4 ms·

How exaclty are farmers "stealing" from the soil, when the same patch of land has been used for monocultures a hundred years or more? To me it seems to be a pre

How exaclty are farmers "stealing" from the soil, when the same patch of land has been used for monocultures a hundred years or more? To me it seems to be a pretty stable cycle at this point, where the soil is not the limiting factor (cf increasing yields over the same period)

Gordonjcp 4y ago
It's not been used as a monoculture. Grassland is incredibly complex. Maintaining farmland is incredibly complex.
imtringued 4y ago
What I have seen is corn farmers turn perfectly healthy soil into hard bricks (I mean pure clay) within 25 years.
zelos 4y ago
It's not a closed system, is it? farmers are pumping in huge amounts of nutrients in the form of fertiliser, mostly made using fossil fuels.
- samatman 4y ago
  Fertilizer is made using energy, this is a critical distinction. The only consumables in the Haber process are air, heat, and pressure. Ammonia production can be designed to run when energy is cheap, free, or negative in price, this is unlike other energy-intensive industrial feedstocks such as aluminium smelting. It isn't currently economically efficient to run factories this way, but (again, unlike smelting bauxite) it is physically plausible to start-and-stop Haber process plants on a scale of hours. Nitrogen fertilizers cause their own cascade of second-order effects when they leach into the water supply, but this can be solved with well-understood chemistry which renders the nitrate largely insoluble in water but available to soil microorganisms, who are happy to share it with crop roots. My point is that fossil fuels aren't a feedstock for the most important fertilizer, so the use of fossil fuels in their manufacture is instrumental rather than inherent.
badpun 4y ago
Plenty of land that was previously farmland is currently desert or otherwise almost useless. It just takes a different amount of time in different regions.
dangerface 4y ago
> How exaclty are farmers "stealing" from the soil, when the same patch of land has been used for monocultures a hundred years or more? Before the world wars and invention of artificial fertiliser we didn't have monocultures. On the scale of agriculture artificial fertiliser and factory farming is extremely new not something we have been doing for hundreds of years. The issue is that when the crop is harvested you are taking nutrients out of the field into the crop then taking that crop off the soil. These nutrients need replaced or you will deplete the field. A hundred years ago this would come back in the form of rotations of crops and animals that leave dung to fertilise the land today its done with artificial fertiliser which provides lots of nitrogen but is missing all of the trace nutrients that where removed. Better artificial fertiliser could help but there are other problems with artificial fertiliser like run off where rain remove the fertiliser from the field and dumps it into wetlands and rivers which are poisoned by the massive amounts of nitrogen. The old way was sustainable but required lots of manual labour the new way is not sustainable but is easily automated. The real sustainable solution is to automate the old way of farming.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

It's not been used as a monoculture. Grassland is incredibly complex. Maintaining farmland is incredibly complex.

imtringued 4y ago

What I have seen is corn farmers turn perfectly healthy soil into hard bricks (I mean pure clay) within 25 years.

zelos 4y ago

It's not a closed system, is it? farmers are pumping in huge amounts of nutrients in the form of fertiliser, mostly made using fossil fuels.

samatman 4y ago
Fertilizer is made using energy, this is a critical distinction. The only consumables in the Haber process are air, heat, and pressure. Ammonia production can be designed to run when energy is cheap, free, or negative in price, this is unlike other energy-intensive industrial feedstocks such as aluminium smelting. It isn't currently economically efficient to run factories this way, but (again, unlike smelting bauxite) it is physically plausible to start-and-stop Haber process plants on a scale of hours. Nitrogen fertilizers cause their own cascade of second-order effects when they leach into the water supply, but this can be solved with well-understood chemistry which renders the nitrate largely insoluble in water but available to soil microorganisms, who are happy to share it with crop roots. My point is that fossil fuels aren't a feedstock for the most important fertilizer, so the use of fossil fuels in their manufacture is instrumental rather than inherent.

badpun 4y ago

Plenty of land that was previously farmland is currently desert or otherwise almost useless. It just takes a different amount of time in different regions.

dangerface 4y ago

> How exaclty are farmers "stealing" from the soil, when the same patch of land has been used for monocultures a hundred years or more? Before the world wars and invention of artificial fertiliser we didn't have monocultures. On the scale of agriculture artificial fertiliser and factory farming is extremely new not something we have been doing for hundreds of years. The issue is that when the crop is harvested you are taking nutrients out of the field into the crop then taking that crop off the soil. These nutrients need replaced or you will deplete the field. A hundred years ago this would come back in the form of rotations of crops and animals that leave dung to fertilise the land today its done with artificial fertiliser which provides lots of nitrogen but is missing all of the trace nutrients that where removed. Better artificial fertiliser could help but there are other problems with artificial fertiliser like run off where rain remove the fertiliser from the field and dumps it into wetlands and rivers which are poisoned by the massive amounts of nitrogen. The old way was sustainable but required lots of manual labour the new way is not sustainable but is easily automated. The real sustainable solution is to automate the old way of farming.