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I'm skeptical. A lot of the land that looks like good land in north America has a poor climate, poor soil, or both. Further, to make soil productive, you have t

I'm skeptical. A lot of the land that looks like good land in north America has a poor climate, poor soil, or both. Further, to make soil productive, you have to do a lot of work building irrigation and drainage. People look at a state like Montana and think that the vast stretches of land are undeveloped, but in reality, unless you went in with a lot of investment and care, the soil would just lift off and you'd end up with another dust bowl. If Canadian farmers are like farmers in most of the western world, they're great at filling forms, exploiting bureacracy, getting paid to not grow sugar beet or whatever the latest scheme is, then yakking about how it breaks their cowboy hearts that the state can't just let them be free.

hn_version_0023 5y ago
Honest question: how much of that poor soil is directly related to the damming of rivers all over the US? I’m curious to know and not really sure how to go about finding an answer.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  Not sure about Canada, but in the US, this mostly due to deforestation and centuries of aggressively farming the same land: there’s preciously little nutrients and carbon in the soil compared to fields that have living forests right around them. Sure there would be crop losses to animals in such fields, but those animals also fertilize the soil and keep the microbiome diverse.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  Well, at least in Montana, it's just a semi-arid climate. It doesn't rain enough for farming techniques developed in western europe. My general feeling is that a good field is usually the product of generations of work: where I grew up, you had to put drainage channels every two meters, giant ditches, endless effort to get rid of weeds, etc. It wasn't the case you could just move into unmaintained soil, especially virgin soil with shrub on it, and expect it to start producing wheat without a hell of a lot of labour. That's compounded by the fact that farmers are basically soil-seeking missiles, and always have been. If there's a patch of really good farming land, that's probably been a lot of competition for it in the preceding centuries. If there aren't any farmers on it, there's almost always a reason.

hn_version_0023 5y ago

Honest question: how much of that poor soil is directly related to the damming of rivers all over the US? I’m curious to know and not really sure how to go about finding an answer.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
Not sure about Canada, but in the US, this mostly due to deforestation and centuries of aggressively farming the same land: there’s preciously little nutrients and carbon in the soil compared to fields that have living forests right around them. Sure there would be crop losses to animals in such fields, but those animals also fertilize the soil and keep the microbiome diverse.
pasabagi 5y ago
Well, at least in Montana, it's just a semi-arid climate. It doesn't rain enough for farming techniques developed in western europe. My general feeling is that a good field is usually the product of generations of work: where I grew up, you had to put drainage channels every two meters, giant ditches, endless effort to get rid of weeds, etc. It wasn't the case you could just move into unmaintained soil, especially virgin soil with shrub on it, and expect it to start producing wheat without a hell of a lot of labour. That's compounded by the fact that farmers are basically soil-seeking missiles, and always have been. If there's a patch of really good farming land, that's probably been a lot of competition for it in the preceding centuries. If there aren't any farmers on it, there's almost always a reason.