8 ms·

They cover exactly this in the article. The main take is "while surface contact stresses remained nearly constant over the course of modern mechanization, subs

• jacquesm 4y ago
  Indeed, which is why the title is so strange. Sauropods are a strange thing to compare with anyway, I would compare it with other methods actually used for working the land.
  • anotheryou 4y ago
    I just skimmed the abstract but it sounds like they made the comparison because sauropods already compressed most soil everywhere. So it simplifies it a bit in the title, but it's about exceeding the level of compression already established anyways due to sauropods. Also the weight over area might become less relevant the deeper you go because it naturally spreads outwards anyways.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      > because sauropods already compressed most soil everywhere That happened long ago that I don't think that you can state that with such certainty about the state of soil today. It makes zero sense. Sauropods lived at the latest 66 million years ago, and quite possibly longer. Unless there is some other link that the article tries to make but I've missed.
  • SiempreViernes 4y ago
    Sauropods are presumably the heaviest things we know to have worked the land in anything like a sustainable way: being herbivores they obviously can't survive for long as a species if they permanently damage the soil to the point of being unproductive simply by walking on it. It would be fair to object that what was unsustainable by plants then might not be a problem for more modern plants, but I'm not sure what your comment about other methods aims at. The uncertainty comes from machines reaching previously unexplored weights, comparing with soil effects from lighter methods is unlikely to tell you if there's something bad coming.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      All we know is that it apparently worked for Sauropods, not what the upper limits are, and it need not have been sustainable, that depends on how big an area they were covering and how many of them there were, that it was sustainable is something the article seems to assume without further consideration. Other methods are more applicable because we actually have data on what works and what doesn't with respect to soil loading, farmers really do not want to damage their land ('damage it in an hour, take a decade to recover') and have learned the hard way not to overload the soil already.
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      The resistance of soil to compaction is totally different in a forest with mighty trees and roots, where these beasts presumably roamed, and a barren field of dirt. And secondly, 'sustainable' to a heart of wild beasts does not mean harvest every year - maybe the heard comes back in 20 years when soil has recovered. Lastly, maybe they wheren't sustainable, after all they are extinct.
      • SiempreViernes 4y ago
        > Lastly, maybe they wheren't sustainable, after all they are extinct. I mean, they existed for tens of millions of years (according to wikipedia), which is 1000's of times longer than the entirety of human farming; I think this easily classified as "sustainable".
  • anotherjesse 4y ago
    I've been listening to Nick Offerman read The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. Wendell talks about using horses instead of tractors - the impact on the land and the economics. (using horses is just a small part of the economics - a community / local approach being a large aspect of Berry's writings) Coming soon: Chris Pratt using a team of sauropods to farm in the next Jurassic Park movie.
    • usrusr 4y ago
      > Chris Pratt using a team of sauropods to farm in the next Jurassic Park movie. If that's not in Randall Monroe's What If, I assume it must be in the upcoming sequel?
      • robga 4y ago
        > Coming soon: Chris Pratt using a team of sauropods to farm in the next Jurassic Park movie. The Good Dinosaur (2015) - Argo and his family worked the farm like champs. No “T wrecks” there!
    • lupire 4y ago
      Simpsons^WFlintstones did it
  • azernik 4y ago
    The comparison comes because they're trying to draw conclusions about the effects of large sauropods on the prehistoric environment from modern experience with mechanized agriculture. "As the total weight of modern harvesters is now approaching that of the largest animals that walked Earth, the sauropods, a paradox emerges of potential prehistoric subsoil compaction. We hypothesize that unconstrained roaming of sauropods would have had similar adverse effects on land productivity as modern farm vehicles, suggesting that ecological strategies for reducing subsoil compaction, including fixed foraging trails, must have guided these prehistoric giants."
    • dotancohen 4y ago
      This is strange because the subsoil composition of today vs. 65+ million years ago, let alone 250 million years ago, is substantially different. Mostly different insects, different bacteria, and though Earthworms did exist for much of that period, other types of worms did not. Lignin was already in trees and mushrooms were already in the ground, but soil as a living ecosystem was far less developed and alive than it is today - it was probably closer to regolith at least in the 250-100 million year ago period.
      • azernik 4y ago
        I agree that it's a pretty shaky extrapolation they're making here, just trying to explain the reasoning.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • YinglingLight 4y ago
• Gravityloss 4y ago
  Let's say you have a load of 1000 kg on a 1 square meter steel plate on a field. What is the compression 1 meter underground directly below? Less than at the surface. What about compression 1 meter underground and 0.5 meters to the side from the center, ie below the edge of the plate? Even less. And 1 meter to the side, even than that. The load spreads underground. From a small point load, it dilutes fast with depth. What if you add a similar load directly adjacent to the previous one. Pressure is same but area is added. What is the compression 1 meter underground, at the border between the plates. It's more than in the previous case, since both loads now contribute to it. So there is a sort of load pyramid that has to form underground to support each point load. And the more point loads you add in a grid, the deeper you go, the pyramid overlap more together. So with constant pressure, the wider area you have, the more there is stress deeper down, and the worse the effect gets with distance.
  • BurningFrog 4y ago
    I'm not going to try doing the math, but the deeper you go, the more the pressure will be dominated by the weight of the soil above.
  • boringg 4y ago
    And it's exactly this part that might elude the "Farmers typically know everything" argument.
    • xbar 4y ago
      I sat around with a group of farmers for years, listening to them tell me that they knew what was best to produce on their land profitably. Much of their formerly-arable land became un-arable and is today made entirely of sprawling tract homes.
      • throwaway0a5e 4y ago
        Is that because they didn't know what they were doing or because they saw the writing on the wall and planned their exit? Low margin industries tend to have a lot of things that are done "wrong" by the calculations of the clipboard warriors that dominate online discourse because said calculations tend to assume constants for things that should are variable (like the regulatory situation, state of technology in an industry or rate of progression therof) and assume amortization timelines that are unrealistic. When your margin is razor thin it often makes the most sense to do things in a manner that's non-optimal on paper but yields guaranteed returns today. Do that every day and you stay in business. You might make less money in the long run but you aren't taking on risky capital investments or boxing yourself into a risky corner with inflexible business practices. There are two metal recycling yards local to me. One is part of a chain, run by a subsidiary of a public company. All they do is scrap metal and they are highly efficient at it. Things are clean and run by the book. The facilities are orderly. The machines are new. You can't scrap a car, a street sign, or anything else that's suspect without giving them all sorts of ID. On paper, they do everything right. The other one is a 150yo family own business. They do scrap metal but have a handful of other income streams using the same facility (everything is for sale, basically). I don't think they have a single tool or piece of equipment that was made this century. The facility is always overflowing with piles of various materials that come and go in no apparent order. Their workplace safety is fine, but absolutely rife with tiny things they could get fined for. They pay their employees crap and make up for it with perks (free lunch every day, free fuel oil in the winter, can use company trucks and facilities for personal projects with permission, etc). I'm pretty sure you could scrap a stolen cop car there if you brought it in the same day that the full train cars of processed material go out. On paper all this is wrong. The clipboard warriors would have a field day making it "better" Guess who weathered the pandemic with nary a slowdown and guess who couldn't retain staff or keep their machines running and cut back hours?
• wrycoder 4y ago
  While it’s better to avoid it in the first place, farmers have long dealt with subsurface compaction using an implement called a subsoiler, which breaks up the compaction and restores normal drainage. The article didn’t address that, but did speculate about the ecological intentionalities of sauropods. I suggest the authors do more field work, preferably with a horse and a moldboard plow.
• fho 4y ago
  Completely anecdotal case in point: I live on what used to be a farm. Last year was the first where the well below the house did not carry any water despite moderate rain throughout the year. Instead, heavy rainfall in the last days carried away the top soil layers and washed them off the fields and onto streets and playgrounds. To me, the explanation that lower layers have been compacted and now block the water seem pretty reasonable.
  • throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    >To me, the explanation that lower layers have been compacted and now block the water seem pretty reasonable. The simpler and more likely explanation is that you have a clay or otherwise mostly impermeable substrate.
    • chrisBob 4y ago
      In fact you SHOULD have a layer of clay between the surface and the ground water you are drinking. You don't want a fast path between surface contamination and your well water.
      • bluGill 4y ago
        You want a compromise. You need water to get to the well somehow. It needs to get there fast enough to replace what you use, but not so fast that it isn't filtered first.
• hinkley 4y ago
  Recently I read an article in which someone pointed out that while compaction in the root zone can be mitigated by better management practices, compaction at the bottom or below this are will remain until the next glaciation period. That is very, very bad. Practically our only option at that point is to build soil up which is not something modern farming remembers how to do.
  • egberts1 4y ago
    Where can one find the practice of building up the soil? Is it a “lost-art” due to introduction of fertilizers?
    • hinkley 4y ago
      Tillage combined with fertilizer. Tilling fluffs up the soil temporarily, but it can and often does compact down harder than it was before. Organic farming started down this path, but semantic diffusion killed that, and the mantle was taken up by the no-till and permaculture people, after their own fashions. The question of whether animals help or hinder is still a bit of an open one, but there is some evidence that in the wild, herd grazing was a net benefit to prairie health specifically because predator pressure keeps the herd moving. We see a similar thing in forest settings. In areas where wolves have been removed, the deer end up damaging the trees. A number of farmers have been working on rotation grazing strategies, typically using movable electric fences and short intervals between moving the animals. Joel Salatin and Gabe Brown are two people you can find on youtube (and in Gabe's case, at the book store). IMO Gabe's videos have more information, while Joel's a better salesman. Edit to add: There's also controlled fires, but that's a far tougher sell in this day and age.
    • tfourb 4y ago
      Search for “regenerative agriculture” and “permaculture“. It’s not necessarily something we “lost”. While some ancient farming techniques can be regenerative, exploitative practices have been part of agriculture since its inception. In its modern form, industrialized agriculture is essentially strip mining.