> 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 a

> 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.