloo-a3... ... Dust in the Wind. Dirt in the Ground. The Earth dies screaming. I will survive.

So we short or long soy/corn? Insurance regarding farming crops and futures though is a very interesting topic, one that I wish to have learned more about. Tons of big things.

gumby 6y ago

Modern farming is not the bucolic system drawn on the food packages in the supermarket. It's an extractive industry little different from mining or oil drilling. In fact industrial food is largely eating oil, both in energy intensity itself and the use of oil as feedstock for fertilizers and food additives.

Spooky23 6y ago
Exactly. I worked on a farm in my teens in 90s upstate ny that was like the last dying breath of the traditional family farm. It was a property that was intact since a land grant from a Dutch patroon and continuously farmed until around 2000. Today the family still owns it, and boards a few horses to pay the taxes. The farmer was an old-school conservative farmer. He was a local Republican Party leader for awhile, a conservationist and just overall hardworking guy. The modern farm is more like an oil company. I think that 75 years from now, when we lament the fate of the impoverished Midwest Desert and will see the 1970s/1980s as a watershed moment where we flipped our entire governance philosophy to short term P&L, despite then obvious and already learned lessons of the past.
- failrate 6y ago
  This is a romanticized view of the small family farm. Our farmibg practices in the US were imported from Europe and were not adapted to our climates. Settlers spread like locusts across land that was so fertile that even if they didn't know what to do, the soil would rescue them. Until it was finally so used up that it couldn't support crops.
  - dijit 6y ago
    This is a weird take on history, it contradicts directly what I was taught and understood to be true. The dust bowl was pretty bad but as far as I understood it there was very little fertility to much of the land in what we now call the USA, which is why life was difficult for the early European settlers.
    - supernovae 6y ago
      I saw something recently that showed the dustbowl was from loss of native grasses that had deep roots to crops that couldn't contain the soils and hold the bio-mass... Eventually without the root mass of the native grasses, it withered away... The treatment of the soil as if it is infinite and something purely to be extract is exactly like oil and mineral mining no matter the scale... Regardless of the dust bowl and the types of farmers that caused it, the hopes are that we learned how to farm within the ecology of the region(s) we live in and how those regions may vary from one another and we should build adaptive farms that work in harmony...
    - failrate 6y ago
      Can you explain all of the people who were living and farming here prior to the European invasion? The land in the US is fertile. The prairies were incredibly fertile.
      - dijit 6y ago
        The reason I brought it up was because most farms in Native American USA were largely unproductive, and even agriculturally heavy tribes had to supplement their farms with hunting in winter.
  - ljm 6y ago
    Settlers didn't intuitively know how to farm the land at home, whether that was in the Mediterranean climate of the south of Europe or the temperate one in central Europe, or the colder one further north. And it's certainly not as if the European continent is somehow especially farmable without knowing anything about farming. The wikipedia article on crop rotation[1] explains quite plainly that this has been evolving over eight thousand years, with a recent development pre-WW2 being in the southern US, and the most recent one being a shift to stopping crop rotation and instead switching to chemicals. That last particular update should be setting the alarm bells ringing. The evidence doesn't really support your claim unless you think the entirety of Northern America had no concept of farming until colonialism arrived a few hundred years ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation#History
- monkeybutton 6y ago
  This makes me think of the Grapes of Wrath: >Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. >You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it. The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.
nuisance-bear 6y ago
Maybe we shouldn't burn ethanol in cars. Maybe we shouldn't load up every food product with corn syrup.
- slt2021 6y ago
  if you think about it, it is ridiculous that we burn food as fuel in our cars and add unhealthy amount of sugar syrup into everything
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Food is fuel, always has been. An internal combustion engine is efficent compared to biological processes of motion.
- AceJohnny2 6y ago
  Corn in the US is heavily subsidized. It's why corn syrup is so prevalent in US foods, because the subsidies mean it's cheaper than any other sources of sugar. In the US, Iowa is the largest producer of corn [1] (producing nearly 40% more than the next, Illinois,) and thus the greatest beneficiary of those corn subsidies. Could we reduce those corn subsidies? No, it's politically nonviable, in part because Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must have the first primaries in the US [2][3]. No candidate that has ever said anything against corn subsidies has won a primary. [1] https://www.cropprophet.com/what-state-produces-the-most-corn/ https://www.cropprophet.com/what-state-produces-the-most-cor... [2] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-iowa-and-new-hampshire-go-first https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-iowa-and-new-hampshi... [3] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/01/why-the-iowa-caucus-comes-first.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/01/why-the-iowa-cau...
  - AceJohnny2 6y ago
    And if you believe in a link between obesity, diabetes, and the prevalence of corn products in our food, the chain of causality looks even worse.
    - 6y ago
selimthegrim 6y ago
Sarah Taber covers this very well on her Twitter (even though she has a particular anti-dairy ax to grind)
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  There is more than one twitter account that comes up when you search for that name. I assume you mean this one (whom I happen to be following already and didn't realize it): https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    Yes that’s her.
- hinkley 6y ago
  From what I understand we probably all should. Mark Shepard also complains from time to time that dairy supply is outstripping demand to the point where farmers can't make money off of it. That's dumb in it's own right but if you consider the ecological footprint, then we have a problem.
corty 6y ago
Most important is nitrogen-based fertilizer, that can easily be produced from any kind of electricity. Most of the other stuff are minerals that are cheaply mined anywhere and won't run out for the next few thousand years. The most important oil consumption is for driving farm implements, but that can easily be changed to rapeseed oil in the short term and other green energy in the long term. So no cause for panic.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Well I agree that the oil argument isn’t very good. But I don’t think the conclusion is “no cause for panic.” I think water loss (especially from aquifers but also just drought and river diversion in California), soil erosion, habitat loss, and homogenisation are big worries. We’ve seen big problems from soil loss before in America where the prairie grass with its deep root systems holding the soil together was replaced by cereal crops with short roots and plowing exposing the soil. The result was the dust bowl.
- markdown 6y ago
  Rapeseed oil isn't green energy. It's just more big-Ag.
  - corty 6y ago
    With that attitude we can just go back to the caves. Big-anything is what makes our society and level of population work, without Big-Ag we couldn't feed everyone. Without Big-Trans we couldn't distribute the food. Without Big-Trade, you would have to inefficiently buy from 20 small shops selling one item each. Without Big-Industry, your kitchen implements would be a pot and a kettle above the fireplace. Rapeseed oil maybe isn't a perfect solution. But whining about everything that makes headway just because it isn't perfect yet also holds us back.
    - markdown 6y ago
      What a strange stance to take in a thread about how big-Ag has destroyed a third of US topsoil. You've been brainwashed.
snarf21 6y ago
I'm not worried about the soil, I'm worried about the water. The Ogallala Aquifer is shrinking. The more it shrinks, the more there will be compaction preventing it from refilling to previous states. We can always grow food in water but getting clean water will be an increasingly difficult task. Look how bad it already is in CA.
- nradov 6y ago
  We can grow crops with far less water. Look at farms in Israel. The problem is that water prices don't account for externalities or sustainability, so in the short term farmers have little incentive to conserve.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    How much of the water that Israel’s farms consume, depends on desalination? So, if it really long-term sustainable?
    - dcolkitt 6y ago
      Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting factor is electricity. And renewables continue to deliver Moore's law like improvements in the price and quantity of electricity, without any environmental externalities.
      - gumby 6y ago
        > Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting factor is electricity. Disposal of the extracted salt is a serious issue. You can’t just inject brackish water back into he ocean as it screws up the ecology of the near shore environment (or wherever else you’re willing to squirt it.
        nradov 6y ago
        Most desalination plants do just inject saline water back into the ocean. There's no where else to put it. In most cases the outflow pipe runs some distance offshore into deeper water to reduce the environmental impact.
titzer 6y ago
I come from a long line of farmers. My father was the last of our family to try to hold onto the farming tradition. He grew up on a farm, along with all my aunts and uncles. His generation was the first go to college. He chose business. He made a ton of money, and hated it. After leaving the business world in the mid 1980s to return to farming, it was not the same, and he soon returned to what was effectively day trading in the early to mid 1990s. The transformation of farming is a direct result of corporatization and globalization, like almost every other sector of the economy. It's just more of the machine eating the world. Small, family farms, the kind that my ancestors toiled on, since unrecorded history, literally centuries, back to central Europe, were chewed up and spit out by the machine. The forests, the land, the local wildlife, now, too, the soil, all chewed up and digested in the pursuit of the one thing that the machine really craves: money. It's the legacy of our entire economic focus on profit, growth, scale. No big conspiracy, no evil bad actors you can hate forever, just the summation of our value system expressed in the invisible hand of the market, jostled or cajoled here and there by policy, or retarded briefly by it, but always pointing in the same direction, eventually to consume all the natural resources, dipping over the threshold of sustainability to the reservoir of resources behind it, extracting and emptying it, until eventually there is nothing left.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tharkun__ 6y ago
  I'm not sure how much this actually scales and makes enough money but it sure is an awesome tale (saw the movie on Netflix - https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829 https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829): https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ Your dad might love it, even if just for the nostalgia. That said, I think some of the lessons in there are awesome. Both the ones about biodiversity but also perseverance in the light of 'disaster' striking and staying strong and going on with the biodiversity path instead of just resigning and saying "yep, alright, Big Farmer is right, this doesn't work".
  - stefs 6y ago
hangonhn 6y ago
There's nothing bucolic about farming -- ever. Both my wife and I come from farming families. I lost a great grandfather who effectively worked himself to death in his early 30s and my wife had a great grandfather who died from being attacked by a bull. Farming has always been very hard work. I have friends in tech who grew up in farming families and they are the few people in tech who can easily get up early in the morning because that's also a part of farming life -- get up before the sun is even up. I don't know where the romanticized idea of farming life came from because it was never that great. Historically, it was just a way to provide food for your family and maybe make a profit on the side if you're lucky.

makerofspoons 6y ago

We're ~60 years from running out of topsoil globally if we continue degrading it at the current rate: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...

FredPret 6y ago
We’ll probably be eating lab-grown meat and hydroponically-grown vegetables by then. If we’re not all uploaded to a server embedded in the planet’s core or orbiting the sun.
- neonnoodle 6y ago
  Good news! we're orbiting the sun now, well ahead of target date
  - FredPret 6y ago
    Didn’t think the words “in an artificial sattelite” were really needed to convey the idea.
- debacle 6y ago
  Hydroponically grown vegetables tend to be nutrientless sponges. Hydroponically grown celery tastes like water. Fresh, dirt-grown celery is nearly inedible because of how sharp and metallic the flavor is. Industrial and lab-grown meat will face the same problems.
  - sp332 6y ago
    I've heard exactly the opposite about hydroponic vegetables. I suppose it depends on what nutrients the plants are given in the water. What is your experience?
    - debacle 6y ago
      It's 100% the nutrients + minerals. When you get right down to it, you're just trading one growing medium for another. That said, hydroponics allows for a level of control in nutrients that soil does not, generally leading to weighty, tasteless veggies.

okareaman 6y ago

I guess we'll have to replace it "Artificial soil: quick and dirty" https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526161-700-artificial-soil-quick-and-dirty/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526161-700-artifici...

hinkley 6y ago
Requires a subscription. 'Replace it' is a little imprecise here, allowing for substitutes. I'm sure some people are trying to make substitutes but we know a lot more about how soil becomes these days and we're able, to an extent, to create it by introducing food to the right food chains. Unfortunately for perennial crops, you have to build that food chain up orders of magnitude more than you do just for annual plants. At the same time the carbon content and resiliency are much much better. Elaine Ingham is worth some time in a search engine.
- okareaman 6y ago
  I don't have a subscription. I found it by googling, maybe that gives you a one time pass

CapitalistCartr 6y ago

These topsoil crisis stories have been running since the 1930s, and are still nonsense. Modern farming doesn't depend on soil nutrients. The soil is tested, then minerals and petrochemical fertilizers are added. The soil is basically a growing medium.

merpnderp 6y ago
Funny because when I saw the headline it reminded me of the same crisis in the 80’s that never came to pass. I sometimes wonder if these crisis stories are just written by journalists he need to meet their clickbate quota for the week in this Google Adsense driven industry… naaaaa
milkytron 6y ago
Wasn't the dust bowl caused by topsoil degradation? That seemed like a very substantial crises for wide swaths of the country's population.
- searine 6y ago
  >Wasn't the dust bowl caused by topsoil degradation? No. It was caused by extensive deep tillage as method of pest control. We have better tools and methods now.
- sp332 6y ago
  It was caused by lack of cover plants. Farms are using cover crops like ryegrass more because it helps keep water in the soil better.
- Edman274 6y ago
  "These topsoil crisis stories have been running ever since that time that topsoil crisis killed thousands and caused widespread food insecurity. Utter hogwash. Well, it would be hogwash if any of the hogs had anything to eat."
- maxerickson 6y ago
  The chemical fertilizer revolution happened in the 1950s. (which didn't disconnect productivity from soil condition, but it loosened the relationship)

ciconia 6y ago

It's as if humanity is squeezing the planet like a lemon for every last drop. There's not much left...

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
The planet will be fine, but we are sawing off the branch we are sitting on

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

If anyone is curious I am working on an open source farming robot meant to be used for regenerative agriculture techniques. My hope is that we can build robotic tools that work the land more like human hands do instead of the big tools and poisons we use today. If you like that kind of thing please take a look: https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-precision-farming-rover-from-twisted-fields/17 https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...

hinkley 6y ago
On the plus side, your rover is going to work better with contour planting, which is part of the solution to our problems. The downside is that most of the post-modern agricultural variants embrace observation as being critical, and we of all people should know that statistics and graphs are not a substitute for actually looking at things. Having a robot phone home is not the same as knowing what's going on. As an aside, I think you're going to need chonkier wheels on that thing, and better resistance to mud (what are those boxes right above the wheels?) Also you should research fork rake, and how it relates to the tendency of a wheeled vehicle to maintain or change direction. There may be a wheel design that affords you more cycles for other activities besides keeping the vehicle tracking straight.
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  Thanks! Yes I do dream of contours cut all through a town where small robots can tend to locally grown food. And of course for large farms it’s still a help if there are any hills. Having people on the ground is very important. Sometimes in my mind I imagine a fully automated farm but I try to push back against myself and think more of how this can be a tool to help people do their work. For observation I do want to be able to provide high resolution images stitched together and geolocated so that a record of observations is available for review now and for posterity. There’s no substitute for walking the field and observing with human eyes. Bending down and looking close. Picking a leaf, breaking it open, and smelling it. I do think we will need great optics and high resolution imagers, plus a high res imager on an arm for detailed remote views. I do want to teach these machines to do some diagnosis on their own. But ultimately this will be a tool to aid a farmer, not replace them. I have a new video coming soon that shows our replacement drive system. You’re right that the system shown in that video was susceptible to mud. The new system has operated for weeks in the rain and mud and done well. It’s a fully sealed geared hubmotor system. Rake is on our minds too. I think we might move to a custom fork soon. Thanks for your comments!

DoreenMichele 6y ago

I have done a little quick and dirty looking around, trying to get an idea of how much damage was done in the Dust Bowl and what the long term consequence were (as a point of comparison/trying to find a thing that might help mentally model where this is going). Here are a couple of links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl#Long-term_economic_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl#Long-term_economic_i... https://www.softschools.com/facts/us_history/dust_bowl_facts/814/ https://www.softschools.com/facts/us_history/dust_bowl_facts... I run r/UrbanForestry and have recently posted some soil-related pieces there and I'm trying to get a handle on a complex topic without having to get a PhD in it. If anyone can suggest some good sources for me, I would appreciate it.

tastyfreeze 6y ago
YouTube soil health videos has all you need. Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta presentations are easy to consume. Dr. Elaine Ingham focuses more on the soil life in greater detail than most care about but she does provide some important to understand details on rhizosphere interactions. Living Web Farms has quite a lot of lectures about regenerative practices. There are also a myriad of academic papers on soil health as well. This video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A , by Gabe Brown set me on the regenerative path. If you dont want to consume hours of information here is the gist. The soil is alive. Plants use microbes and fungus as an external stomach. Direct sun and disruption/tilling kill the soil life. Without life in the soil you eventually have a desert as the organics are sifted out of the sand by weathering.
meristohm 6y ago
Thanks for your efforts. Here’s a podcast[1] episode about regenerative farming, with an anecdote from a farming couple in MN who note lower cost per bushel of corn and soybeans over the past seven years after transitioning to no-till. They also observe more birds on their farm, presumably eating more insects, eating more-numerous smaller life forms supported by the soil which is up from 1-2% organic material to 5% (previous prairie, under management by pre-colonial humans, had about 12%)[1]. One of the podcast hosts is Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, editor of a recent book[2] about actions we can take as the climate changes. [1] How to Save a Planet, episode 2021-01-07 titled “Soil: The Dirty Climate Solution” [2] Johnson and Wilkinson, editors (2020); All We Can Save: truth, courage, and solutions for the climate crisis; ISBN 978-0-593-23706-9

briga 6y ago

It's a shame we don't have satellite imagery dating back to when Europeans first arrived on the continent. I suspect the whole western US was once far more lush and green than it is today. The central valley in California, for example, used to have several natural lakes. Who knows how much impact the damming the Colorado river has on the ecology of the southwestern deserts. I can't imagine that concentrating water into man-made reservoirs combined with intensive agriculture has done much to help the drought conditions we see today across the US.

tkinom 6y ago
When spaceX arrive in Mars, I am sure "Google Mars" will start logging time lapse for Mars.
seiferteric 6y ago
I have heard that the creeks in the central valley used to run most/all of the year because the water table was practically at the surface. This also allowed for the healthy salmon runs we used to have. Now all the creeks are dry by early/mid summer.
- briga 6y ago
  That's true in silicon valley too, I remember seeing fish drowning in tiny pools of water because the creeks dry up so much. The floodplain of the san francisco bay has just been so heavily developed that there's just not enough water to go around.

stakkur 6y ago

Yes. But most of the crop grown in that 'corn belt' is not for human consumption, it's for feeding livestock. We're destroying farmland to feed our need for meat. The rest of the crop in the Corn Belt--soybeans--is mostly exported abroad.

virtuallynathan 6y ago
I don't believe that's fully the case: https://www.sacredcow.info/blog/qz6pi6cvjowjhxsh4dqg1dogiznou6 https://www.sacredcow.info/blog/qz6pi6cvjowjhxsh4dqg1dogizno... Lot of corn and soybean oil produced, animals get whats left, generally.
- stakkur 6y ago
  I believe it is, as does the USDA: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgrains/feedgrains-sector-at-a-glance/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgra... Ethanol is a factor, but again--most production overwhelmingly ends up as livestock feed (as the USDA points out).
  - edgyquant 6y ago
    Where I’m from in the Midwest it’s nothing but corn fields, but the farmers themselves claim that most of it goes into horse feed and the rest is pop corn (which until I was an adult I didn’t realize was actually a type of really hard corn that is grown, not normal corn that is then dried.)
  - belorn 6y ago
    Are we talking about weight or by plant? If a plant is 60% by-product is 40% human edible product, and we give all the by-product to animals and all the edible parts to humans, then 60% of the crop weight goes to the animals, while 100% of the crop goes to both animals and human. As it is, there are four primary ways corn is used as feed. 1: Is to take the entire plant and chop it up and turn it to feed. 2: After harvesting the cobs for human consumption, the stalks, leaves, husks can be turned into feed. 3: The remaining stalks and left over cobs can be grazed on. 4: byproducts for ethanol or other refining processes can be turned into feed. The only one which is an actually problem here is the first one where the human edible part get turned into animal feed. As I understand it is also the most expensive feed. The linked source does not seem to define how large percent of the yields are used in this way.

mberning 6y ago

Here in SW Ohio I’m not sure there ever was an abundance of rich topsoil. I have 5 acres which has never been farmed and the native soil is dense, sticky clay. It is hard to get anything other than weeds to grow in it. Yet the corn farms around here always seem to produce.

hinkley 6y ago
> I have 5 acres which has never been farmed If your records don't go back to the 1700's then you don't know that for sure. SW Ohio was the eastern tip of the savannas, so even if it wasn't farmed, someone busted the sod for your forebears to stake a claim.

99_00 6y ago

Right now there is no financial incentive to preserve topsoil. In the future there will be. So why artificially create incentive to pay the higher cost now when we can punt to the future where technology will be so much better and the cost will probably be lower?

CuriouslyC 6y ago
Topsoil takes a long time to build up. If you wait until it's an emergency to start trying to change farming practices, it'll take 10 years for farming practices to change, then another 10 years to build topsoil, and a lot of people will starve.
- 99_00 6y ago
  >“In 150 years or so, we’ve lost over half of that rich topsoil—if not all in some places.” If the timescale of the solution is decades we are good, because the time scale of the problem is centuries.
  - evan_ 6y ago
    50 years from now "We've got 100 years left before we have to worry about this!" 100 years from now "We've got 50 years left before we have to worry about this!" 145 years from now "This is a crisis, if only we had 150 years to work on this maybe we could get somewhere, but as it is..."
meowkit 6y ago
Same problem with climate change. 1) You assume technology will be better. There is no guarantee that this will be true. 2) Externalities like mass migration or civil unrest that could occur from food shortages would mean we don’t have a chance in the future to tackle the problem effectively.
- 99_00 6y ago
  Nuclear power can solve climate change now. Technology doesn't need to be better. People don't want to solve the problem now because 1) We don't need to solve it now 2) Fear of impending doom is a great way to push a wide array of agendas (ideological, economic, political) forward.

aaron695 6y ago

Luck the environmental lobbyist have got the suckers into only caring about CO2 levels, and not harming the planet. That said, if this reduces productivity that would mean more forests to cut down but I'd need to see a more full report on what is happening. Loss in land value and productivity should also be happening to back this up. The entire region will not suddenly become useless at once. And if there's anyone left who cares about the environment not CO2, helping quantify this at land sale level would help push some market forces.

nobrains 6y ago

I think everyone needs to learn from the ancient wisdom on the Punjab province in India and Pakistan. Open Google earth and zoom into Punjab. It is the greenest agriculture zone in the entire world. Just look at it yourself. Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive for the world. And one more thing. The GMO crops being introduced I that region needs to STOP. It will kill the best farming land we have and then there will be no ability to rewind time. Read about the recent farmers protests there to also know more about the problems the farmers are facing.

awillen 6y ago
GMO crops allow us to grow more food with less space/nutrients/etc. They are a solution, not a problem, and when people fear monger about them it hurts everyone.
- DoctorNick 6y ago
  So you'd prefer that farmers get screwed by the onerous IP clauses surrounding them?
  - pm90 6y ago
    No, just remove the onerous clauses rather than GMO crops.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      The most interesting patents have already expired. Most of the clauses you think of as onerous are non issues to real farmers. Hybrid seeds don't breed true, so no farmer is saving their seed in the first place.
  - tofof 6y ago
    This is a false dichotomy, and really just a red herring. GP claimed "GMOs ... will kill the best farming land we have" The parent you replied to refuted that point. Onerous IP clauses surrounding crop seeds is an IP issue, not one of agriculture and topsoil quality. And quite frankly, if onerous IP was the cost we HAD to pay, compared to the depletion of a resourse that is "non-renewable in human timescales," [1][2] yes, that's easily worth it. 1: Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN, http://www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-details/en/c/278954/ http://www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-detai... "Soil is a finite resource, meaning its loss and degradation is not recoverable within a human lifespan." 2: US Forest Service, way back in 2003 https://web.archive.org/web/20170531160340/https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fia/local-resources/pdf/field_manuals/2003_manual_supplement_cover_p3.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170531160340/https://www.fs.fe... Section 11.2 "On human time scales, fertile topsoil is not a renewable resource."

idownvoted 6y ago

Always be wary of studies conducted by people taking a political assumption and turning it into the basis of their paper. It's not coincidal that said studies either lack specifics in some areas, while being over-specific in others or are cited in the same manner (leaving out details where it helps the political camp, being over-specific in others). One can already see this turning up in general rebuttals of agriculture, or citations that leave out the critical detail that soil erosion is caused by corn specifically, not crops in general. Or which kind of geographic reagion was used. Or how well farmes tilled their land (see the picture about erosion down-hill: its just a question of the right tilling-technique to prevent that from happening). And as a last resort you can always toss it into some meta study to "prove" your point.

datavirtue 6y ago
I have lived in the corn belt my whole life. I was just surprised that anyone might think there is significant topsoil left. The average field is continually beat to hell by machines that create magnificent dust storms twice each season--spraying glyphosate and planting, and then harvest. All the major farmers in my region use no-till but they dump lots of fertilizers and/or must rotate between corn and soya (beans create and accumulate nitrogen at the roots, leaving it behind in the soil for the next crop). All the fields I'm used to are very pale and clayish. Dark soils in newish-virginish soils stand out like a sore thumb and can really only be found in small non-factory fields.

throwaway210401 6y ago

Tangentially related, I want a dataset of all cultivated lands and what crops they are growing? Is there a dataset for it? I mean, I give GPS coordinates and I get back crops growing there.

bluGill 6y ago
General data is in government reports. The farmer who owns that GPS coordinate has it, but considers it sensitive data and won't tell you. There are big databases, but they respect the farmers not wanting to share and won't talk. The admins of those database are registered with the SEC as having inside information and so they cannot trade in relavent markets.
- throwaway210401 6y ago
  Interesting. I can't imagine it being so sensitive. Someone can look at satellite imagery and figure out what those crops are, even on a country wide scale.
jointpdf 6y ago
You want the Cropland Data Layer from USDA/NASS. 30m resolution, updated yearly: - https://nassgeodata.gmu.edu/CropScape/ https://nassgeodata.gmu.edu/CropScape/ - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Cropland/Release/index.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Cropland/Rele... - https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/USDA_NASS_CDL https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/...
- throwaway210401 6y ago
  Thx. This looks cool.

boringg 6y ago

Does anyone know if land application end use of biosolids can convert to top soil?

thorwasdfasdf 6y ago

Us gardeners topdress our soil with organic matter to prevent topsoil loss and erosion. Personally, I often use unfinished compost because my compost is usually not done yet.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Many farms use a hydrogen-fixing cover crop, but they probably don’t let it live long enough to get the full benefit.

hourislate 6y ago

Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil. Don't know if it's true but someone once told me nothing will grow in a corn field for 5 years afterwards unless it is roundup ready. There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... *Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years* We are f...ed the way things are going. Might have to start gardening locally (back yard) or hope Indoor vertical farming takes off.

Scoundreller 6y ago
> Might have to start gardening locally (back yard) No reason not to start now depending on where you are. I grow for flavour and value not calories.
devmunchies 6y ago
i see neighbors using Glyphosate all the time. don't know how its even still sold in stores.
- ta988 6y ago
  Really simple. Heavy lobying and no public opposition.
- bluGill 6y ago
  It is about the safest chemical gardeners use. Check the safety data on the fertilizers they apply sometime.
giantg2 6y ago
I believe it takes 4 years after the end of applications before it can be certified organic. Stuff will grow the following year or so. I think the half life is 90 days. Plus farmers have to pay for the chemicals they spray and try to apply the right amount since over application would cost more. So it should resolve itself fairly fast.
6y ago

sjtindell 6y ago

This is probably in part because so much of it is nothing but corn.

carapace 6y ago

It doesn't have to be this way. E.g. "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A Regenerative agriculture is profitable (Brown makes money) and build soil volume and fertility year on year.

tern 6y ago
Case study of large-scale profitable regenerative agriculture in Brazil: https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/regenerative-organic-can-feed-the-world-1d7a410d0441 https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/regenerative-or...

activehuman 6y ago

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

pwr33 6y ago
It's more than that. Look no further than this forum to find people who revel in thwarting any progress on issues that are vital to our very existence. These people are traitors to humanity and need to be stopped at whatever cost.

terramars 6y ago

this is a terrible title. what the article says is, a third of the corn belt has lost all of its topsoil. the rest of it has lost a large percentage of it (some of which may just have migrated). so the situation is actually quite a bit worse than the top line. of course the good thing is all of that is repairable, the bad thing is it will take centuries to fully restore the grassland if you leave it alone - which of course can't happen!

inter_netuser 6y ago

corn-derived ethanol is an environmental crime.

fy20 6y ago

I was watching a video about regenerative agriculture the other day (I can't remember which one) and one of its claims was that food isn't as nutritious as it used to be because of current farming practices. The theory was that when farmers fertilize crops the fertilizer only has common nutrients like nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, but like us plants need a wide variety of nutrients, and those don't exist in the soil anymore. Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? (i.e. links to papers)

tastyfreeze 6y ago
Yes it is true. But, its not that the nutrients dont exist. It is that there is no life in the soil to make them available to plants. https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/blog/nutrient-density.shtml https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/blog/nutrie...

sthnblllII 6y ago

>Settlers began systemically clearing the Great Plains prairie in the early 1800s as the John Deere plow became a staple of conventional tilling, which is the practice of digging up the topsoil to plant seeds. Later, gas-powered tractors made ripping up fields even easier. Here's how this would read without the emotionally manipulative language: > The Great Plains prairie was first tilled by European settlers from the United States in the early 1800s with animal-drawn cast iron ploughs like the ones designed by John Deer. In the 20th century, tractors replaced horses and oxen for pulling ploughs. I'm not sure what purpose demonizing farmers is serving here but I don't like it.

exabrial 6y ago

Corn is one of the worst crops... water intensive, land intensive, and bad for your health too.

sabujp 6y ago

Google earth timelapse now confirms this, just put the camera over the US, push play and watch how brown/desert looking middle america becomes.

ksec 6y ago

The next wave of VC and Tech companies should be in Bio and Food Tech. There is so much that needs to be done.

Borrible 6y ago

Ah, no problem. Just exchange it with micro plastics https://soil.copernicus.org/articles/6/649/2020/ https://soil.copernicus.org/articles/6/649/2020/ In case that is not enough, there still is Soylent Green. Did you know, before the introduction of artifial fertilizers, they used the human bones from Napoleonic battlefields? https://medium.com/study-of-history/the-bones-of-waterloo-a3beb35254a3 https://medium.com/study-of-history/the-bones-of-waterloo-a3... ... Dust in the Wind. Dirt in the Ground. The Earth dies screaming. I will survive.