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>Modern farmers are keenly aware of soil quality and spend a lot of time and money to keep their farms running at top efficiency. You sure about that? When I w

>Modern farmers are keenly aware of soil quality and spend a lot of time and money to keep their farms running at top efficiency. You sure about that? When I was ARS, sure there were 3-4 farmers I met who took SOC and and soil health seriously; individuals who wanted to think about their soil as an ecosystem and grow their soils as they did their crops. Then there were the other 96-97 farmers you would meet who could give two wiffs of stinky piss about doing anything other than extracting as much value off their land as quickly as possible. This was typically done with high degrees of tillage, large quantities of fertilizer, and significant doses of herbicide. If there SOC levels dropped below 5%, they would just buy in lime and lime the shit out of the fields. Rinse, wash hands, repeat. Its purely anecdotal, but the *vast* majority of farmers I had the opportunity were not good farmers and not interested in any kind of longer term relationship with their soils. Most seems like they were trying to extract maybe 5-15 more years of growth out of their soils before they were completely depleted of SOC and basically not usable as farm-able land. We're talking about a region that prior to cultivation had SOC levels in the 30-40s; most of the soils there now are down at below 10%, many as low as 5%, which is borderline being able to grow anything at all.

jeffbee 5y ago
Recently read the book "Running Out" about aquifers in western Kansas. Takeaway was that the overwhelming majority of farmers were explicitly targeting emptying the aquifer within their lifetimes. Unclear what they expect to happen next.
- omegaworks 5y ago
  Bailouts. Every American farmer relies on the generous crop insurance policies maintained by our government.
titzer 5y ago
This is an unfortunate consequence of a long chain of economic transformation. My family was all farmers, a nearly unbroken chain reaching back at least 300 years into western Germany. My father went into the business world, but hated it and tried to return to farming in the mid 1980s, at which point economies of scale had already transformed the market so that the 200 acres of corn and soybeans the family had raised for generations no longer could support his full income. He borrowed money, bought another farm, couldn't even afford the equipment to harvest my grandparents' farm, had to contract out to the burgeoning Wagners who were farming thousands of acres. In the end, he had to give up the idea of farming and became basically a day trader by the mid 1990s. He was nostalgic about the old farm and it was tragic that his entire world was upended by enormous macroeconomic forces that pushed him into dry tech-driven commodity futures trading, about the exact opposite of what was bred into his genes. I can see why farmers are extracting every bit of profit from the soil that they absolutely can. The machine demands it of them. Farms are huge operations nowadays, and from what I can tell, small family-owned and run corn and beans farms are half a century in the past at this point. The soil is just one more casualty of growthism.
imtringued 5y ago
That's what we get from the "grow as fast as possible today" mentality. People aren't thinking about how to maximize economic output. That is probably the biggest failing of capitalism. People think maximum growth is the same thing as maximum output.
shawn-butler 5y ago
>> Its purely anecdotal, but the vast majority of farmers I had the opportunity were not good farmers It is purely anecdotal. It greatly depends on the location and the generational age of the farmer the extent to which they are concerned with soil conservation. Cultural practices in farming tend to have wide adoption swings, (neighbors see what their neighbors are doing, etc) Entire counties will be using conventional methods and within a few seasons swap to lower disturbance methods. Conservation tillage practices—including no-till, strip-till, and mulch-till—vary widely across crops and regions[0]: • Conservation tillage was used on roughly 70 percent of soybean (2012), 65 percent of corn (2016), 67 percent of wheat (2017), and 40 percent of cotton (2015) acres. • The share of total conservation tillage that is no-till also varied from 67 percent (45 percent of total acreage) in wheat (2017) and 56 percent (40 percent of total acreage) in soybeans (2012) to 44 percent (18 percent of total acreage) in cotton (2015) and 42 percent (27 percent of total acreage) in corn (2016). • For individual crops, the rate of no-till varies by region. The likelihood of no-till corn, for example, is relatively high in the Northern Great Plains (50 percent of conservation tillage in corn, 34 percent of total corn acreage), Prairie Gateway (69 percent of conservation tillage, 49 percent of corn), and the South (the Eastern Uplands, Southern Seaboard, and Mississippi Portal combined) (67 percent of conservation tillage, 53 percent of corn). • Almost 50 percent of corn, soybean, wheat, and cotton acreage was in no-till or strip-till at some time over a 4-year period (including the survey and 3 previous years), but only about 20 percent of these acres were in no-till or strip-till all 4 years. I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive. [0]: Tillage Intensity and Conservation Cropping in the United States, USDA 2018
- bluGill 5y ago
  > I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive. It could be right. The smaller the farmer the less likely they are to realize how much the investment in better farming is worth it. The very large farmers have the numbers showing the investment is worth it, they control a lot of land, but are only a minority of farmers. I'm still with you that > 90% is a bad estimate, but it isn't as bad as you make it out.
bluGill 5y ago
> You sure about that? When I was ARS, sure there were 3-4 farmers I met who took SOC and and soil health seriously; individuals who wanted to think about their soil as an ecosystem and grow their soils as they did their crops. In the long run farmers are care about soil health make more money than those that don't. The rule of thumb is it takes 7 years before no-til is more profitable than conventional tillage. Once you get no-till going though it uses a lot less fuel (pulling a plow through soil uses a lot of energy). Farmers have also caught onto the fact that modern computers and equipment allow you to see what parts of the field you doing what. When you sell the farm they will make it worth while to build up your soil as farms that yield better are worth more than farms that yield poorly. In the end you are right - far too many farmers are not caring for their soil as they should. All the big ones are though as they have figured out the long term investment is worth it.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Don't have you tell you this, and not disagreeing with you.. but ... Farming is mining. It's extractive. Every bit of plant matter we ship off our farms in the form of food is carbon and nitrogen that is no longer in our soils. I concur most farmers don't give a crap. But even the ones who do, it just slows it down, doesn't stop it. We run a little market garden. I follow all sorts of agronomy feeds and information and then read and watch what other growers are doing. Even the most "regenerative" and "ecological" growers don't seem to get it... There's no free lunch. I've read analysis which points out that there is not even enough manure produced on the planet to fertilize our farm fields without chemical additions, and don't even think about compost, it's not even close... and all the soil retention and cover cropping one does will only slow down, not reverse, top soil loss. If you're not losing carbon in your soils, it's because you're bringing it in from somewhere else, and it's lost there. So many permaculture types trying to imply that what works for them in their backyard city gardens works on a large scale. It does not. I learned the hard way. I see "no till" market garden growers whose solution is basically to dump 100 cubic yards of compost on their beds each year and plant into that instead of tilling. This is the Richard Perkins etc. method, and it's intellectual dishonesty. All that compost comes from somewhere and that place now in turn has a carbon deficit. At least, this is all the case until we can find a way to efficiently extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into solid soil ammendment. Trees and cover crops can't do it fast enough.
- 7952 5y ago
  I think most carbon in plants comes from CO2 in the air.
  - simonh 5y ago
    As does the nitrogen, this is basic biology. Post is tosh. We’ve been farming in Europe for 10,000 years and still going strong. Soil regeneration is not rocket science.
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      Most plants can't take nitrogen from the air. Only nitrogen fixing legumes do that, and only with the assistance of bacteria in the soil biome.
webinvest 5y ago
Soil Organic Carbon levels? Don’t most plants get most or all of their carbon (and mass) from carbon dioxide in the air during respiration?
- foxyv 5y ago
  They do both. Usually though, soil organic matter which contains the most SOC ensures food for bacteria and fungi which make healthy soil. Plants, much like humans, require microbiota to survive and stay healthy. You are not just feeding plants, but also the bacteria and fungi that prevent disease and help produce nutrients. In addition, plain sand and clay is very poor at retaining nutrients and moisture. Organic matter tends to soak up nutrients like a sponge. This is why media based hydroponics uses porous material like volcanic rock and pumice.

jeffbee 5y ago

Recently read the book "Running Out" about aquifers in western Kansas. Takeaway was that the overwhelming majority of farmers were explicitly targeting emptying the aquifer within their lifetimes. Unclear what they expect to happen next.

omegaworks 5y ago
Bailouts. Every American farmer relies on the generous crop insurance policies maintained by our government.

titzer 5y ago

This is an unfortunate consequence of a long chain of economic transformation. My family was all farmers, a nearly unbroken chain reaching back at least 300 years into western Germany. My father went into the business world, but hated it and tried to return to farming in the mid 1980s, at which point economies of scale had already transformed the market so that the 200 acres of corn and soybeans the family had raised for generations no longer could support his full income. He borrowed money, bought another farm, couldn't even afford the equipment to harvest my grandparents' farm, had to contract out to the burgeoning Wagners who were farming thousands of acres. In the end, he had to give up the idea of farming and became basically a day trader by the mid 1990s. He was nostalgic about the old farm and it was tragic that his entire world was upended by enormous macroeconomic forces that pushed him into dry tech-driven commodity futures trading, about the exact opposite of what was bred into his genes. I can see why farmers are extracting every bit of profit from the soil that they absolutely can. The machine demands it of them. Farms are huge operations nowadays, and from what I can tell, small family-owned and run corn and beans farms are half a century in the past at this point. The soil is just one more casualty of growthism.

imtringued 5y ago

That's what we get from the "grow as fast as possible today" mentality. People aren't thinking about how to maximize economic output. That is probably the biggest failing of capitalism. People think maximum growth is the same thing as maximum output.

shawn-butler 5y ago

>> Its purely anecdotal, but the vast majority of farmers I had the opportunity were not good farmers It is purely anecdotal. It greatly depends on the location and the generational age of the farmer the extent to which they are concerned with soil conservation. Cultural practices in farming tend to have wide adoption swings, (neighbors see what their neighbors are doing, etc) Entire counties will be using conventional methods and within a few seasons swap to lower disturbance methods. Conservation tillage practices—including no-till, strip-till, and mulch-till—vary widely across crops and regions[0]: • Conservation tillage was used on roughly 70 percent of soybean (2012), 65 percent of corn (2016), 67 percent of wheat (2017), and 40 percent of cotton (2015) acres. • The share of total conservation tillage that is no-till also varied from 67 percent (45 percent of total acreage) in wheat (2017) and 56 percent (40 percent of total acreage) in soybeans (2012) to 44 percent (18 percent of total acreage) in cotton (2015) and 42 percent (27 percent of total acreage) in corn (2016). • For individual crops, the rate of no-till varies by region. The likelihood of no-till corn, for example, is relatively high in the Northern Great Plains (50 percent of conservation tillage in corn, 34 percent of total corn acreage), Prairie Gateway (69 percent of conservation tillage, 49 percent of corn), and the South (the Eastern Uplands, Southern Seaboard, and Mississippi Portal combined) (67 percent of conservation tillage, 53 percent of corn). • Almost 50 percent of corn, soybean, wheat, and cotton acreage was in no-till or strip-till at some time over a 4-year period (including the survey and 3 previous years), but only about 20 percent of these acres were in no-till or strip-till all 4 years. I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive. [0]: Tillage Intensity and Conservation Cropping in the United States, USDA 2018

bluGill 5y ago
> I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive. It could be right. The smaller the farmer the less likely they are to realize how much the investment in better farming is worth it. The very large farmers have the numbers showing the investment is worth it, they control a lot of land, but are only a minority of farmers. I'm still with you that > 90% is a bad estimate, but it isn't as bad as you make it out.

bluGill 5y ago

> You sure about that? When I was ARS, sure there were 3-4 farmers I met who took SOC and and soil health seriously; individuals who wanted to think about their soil as an ecosystem and grow their soils as they did their crops. In the long run farmers are care about soil health make more money than those that don't. The rule of thumb is it takes 7 years before no-til is more profitable than conventional tillage. Once you get no-till going though it uses a lot less fuel (pulling a plow through soil uses a lot of energy). Farmers have also caught onto the fact that modern computers and equipment allow you to see what parts of the field you doing what. When you sell the farm they will make it worth while to build up your soil as farms that yield better are worth more than farms that yield poorly. In the end you are right - far too many farmers are not caring for their soil as they should. All the big ones are though as they have figured out the long term investment is worth it.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Don't have you tell you this, and not disagreeing with you.. but ... Farming is mining. It's extractive. Every bit of plant matter we ship off our farms in the form of food is carbon and nitrogen that is no longer in our soils. I concur most farmers don't give a crap. But even the ones who do, it just slows it down, doesn't stop it. We run a little market garden. I follow all sorts of agronomy feeds and information and then read and watch what other growers are doing. Even the most "regenerative" and "ecological" growers don't seem to get it... There's no free lunch. I've read analysis which points out that there is not even enough manure produced on the planet to fertilize our farm fields without chemical additions, and don't even think about compost, it's not even close... and all the soil retention and cover cropping one does will only slow down, not reverse, top soil loss. If you're not losing carbon in your soils, it's because you're bringing it in from somewhere else, and it's lost there. So many permaculture types trying to imply that what works for them in their backyard city gardens works on a large scale. It does not. I learned the hard way. I see "no till" market garden growers whose solution is basically to dump 100 cubic yards of compost on their beds each year and plant into that instead of tilling. This is the Richard Perkins etc. method, and it's intellectual dishonesty. All that compost comes from somewhere and that place now in turn has a carbon deficit. At least, this is all the case until we can find a way to efficiently extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into solid soil ammendment. Trees and cover crops can't do it fast enough.

7952 5y ago
I think most carbon in plants comes from CO2 in the air.
- simonh 5y ago
  As does the nitrogen, this is basic biology. Post is tosh. We’ve been farming in Europe for 10,000 years and still going strong. Soil regeneration is not rocket science.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Most plants can't take nitrogen from the air. Only nitrogen fixing legumes do that, and only with the assistance of bacteria in the soil biome.

webinvest 5y ago

Soil Organic Carbon levels? Don’t most plants get most or all of their carbon (and mass) from carbon dioxide in the air during respiration?

foxyv 5y ago
They do both. Usually though, soil organic matter which contains the most SOC ensures food for bacteria and fungi which make healthy soil. Plants, much like humans, require microbiota to survive and stay healthy. You are not just feeding plants, but also the bacteria and fungi that prevent disease and help produce nutrients. In addition, plain sand and clay is very poor at retaining nutrients and moisture. Organic matter tends to soak up nutrients like a sponge. This is why media based hydroponics uses porous material like volcanic rock and pumice.