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A general question: how does forestry avoid degrading the soil? If you keep removing the plants that grow, rather than allowing them to rot and return the nutr
by willvarfar 5y ago
A general question: how does forestry avoid degrading the soil? If you keep removing the plants that grow, rather than allowing them to rot and return the nutrients they sucked up during their lifetime back the soil, do the trees steadily grow worse until it is no longer profitable and you have to go grow trees somewhere else?
- coryrc 5y agoTree bulk comes from the air, not the soil.
- dragontamer 5y agoAnd the next most significant macronutrient is nitrogen/potassium. Aka: typical fertilizer.
- Ma8ee 5y agoThe right plants catches nitrogen from the air. Fungus and microorganisms make minerals, like potassium, available from sand and rocks. This works great until someone destroys the soil by killing all microorganisms with pesticides or fertilisers. Forests are very good at producing a lot of biomass without help fertilisers, even when a lot of trees are "harvested".
- vinhboy 5y agoI don't know why, but it took me years to internalize this... lol...
- riffraff 5y agolikewise, took me years to internalize that when you're losing weight, you're breathing and pissing most of it: you burn C+H+O compounds, and expel CO2 and H20.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoYeah I mean, there's barely any solid residue when you burn fuel in your car when you think about it. There's some (carbon), but most is converted to CO2 and H2O.
- dehrmann 5y agoWood is mostly cellulose (which is all carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen). There's some calcium and potassium, but not that much. You are correct that it's not entirely renewable.
- eru 5y agoNot sure what you mean by renewable? Would carbon, hydrogen and oxygen be more renewable than calcium and potassium? They are all just elements we have a lot of on earth. And those elements don't get used up. Toss your wood on a compost pile, and you can re-use them?
- lopis 5y agoThe way the wood is treated, it can't just be composted. It contains too many chemicals that would contaminate the floor. You can't compost furniture.
- eru 5y agoSorry, compost was perhaps the wrong word. I meant, getting at the atoms ain't that hard.
- kenneth 5y agoCarbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen come from the air, and are infinitely distributed around the earth via the atmosphere. Calcium and Potassium aren't.
- eru 5y agoYes, they got dig up somewhere. (Or you could filter them out of seawater.) I don't see any conceptual difference. The atmosphere ain't actually infinite.
- hutzlibu 5y ago" Calcium and Potassium aren't." But they are allmost unlimited in the ground. A intact forest, with deep roots in symbiosis with lots of fungi and other microorganisms retrieves them and make them avaiable to the rest of the forest via leave fall. So taking out some trees at a time is sustainable. Chopping down all of them, is not.
- tuatoru 5y agoMost of the non-cellulose elements (the ones nneeded for life) are in the outer layers of the tree. Modern forestry machines strip off the bark and a little of the phloem (the living layer) in situ. But yeah, there is a slow loss. Partly made up by the micrometeorite dust that falls everywhere, and in some places by dusts from other places. For example, the Amazon rainforset is replenished from the Sahara. Deciduous forests are better at this. Deep tree roots break down rocks in the subsoil, recovering minerals that way, and leaf fall creates a realtively rich soil. Undisturbed virgin deciduous forests with deep soils have near 100% mineral recycling. The micrometeorite dust makes up the rest.
- mellavora 5y agoWith credit to the other posters here, who do give correct answers as to how forestry is less destructive to the soil than other crops,.... and assuming a clearcut/monoculture approach to tree farming (because the comp to foodcrop agriculture also ignores regernerative/permaculture techniques) forestry is massively disruptive to the soil, because it obliterates the ecosystem/community which allows forests to produce so much biomass. also, because the harvest cycle is measured in decades rather than years, the soil destruction also happens at a slower rate. Doesn't mean it isn't as destructive per harvest cycle, just that the cycle rate is slower.
- dredmorbius 5y agoDepending on what trees are grown, and the specific ecology and geology, it can and does. However this typically occurs over several generations of planting, each of which are 2--4, or more, human generations. James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State opens with a description of how "rationalised" scientific forestry in Germany lead to a precipitous decline in the health of the soil and ultimately yields of timber, but over the course of 150--200 years. He's largely citing Richard Plochmann, Forestry in the Federal Republic of Germany (1968), and Chris Maser, The Redesigned Forest (1988).