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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 abou

• 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.