8 ms·

Soil in Midwestern US is eroding 10 to 1k times faster than it forms

297 points by voisin 4y ago

talideon 4y ago
That's entirely unsurprising. We have a related problem in Ireland around bogs: bogs have historically been cut for fuel, and are not a renewable resource because they don't reform that quickly. Yet you have people treating them as if they are renewable. The US has been doing something similar with its farmland for centuries. You can't have vast empty expanses of grassland that won't erode because there's _nothing_ to renew them. Hedgerows and forest cover are important to minimise losses as they act as traps, but these kinds of things are not as common as they should be in the US. It's like the actual lessons of the dustbowl were never actually learned.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  https://soilsolutions.net/save-the-topsoil/ https://soilsolutions.net/save-the-topsoil/ >According to this display the average depth of topsoil in the year 1850 across Iowa was 14 inches. In 1900 it had decreased to 11.5 inches. After another 50 years it had dropped to 8.5 inches and in the 50 years from 1950 to 2000 it had decreased another 3 inches to 5.5 inches. If our rate of loss has stayed steady over the last 18 years the topsoil depth should now be at 4.5 inches. If this rate continues our topsoil will be depleted by 2093. It seems we may be aggressively depleting our topsoil like we are our petroleum resources. We could just be in the final era before the plunge for both. I hope we are using what we have left to fix the problem and find new solutions.
  - Jarwain 4y ago
    I feel like we're going to end up moving towards hydroponics and the like before/instead of resolving the topsoil problem
    - rdtwo 4y ago
      Nah we just need to stop growing food for diesel
      - akiselev 4y ago
        The distillers grain that is left over from biofuel production is fed to cows and makes up a significant fraction of all cattle feed. If we stopped, that corn would still be planted but beef would get more expensive.
        eclipticplane 4y ago
        Well, we also need to eat less meat. The American west can sustain vast herds of ruminants in land that is not suitable for farming.
        nightski 4y ago
        We don't all need to do anything. You can do as you please.
        JamisonM 4y ago
        Seems like lower corn prices, higher beef prices, some marginal environmental benefit, and lower fuel prices is kind of reasonable trade off all-told if that was where it netted out.
    - honkler 4y ago
      I think we are rather going to have starvation and collapse.
      - porknubbins 4y ago
        If you’re just looking at calories the US has a massive surplus of arable land.
    - jandrese 4y ago
- tharkun__ 4y ago
  Absolutely agreed. There are so many things and old practices that could deal with this but people seem to completely ignore it all. Or maybe they just don't know. We had a farmer around here who seems to have learned. He somehow figured out that hedgerows help break the wind and are home to beneficial birds and other animals, even if also probably harboring not so beneficial ones such as rabbits ;) He subdivided his fields by "planting" hedgerows again but he did it on the cheap. He threw a bunch of old branches/cutoffs around his fields and just left it there for a few years. Over time, birds and other animals probably that used the branches for shelter would drop seeds and over time an actual hedge grew all by itself. FWIW he also built a little pond in the middle of some fields, simply by digging out a hole and piling up the dug out soil around it on 3 1/2 sides.
  - rdtwo 4y ago
    You would never do this with rented land. Most farmers rent the land so they have no interest in improving soil
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - randomdata 4y ago
      You certainly wouldn't against the wishes of the landlord who doesn't want to clean up your mess after you move on. That's a good way to get kicked out. If it is what the landlord wants, you no doubt would. If you don't there are a 100 other farmers lined up for the land who will.
      - Calamitous 4y ago
        I think you are vastly overestimating the number of people who want to be farmers.
        randomdata 4y ago
        Well, being a farmer, I have to compete against them and have a good handle on who else wants the land I have been able to rent, and who has taken the land I wished to rent but lost out on. So, no, I don't think so. That doesn't even get into the people who wish they could farm but can't because there are already so many lined up in front of them.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  As long as there is a profit to be made, people will do it. The consequences of their actions won't be felt by them and they know it. We've got a system that does not provide checks and balances against that, and the world is run by the same neoliberal ideology that says the market is always right and intervention is wrong. Sucks for our kids and their kids, but the people doing things like this do not care one iota. It's a shame that those that run the world are ideologically opposed to make them care about the damage they're doing.
  - nverno 4y ago
    Personally, I wouldn't say Iowa farmers run the world. We have systems, eg. the USDA, EPA, etc. that are supposed to protect against long-term damage. They just might not be doing enough in many cases. This is about a lot more than ideology. People want food, and it's a whole lot harder to produce the quantities people need using better long-term farming practices. Hopefully, that changes.
    - blululu 4y ago
      People have food. There is more than enough food for everyone in the US. The US produces a large surplus. The federal government intervenes with generous subsidies, to guarantee over production.
      - paganel 4y ago
        > The US produces a large surplus. Which helps keep the price of basic foods low in other parts of the world, such as Africa. Take that out and you've got huge famines over large parts of the world, huge famine-induced migrations and guaranteed big wars. There's no way for a country like Egypt to feed its population of 100 million (I just checked that value yesterday on wikipedia, I still can't believe it) all by itself, that's why it needs cheap food imports to be available. Yes, the Western subsidies for their own agricultural products directly kill most of African agriculture in the bud, but, even so, and I repeat, I don't think a country like Egypt would have been able to feed itself. Maybe a country like Congo could (population ~100 million), but the soils over there are not suitable for farming grains and then you'd have to cut down the equatorial forests to make way for said farming land. One could transform nearby Zimbabwe in the bread-basket of Africa again, but then all the environmental damages we now inflict on the US MidWest prairies and big rivers would similarly negatively affect the African savannah and rivers like the Zambezi.
- dleslie 4y ago
  Same with the Canadian prairies. They keep wondering why there's drought year after year, but swear it's not because they drained all the wetlands to grow canola.
- lettergram 4y ago
  To be fair... Ireland has also been doing this to bogs since time immemorial. It was just only the locals collecting the peat moss for heat. In 2020 Ireland closed its last peat moss power station https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2020/1218/1185188-power-station/ https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2020/1218/1185188-power-sta...
- hinkley 4y ago
  Colonial era sod was so thick that they built cabins out of it. Those perennial grasses in the Midwest had crazy deep roots. We removed them to plant corn.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  I live next to the largest intact raised bog in Europe (it's in Ireland) and the profound ignorance of people who claim to love the land is staggering. They have no clue about how bogs form, how long it takes to replenish (basically forever, especially considering drying), and mostly think climate change is great news for making winters warmer (they're not familiar with the AMOC). It's "protected" but the trail still has quite a lot of turf-cutting debris.
peteradio 4y ago
Paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstract/doi/10.1130/G50667.1/619178/Pre-agricultural-soil-erosion-rates-in-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstrac... An unfortunately sensational title IMO.
- mario_kart_snes 4y ago
  Yeah, from that link: "The long-term erosion rates are also one to four orders of magnitude lower than the assumed 1 mm yr soil loss tolerance value assigned to these locations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture." So this paper shows the erosion is actually slower (better!) than we expected.
  - dmckeon 4y ago
    Aren't those the "pre-agricultural erosion" rates that are lower than the current rates?
  - isThereClarity 4y ago
    From my understanding of that abstract, it's the _pre-agricultural_ erosion rates are lower than assumed, so the tolerance value for agricultural land has been set too high. From the conclusion: > We find that pre-agricultural erosion rates in the midwestern United States are on the order of 0.0001–0.1 mm yr–1. Soil loss tolerance values of 1 mm yr–1 are one to four orders of magnitude higher than pre-agricultural erosion rates. Similarly, the agricultural erosion rates are 10–1000 times greater than the preagricultural erosion rates. Our results indicate that tolerable soil erosion, as currently defined, will lead to the depletion of midwestern soils.
  - bribroder 4y ago
    It seems like this rather indicates that the USDA erosion tolerance is too high to meaningfully slow the rate of erosion. 1mm is not a useful target given that the average pre-agricultural rate of erosion is 0.04mm--this paper says that the pre-agricultural erosion rate was much lower than expected and this means modern practices are still causing more damage than previously understood and tolerance should be lowered by an order of magnitude.
beachy 4y ago
Wait until they realise how much faster oil deposits are being depleted than formed. Humans gonna deplete.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
BugsJustFindMe 4y ago
Forgive me if I missed the answer, but where is it going?
- FredPret 4y ago
  Rivers carry it to the sea
- voisin 4y ago
  During the Dust Bowl, a lot of the soil blew away into the Atlantic Ocean off New England. Not sure how they knew that but I’ve come across this a number of times. Absent organic matter, the soil becomes dust and literally blows away.
  - jseutter 4y ago
    The wikipedia page mentions it - the prevailing winds are west-to-east across much of the US and Canada due to the jet stream. In the winter the jet stream also moves further south. It mentions some of what must have been epic multi-day dust storms that started in South Dakota and reached Chicago one day and the east coast the next. New England had red snowfall from the residual dust in the air. I was surprised recently when I was watching an Iowa corn farmer on youtube who is the new generation taking over the farm and trying to change things for the better by doing "new" things such as no till farming. I remember reading about no-till as a kid back in the 80s and there are still people who are just now getting the memo and trying it. I loved farming but didn't take over the family farm because my dad was reticent to trying new things, and chose computer programming instead.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      > I remember reading about no-till as a kid back in the 80s and there are still people who are just now getting the memo and trying it. I remember as a kid in the 80s watching people try it. They either went bankrupt or soon pulled the old iron back out of the shed. But the march of technological progress continues. The tools on the market now aren't the same tools they had in the 80s. It stands to reason that it is going to be tried again. Not no-till related, but I recently bought an implement for my farm and my grandfather was concerned because a similar tool he had decades ago didn't work well on the farm. But the new tool is only similar on the surface. When you start looking at the details it is very different, benefiting from decades of advancement. It's worth trying again.
bawolff 4y ago
We really are repeating the early 1900s
- m463 4y ago
  I hope we continue repeating the cycle -- but in a different way. I read the book "the rational optimist" where it turns out mining coal and drilling for oil helped save the whales (replacing whale oil) and forests (replacing firewood). So I am saying maybe solar (or well designed nuclear) could help with energy and pollution. That said, all the bay area redwoods were clear cut to rebuild the city after the earthquake and fires in 1906. Only a handful of old-growth redwoods exist.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > I read the book "the rational optimist" where it turns out mining coal and drilling for oil helped save the whales (replacing whale oil) and forests (replacing firewood). At what cost though ? Sounds overly optimistic to me
thehappypm 4y ago
Basically, it is eroding a miniscule amount, and re-forming at a smaller miniscule amount. All of which well under the max 1mm/year.
- kumarvvr 4y ago
  This information is irrelevant without knowing the current size of top soil. Also important is whether the erosion is accelerating, constant or decelerating.
  - mellavora 4y ago
    There was almost no erosion before modern farming, say 120 years ago. The high rates of erosion are a purely man-made phenomenon
    - jandrese 4y ago
      On geological timescales the rate of erosion is almost instantaneous. We're talking about running out of topsoil in a single lifetime.
    - faddypaddy34 4y ago
      Without modern farming most people wouldn't be able to eat. Soil erosion doesn't worry me nearly as much as the constant transformation of farmland into crappy suburban developments, with pretty lawns that contribute nothing to the eco system or food supply.
      - jdkee 4y ago
        And no one talks about the overpopulation enabled by the petrochemicals and the Green Revolution.
  - ljw1004 4y ago
    Those numbers are easy to find on google! Iowa 14-18" average topsoil depth in 1900, 6-8" in 2000. I'm not sure anyone could tell acceleration/deceleration over this timescale.
jihadjihad 4y ago
"Man – despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." - Paul Harvey
- digitalsushi 4y ago
  and perhaps, that we can literally suck nitrogen out of the air to make the fertilizers that without, we could not have grown to 8 billion people
  - throwaway2214 4y ago
    the dutch are closing 3000 farms because of too much nitrogen nothing is as easy as it seems
- honkler 4y ago
  and modern society owes to dinosaur juice
  - efields 4y ago
    More than anything else. If you took oil out of the meta, it’s not like humanity would die off. It’d just be very different. We’d still be thriving. We’d still likely have scientific breakthroughs that increase quality of life. It’d just be so very different.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      I don’t think it would be that different. I think the growth curve of our technology and population would have had a longer flat section. Obviously this is a ridiculously complex thing to project, but the reason I’m skeptical is that without fossil fuels, there’s still far more energy available than we need. Perhaps an argument could be made that fossil fuels are a distraction and we would have been naturally forced towards more sustainable options. …or we just get super good at burning trees.
    - 4y ago
matt3210 4y ago
10 or 1k is a huge range
- maxbond 4y ago
  It sounds like you're reading that as a margin of error. Some places they measured a factor of 10, other places they measured a factor of 1000.
bluedino 4y ago
I lived across from a farm field, and noticed how dusty in the inside of my garage (and it's contents) got if I left the door open. I didn't put two and two together and realize it was from the field until one spring when I noticed a fine layer of what smelled like manure on my bicycle.
johnthuss 4y ago
“Yet, there’s no reason to despair. ‘There are agricultural practices, such as no-till farming, that we know how to do and we know greatly reduce erosion,’ says Quarrier. ‘The key is to reduce our current erosion rates to natural levels,’”
mythrwy 4y ago
Fertile soils in Florida have it even worse! https://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Media/Images/igphoto/2000751832/ https://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Media/Images/igphoto/20007518... Nearly and inch of soil loss per year since the land was first drained to farm. But this is less erosion and more just decay of organic matter exposed to air I think.
jdkee 4y ago
“The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” -FDR
chubot 4y ago
Good documentary about this issue on Netflix: Kiss the Ground (2020) https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 It has some striking pictures of two farm fields side by side. One supports diverse plant life and produces nutrient-rich food. The plant roots prevent erosion, and retain water. The soil is rich and black. It's "regenerative". The other has brown, dry, dead soil. It's tilled and irrigated and sprayed with chemicals. It grows a single crop, a monoculture. Multiply that by a hundred years and thousands of consolidating mega farms all over the world, and you have a huge amount of erosion --- This problem has been well understood for decades (and by other civilizations for centuries), but is repressed / conveniently ignored by a wealthy, government-subsidized food industry Here's a 2012 documentary about a 1994 project in China to restore degraded / desertified land, and it shows how poor entire states become when the soil is poor (which I suppose is not unlike the American midwest!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ https://rethink.earth/turning-desert-to-fertile-farmland-on-the-loess-plateau/ https://rethink.earth/turning-desert-to-fertile-farmland-on-... Chinese land has supported agriculture way longer than American land, and they have way more people, so they have these problems sooner The US is going to get there
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  I also want to suggest this YouTube lecture on the subject which I’ve enjoyed listening to a couple of times. Dave Montgomery - Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations https://youtu.be/sQACN-XiqHU https://youtu.be/sQACN-XiqHU
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  If the midwest has poor soil, I'd love to see good soil. Must not exist in the US.
  - rsj_hn 4y ago
    The midwest used to have great soil. But the soil in the midwest is not meant to grow crops, but to raise cattle (nature put buffalo there as well as other ruminants). If you have grassland with ruminants, you can take a small portion of that and grow some corn or other staple for a few years, and then return it to grassland (what the Native Americans did) so that it is naturally fertilized by ruminants and the decaying roots of grass. But in order to turn it into millions of acres of soy or corn that are constantly and intensely being harvested, you need to add lots of synthetic fertilizer and then deplete the aquifers, because the midwest is a semi-arid plain. That means the nutrients have been depleted over the previous hundred growing seasons, and it takes more and more fertilizer to get the same level of output even as the aquifers are being depleted. We don't know how many growing cycles are left, but after the next hundred years, if we are still growing crops in the midwest, it will be because we are importing 100% of the nutrients and shipping in the water from elsewhere. We will just be using the physical space at that point, and I doubt crops grown this way can be as nutritious.
zander312 4y ago
We have known for years that erosion is far greater from tilled soil than from ungrazed or wildlife grazed rough native pastures. The evidence comes from many erosion plots around the world where you mark off a plot of maybe 20 yards by 20 yards and put a V shaped funnel arrangement at the lower end and weigh what you catch washed out over say a year. But there are lots of other questions. We don’t have much data on rates of soil formation from underlying rock and moisture. And the problem is that actually many of the world’s best soils are the product of erosion. Often, when fields get eroded, the soil just moves downhill to another location. The Nile delta in Egypt and the Ganges plains in India are excellent soils that came from erosion in other places over millions of years. They are right that zero till usually somewhat reduces erosion. But this technology is under threat because people claim that the herbicide Roundup used before direct seeding causes cancer. ( The evidence for that is very shaky. A large US study of about 40,000 professional Roundup applicators contracted by farmers, who must have had a high level of contact with it, had no higher cancer rates including lymphoma than the average.) Also, farmers, who use a lot themselves, are probably the healthiest demographic in the world. It’s a complex story.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
destitude 4y ago
I've seen parts of southern Iowa where there is zero top soil left. There are many hilly areas around there and resulted in the exposed top soil from "traditional" row crop farming easily washing away in heavy rains. It should never have been farmed to begin with. Once it became unusable for row crop farming they just put cattle on it which causes even more erosion. Because the ground is mostly only clay now any rain easily causes flooding. The best part is where a lot of the farmers there dump all their trash in the ravines (tires, appliances, household garbage, etc) that are formed from all the erosion to create some form of "erosion control".
docmechanic 4y ago
Fascinating that a student in a Master's program is the first to document the natural rate of soil erosion in the Midwest. "For the first time, we know what the natural rates of erosion are in the Midwest,” says Caroline Quarrier, the paper’s lead author and who completed this research as part of her master’s thesis at UMass Amherst. “And because we now know the rate of erosion before Euro-American settlement, we can see exactly how much modern agriculture has accelerated the process.” The numbers are not encouraging. “Our median pre-agricultural erosion rate across all the sites we sampled is 0.04 mm per year,” says Larsen. Any modern-day erosion rate higher than that number means that soil is disappearing faster than it is accumulating."
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  > Fascinating that a student in a Master's program is the first to document the natural rate of soil erosion in the Midwest. More like all the other Agronomy experts are wise enough not to mess with the Corn Subsidies money.
xyst 4y ago
Need to get off this rock before it’s too late. World showing minimal signs of reversing O&G dependency, reduction of eating meat products, and eroding preservation of key ecosystems that help produce oxygen (ie, continued deforestation of Brazilian rain forest).
- pjc50 4y ago
  There's nowhere else that has ecosystems. Making Mars habitable is orders of magnitude harder than keeping Earth habitable.
  - cyber_kinetist 4y ago
    Yeah, at least we should get competent in managing our own ecosystem before trying to create a new one.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  And go to ....?
joshe 4y ago
More comprehensive info summarizing many studies on soil erosion worldwide is here: https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans The above is a vague sensationalized press release written by a PR flack at the university.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
The study tries to estimate how fast soil used to erode using a trace mineral. Assuming this measures the right thing, why would it be the fastest soil can form in modern times, especially with active human intervention to rehabilitate the land?
mikewarot 4y ago
Regenerative farming builds soil, capturing carbon, improving water retention. It costs a bit more than conventional farming, in the short-medium term.
bagels 4y ago
Article says both that is eroding 10-1000x faster than it is formed, and eroding 10-1000x faster than previous erosion rates. Hard to understand what is actually being claimed.
rob74 4y ago
Now here's an attempt at explaining science to laypersons gone wrong: > [...] makes use of a rare element, beryllium-10, or 10Be, that occurs when stars in the Milky Way explode and send high-energy particles, called cosmic rays, rocketing toward Earth. When this galactic shrapnel slams into the Earth’s crust, it splits oxygen in the soil apart, leaving tiny trace amounts of 10Be [...] I would say 10Be is formed by cosmic rays hitting the crust, then it occurs there. And "rocketing" is far slower than the speed at which these particles travel (almost light speed). Also, comparing subatomic particles to "shrapnel" (a macroscopic object) sounds a bit strange to me, but since these are parts broken off from atoms, similar to the way shrapnel breaks off from a grenade, it might make sense...
mattpallissard 4y ago
I grew up in big ag. I think a lot of people get hung up on subsidies and the actions of large conglomerates. While it's true that's what got us there, in my experience what keeps us there is the _this is how my father did it and it worked_ attitude. Looking to the past for a recipe for success. A lot of the old timers actually experienced a time where farming was harder than it was (it's still not an easy job). To them it makes sense to follow what was led as that made life easier. The guys running the farms that are doing really well tend to have a large subset of their acreage dedicated to organic crops based purely on market demand. They also test their soil, rotate their off season cover crops based on those tests, have their livestock graze on the cover, and have radically different opinions than the norm on plow, vs till, vs low till, vs no till (they use them as the situation calls for it, not beholden to a particular method) In short the successful folks question what was done and are trying to get out ahead of industry trends where most people are just blindly following a pattern that worked at some point in the past. IMO it's not too much different the tech industry.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Doesn't mean what you think it means. Topsoil is not vital for agriculture. The best corn grows on eroded clay hillsides - because it's well-drained. The fertility of topsoil is largely irrelevant because everybody uses liquid ammonia fertilizer. The midwest is where the glaciers melted, leaving 100+ feet of silt, sand and gravel. A long way to bedrock most places. So what, 1000 years before we have to worry? Sure we should understand it and measure the processes. But let me tell you it's light-years better than when I was a kid, and every field was a mass of ruts and washout. Because farmers over the last half-century were educated. They do contour plowing to avoid fast-moving water after a rain. Now many do no-till planting where the plow never touches the soil, not for years anyway. You want to know where the real erosion is now? Construction sites. They are allowed to suspend the rules about soil conservation entirely.

297 points by voisin 4y ago

That's entirely unsurprising. We have a related problem in Ireland around bogs: bogs have historically been cut for fuel, and are not a renewable resource because they don't reform that quickly. Yet you have people treating them as if they are renewable. The US has been doing something similar with its farmland for centuries. You can't have vast empty expanses of grassland that won't erode because there's _nothing_ to renew them. Hedgerows and forest cover are important to minimise losses as they act as traps, but these kinds of things are not as common as they should be in the US. It's like the actual lessons of the dustbowl were never actually learned.

Mistletoe 4y ago
https://soilsolutions.net/save-the-topsoil/ https://soilsolutions.net/save-the-topsoil/ >According to this display the average depth of topsoil in the year 1850 across Iowa was 14 inches. In 1900 it had decreased to 11.5 inches. After another 50 years it had dropped to 8.5 inches and in the 50 years from 1950 to 2000 it had decreased another 3 inches to 5.5 inches. If our rate of loss has stayed steady over the last 18 years the topsoil depth should now be at 4.5 inches. If this rate continues our topsoil will be depleted by 2093. It seems we may be aggressively depleting our topsoil like we are our petroleum resources. We could just be in the final era before the plunge for both. I hope we are using what we have left to fix the problem and find new solutions.
- Jarwain 4y ago
  I feel like we're going to end up moving towards hydroponics and the like before/instead of resolving the topsoil problem
  - rdtwo 4y ago
    Nah we just need to stop growing food for diesel
    - akiselev 4y ago
      The distillers grain that is left over from biofuel production is fed to cows and makes up a significant fraction of all cattle feed. If we stopped, that corn would still be planted but beef would get more expensive.
      - eclipticplane 4y ago
        Well, we also need to eat less meat. The American west can sustain vast herds of ruminants in land that is not suitable for farming.
        nightski 4y ago
        We don't all need to do anything. You can do as you please.
      - JamisonM 4y ago
        Seems like lower corn prices, higher beef prices, some marginal environmental benefit, and lower fuel prices is kind of reasonable trade off all-told if that was where it netted out.
  - honkler 4y ago
    I think we are rather going to have starvation and collapse.
    - porknubbins 4y ago
      If you’re just looking at calories the US has a massive surplus of arable land.
  - jandrese 4y ago
tharkun__ 4y ago
Absolutely agreed. There are so many things and old practices that could deal with this but people seem to completely ignore it all. Or maybe they just don't know. We had a farmer around here who seems to have learned. He somehow figured out that hedgerows help break the wind and are home to beneficial birds and other animals, even if also probably harboring not so beneficial ones such as rabbits ;) He subdivided his fields by "planting" hedgerows again but he did it on the cheap. He threw a bunch of old branches/cutoffs around his fields and just left it there for a few years. Over time, birds and other animals probably that used the branches for shelter would drop seeds and over time an actual hedge grew all by itself. FWIW he also built a little pond in the middle of some fields, simply by digging out a hole and piling up the dug out soil around it on 3 1/2 sides.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  You would never do this with rented land. Most farmers rent the land so they have no interest in improving soil
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - randomdata 4y ago
    You certainly wouldn't against the wishes of the landlord who doesn't want to clean up your mess after you move on. That's a good way to get kicked out. If it is what the landlord wants, you no doubt would. If you don't there are a 100 other farmers lined up for the land who will.
    - Calamitous 4y ago
      I think you are vastly overestimating the number of people who want to be farmers.
      - randomdata 4y ago
        Well, being a farmer, I have to compete against them and have a good handle on who else wants the land I have been able to rent, and who has taken the land I wished to rent but lost out on. So, no, I don't think so. That doesn't even get into the people who wish they could farm but can't because there are already so many lined up in front of them.
heavyset_go 4y ago
As long as there is a profit to be made, people will do it. The consequences of their actions won't be felt by them and they know it. We've got a system that does not provide checks and balances against that, and the world is run by the same neoliberal ideology that says the market is always right and intervention is wrong. Sucks for our kids and their kids, but the people doing things like this do not care one iota. It's a shame that those that run the world are ideologically opposed to make them care about the damage they're doing.
- nverno 4y ago
  Personally, I wouldn't say Iowa farmers run the world. We have systems, eg. the USDA, EPA, etc. that are supposed to protect against long-term damage. They just might not be doing enough in many cases. This is about a lot more than ideology. People want food, and it's a whole lot harder to produce the quantities people need using better long-term farming practices. Hopefully, that changes.
  - blululu 4y ago
    People have food. There is more than enough food for everyone in the US. The US produces a large surplus. The federal government intervenes with generous subsidies, to guarantee over production.
    - paganel 4y ago
      > The US produces a large surplus. Which helps keep the price of basic foods low in other parts of the world, such as Africa. Take that out and you've got huge famines over large parts of the world, huge famine-induced migrations and guaranteed big wars. There's no way for a country like Egypt to feed its population of 100 million (I just checked that value yesterday on wikipedia, I still can't believe it) all by itself, that's why it needs cheap food imports to be available. Yes, the Western subsidies for their own agricultural products directly kill most of African agriculture in the bud, but, even so, and I repeat, I don't think a country like Egypt would have been able to feed itself. Maybe a country like Congo could (population ~100 million), but the soils over there are not suitable for farming grains and then you'd have to cut down the equatorial forests to make way for said farming land. One could transform nearby Zimbabwe in the bread-basket of Africa again, but then all the environmental damages we now inflict on the US MidWest prairies and big rivers would similarly negatively affect the African savannah and rivers like the Zambezi.
dleslie 4y ago
Same with the Canadian prairies. They keep wondering why there's drought year after year, but swear it's not because they drained all the wetlands to grow canola.
lettergram 4y ago
To be fair... Ireland has also been doing this to bogs since time immemorial. It was just only the locals collecting the peat moss for heat. In 2020 Ireland closed its last peat moss power station https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2020/1218/1185188-power-station/ https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2020/1218/1185188-power-sta...
hinkley 4y ago
Colonial era sod was so thick that they built cabins out of it. Those perennial grasses in the Midwest had crazy deep roots. We removed them to plant corn.
CalRobert 4y ago
I live next to the largest intact raised bog in Europe (it's in Ireland) and the profound ignorance of people who claim to love the land is staggering. They have no clue about how bogs form, how long it takes to replenish (basically forever, especially considering drying), and mostly think climate change is great news for making winters warmer (they're not familiar with the AMOC). It's "protected" but the trail still has quite a lot of turf-cutting debris.

peteradio 4y ago

Paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstract/doi/10.1130/G50667.1/619178/Pre-agricultural-soil-erosion-rates-in-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstrac... An unfortunately sensational title IMO.

mario_kart_snes 4y ago
Yeah, from that link: "The long-term erosion rates are also one to four orders of magnitude lower than the assumed 1 mm yr soil loss tolerance value assigned to these locations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture." So this paper shows the erosion is actually slower (better!) than we expected.
- dmckeon 4y ago
  Aren't those the "pre-agricultural erosion" rates that are lower than the current rates?
- isThereClarity 4y ago
  From my understanding of that abstract, it's the _pre-agricultural_ erosion rates are lower than assumed, so the tolerance value for agricultural land has been set too high. From the conclusion: > We find that pre-agricultural erosion rates in the midwestern United States are on the order of 0.0001–0.1 mm yr–1. Soil loss tolerance values of 1 mm yr–1 are one to four orders of magnitude higher than pre-agricultural erosion rates. Similarly, the agricultural erosion rates are 10–1000 times greater than the preagricultural erosion rates. Our results indicate that tolerable soil erosion, as currently defined, will lead to the depletion of midwestern soils.
- bribroder 4y ago
  It seems like this rather indicates that the USDA erosion tolerance is too high to meaningfully slow the rate of erosion. 1mm is not a useful target given that the average pre-agricultural rate of erosion is 0.04mm--this paper says that the pre-agricultural erosion rate was much lower than expected and this means modern practices are still causing more damage than previously understood and tolerance should be lowered by an order of magnitude.

beachy 4y ago

Wait until they realise how much faster oil deposits are being depleted than formed. Humans gonna deplete.

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BugsJustFindMe 4y ago

Forgive me if I missed the answer, but where is it going?

FredPret 4y ago
Rivers carry it to the sea
voisin 4y ago
During the Dust Bowl, a lot of the soil blew away into the Atlantic Ocean off New England. Not sure how they knew that but I’ve come across this a number of times. Absent organic matter, the soil becomes dust and literally blows away.
- jseutter 4y ago
  The wikipedia page mentions it - the prevailing winds are west-to-east across much of the US and Canada due to the jet stream. In the winter the jet stream also moves further south. It mentions some of what must have been epic multi-day dust storms that started in South Dakota and reached Chicago one day and the east coast the next. New England had red snowfall from the residual dust in the air. I was surprised recently when I was watching an Iowa corn farmer on youtube who is the new generation taking over the farm and trying to change things for the better by doing "new" things such as no till farming. I remember reading about no-till as a kid back in the 80s and there are still people who are just now getting the memo and trying it. I loved farming but didn't take over the family farm because my dad was reticent to trying new things, and chose computer programming instead.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    > I remember reading about no-till as a kid back in the 80s and there are still people who are just now getting the memo and trying it. I remember as a kid in the 80s watching people try it. They either went bankrupt or soon pulled the old iron back out of the shed. But the march of technological progress continues. The tools on the market now aren't the same tools they had in the 80s. It stands to reason that it is going to be tried again. Not no-till related, but I recently bought an implement for my farm and my grandfather was concerned because a similar tool he had decades ago didn't work well on the farm. But the new tool is only similar on the surface. When you start looking at the details it is very different, benefiting from decades of advancement. It's worth trying again.

bawolff 4y ago

We really are repeating the early 1900s

m463 4y ago
I hope we continue repeating the cycle -- but in a different way. I read the book "the rational optimist" where it turns out mining coal and drilling for oil helped save the whales (replacing whale oil) and forests (replacing firewood). So I am saying maybe solar (or well designed nuclear) could help with energy and pollution. That said, all the bay area redwoods were clear cut to rebuild the city after the earthquake and fires in 1906. Only a handful of old-growth redwoods exist.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > I read the book "the rational optimist" where it turns out mining coal and drilling for oil helped save the whales (replacing whale oil) and forests (replacing firewood). At what cost though ? Sounds overly optimistic to me

thehappypm 4y ago

Basically, it is eroding a miniscule amount, and re-forming at a smaller miniscule amount. All of which well under the max 1mm/year.

kumarvvr 4y ago
This information is irrelevant without knowing the current size of top soil. Also important is whether the erosion is accelerating, constant or decelerating.
- mellavora 4y ago
  There was almost no erosion before modern farming, say 120 years ago. The high rates of erosion are a purely man-made phenomenon
  - jandrese 4y ago
    On geological timescales the rate of erosion is almost instantaneous. We're talking about running out of topsoil in a single lifetime.
  - faddypaddy34 4y ago
    Without modern farming most people wouldn't be able to eat. Soil erosion doesn't worry me nearly as much as the constant transformation of farmland into crappy suburban developments, with pretty lawns that contribute nothing to the eco system or food supply.
    - jdkee 4y ago
      And no one talks about the overpopulation enabled by the petrochemicals and the Green Revolution.
- ljw1004 4y ago
  Those numbers are easy to find on google! Iowa 14-18" average topsoil depth in 1900, 6-8" in 2000. I'm not sure anyone could tell acceleration/deceleration over this timescale.

jihadjihad 4y ago

"Man – despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." - Paul Harvey

digitalsushi 4y ago
and perhaps, that we can literally suck nitrogen out of the air to make the fertilizers that without, we could not have grown to 8 billion people
- throwaway2214 4y ago
  the dutch are closing 3000 farms because of too much nitrogen nothing is as easy as it seems
honkler 4y ago
and modern society owes to dinosaur juice
- efields 4y ago
  More than anything else. If you took oil out of the meta, it’s not like humanity would die off. It’d just be very different. We’d still be thriving. We’d still likely have scientific breakthroughs that increase quality of life. It’d just be so very different.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    I don’t think it would be that different. I think the growth curve of our technology and population would have had a longer flat section. Obviously this is a ridiculously complex thing to project, but the reason I’m skeptical is that without fossil fuels, there’s still far more energy available than we need. Perhaps an argument could be made that fossil fuels are a distraction and we would have been naturally forced towards more sustainable options. …or we just get super good at burning trees.
  - 4y ago

matt3210 4y ago

10 or 1k is a huge range

maxbond 4y ago
It sounds like you're reading that as a margin of error. Some places they measured a factor of 10, other places they measured a factor of 1000.

bluedino 4y ago

I lived across from a farm field, and noticed how dusty in the inside of my garage (and it's contents) got if I left the door open. I didn't put two and two together and realize it was from the field until one spring when I noticed a fine layer of what smelled like manure on my bicycle.

johnthuss 4y ago

“Yet, there’s no reason to despair. ‘There are agricultural practices, such as no-till farming, that we know how to do and we know greatly reduce erosion,’ says Quarrier. ‘The key is to reduce our current erosion rates to natural levels,’”

mythrwy 4y ago

Fertile soils in Florida have it even worse! https://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Media/Images/igphoto/2000751832/ https://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Media/Images/igphoto/20007518... Nearly and inch of soil loss per year since the land was first drained to farm. But this is less erosion and more just decay of organic matter exposed to air I think.

jdkee 4y ago

“The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” -FDR

chubot 4y ago

Good documentary about this issue on Netflix: Kiss the Ground (2020) https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 It has some striking pictures of two farm fields side by side. One supports diverse plant life and produces nutrient-rich food. The plant roots prevent erosion, and retain water. The soil is rich and black. It's "regenerative". The other has brown, dry, dead soil. It's tilled and irrigated and sprayed with chemicals. It grows a single crop, a monoculture. Multiply that by a hundred years and thousands of consolidating mega farms all over the world, and you have a huge amount of erosion --- This problem has been well understood for decades (and by other civilizations for centuries), but is repressed / conveniently ignored by a wealthy, government-subsidized food industry Here's a 2012 documentary about a 1994 project in China to restore degraded / desertified land, and it shows how poor entire states become when the soil is poor (which I suppose is not unlike the American midwest!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ https://rethink.earth/turning-desert-to-fertile-farmland-on-the-loess-plateau/ https://rethink.earth/turning-desert-to-fertile-farmland-on-... Chinese land has supported agriculture way longer than American land, and they have way more people, so they have these problems sooner The US is going to get there

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
I also want to suggest this YouTube lecture on the subject which I’ve enjoyed listening to a couple of times. Dave Montgomery - Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations https://youtu.be/sQACN-XiqHU https://youtu.be/sQACN-XiqHU
nonethewiser 4y ago
If the midwest has poor soil, I'd love to see good soil. Must not exist in the US.
- rsj_hn 4y ago
  The midwest used to have great soil. But the soil in the midwest is not meant to grow crops, but to raise cattle (nature put buffalo there as well as other ruminants). If you have grassland with ruminants, you can take a small portion of that and grow some corn or other staple for a few years, and then return it to grassland (what the Native Americans did) so that it is naturally fertilized by ruminants and the decaying roots of grass. But in order to turn it into millions of acres of soy or corn that are constantly and intensely being harvested, you need to add lots of synthetic fertilizer and then deplete the aquifers, because the midwest is a semi-arid plain. That means the nutrients have been depleted over the previous hundred growing seasons, and it takes more and more fertilizer to get the same level of output even as the aquifers are being depleted. We don't know how many growing cycles are left, but after the next hundred years, if we are still growing crops in the midwest, it will be because we are importing 100% of the nutrients and shipping in the water from elsewhere. We will just be using the physical space at that point, and I doubt crops grown this way can be as nutritious.

zander312 4y ago

We have known for years that erosion is far greater from tilled soil than from ungrazed or wildlife grazed rough native pastures. The evidence comes from many erosion plots around the world where you mark off a plot of maybe 20 yards by 20 yards and put a V shaped funnel arrangement at the lower end and weigh what you catch washed out over say a year. But there are lots of other questions. We don’t have much data on rates of soil formation from underlying rock and moisture. And the problem is that actually many of the world’s best soils are the product of erosion. Often, when fields get eroded, the soil just moves downhill to another location. The Nile delta in Egypt and the Ganges plains in India are excellent soils that came from erosion in other places over millions of years. They are right that zero till usually somewhat reduces erosion. But this technology is under threat because people claim that the herbicide Roundup used before direct seeding causes cancer. ( The evidence for that is very shaky. A large US study of about 40,000 professional Roundup applicators contracted by farmers, who must have had a high level of contact with it, had no higher cancer rates including lymphoma than the average.) Also, farmers, who use a lot themselves, are probably the healthiest demographic in the world. It’s a complex story.

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destitude 4y ago

I've seen parts of southern Iowa where there is zero top soil left. There are many hilly areas around there and resulted in the exposed top soil from "traditional" row crop farming easily washing away in heavy rains. It should never have been farmed to begin with. Once it became unusable for row crop farming they just put cattle on it which causes even more erosion. Because the ground is mostly only clay now any rain easily causes flooding. The best part is where a lot of the farmers there dump all their trash in the ravines (tires, appliances, household garbage, etc) that are formed from all the erosion to create some form of "erosion control".

docmechanic 4y ago

Fascinating that a student in a Master's program is the first to document the natural rate of soil erosion in the Midwest. "For the first time, we know what the natural rates of erosion are in the Midwest,” says Caroline Quarrier, the paper’s lead author and who completed this research as part of her master’s thesis at UMass Amherst. “And because we now know the rate of erosion before Euro-American settlement, we can see exactly how much modern agriculture has accelerated the process.” The numbers are not encouraging. “Our median pre-agricultural erosion rate across all the sites we sampled is 0.04 mm per year,” says Larsen. Any modern-day erosion rate higher than that number means that soil is disappearing faster than it is accumulating."

DoingIsLearning 4y ago
> Fascinating that a student in a Master's program is the first to document the natural rate of soil erosion in the Midwest. More like all the other Agronomy experts are wise enough not to mess with the Corn Subsidies money.

xyst 4y ago

Need to get off this rock before it’s too late. World showing minimal signs of reversing O&G dependency, reduction of eating meat products, and eroding preservation of key ecosystems that help produce oxygen (ie, continued deforestation of Brazilian rain forest).

pjc50 4y ago
There's nowhere else that has ecosystems. Making Mars habitable is orders of magnitude harder than keeping Earth habitable.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  Yeah, at least we should get competent in managing our own ecosystem before trying to create a new one.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
And go to ....?

joshe 4y ago

More comprehensive info summarizing many studies on soil erosion worldwide is here: https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans The above is a vague sensationalized press release written by a PR flack at the university.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

The study tries to estimate how fast soil used to erode using a trace mineral. Assuming this measures the right thing, why would it be the fastest soil can form in modern times, especially with active human intervention to rehabilitate the land?

mikewarot 4y ago

Regenerative farming builds soil, capturing carbon, improving water retention. It costs a bit more than conventional farming, in the short-medium term.

bagels 4y ago

Article says both that is eroding 10-1000x faster than it is formed, and eroding 10-1000x faster than previous erosion rates. Hard to understand what is actually being claimed.

rob74 4y ago

Now here's an attempt at explaining science to laypersons gone wrong: > [...] makes use of a rare element, beryllium-10, or 10Be, that occurs when stars in the Milky Way explode and send high-energy particles, called cosmic rays, rocketing toward Earth. When this galactic shrapnel slams into the Earth’s crust, it splits oxygen in the soil apart, leaving tiny trace amounts of 10Be [...] I would say 10Be is formed by cosmic rays hitting the crust, then it occurs there. And "rocketing" is far slower than the speed at which these particles travel (almost light speed). Also, comparing subatomic particles to "shrapnel" (a macroscopic object) sounds a bit strange to me, but since these are parts broken off from atoms, similar to the way shrapnel breaks off from a grenade, it might make sense...

mattpallissard 4y ago

I grew up in big ag. I think a lot of people get hung up on subsidies and the actions of large conglomerates. While it's true that's what got us there, in my experience what keeps us there is the _this is how my father did it and it worked_ attitude. Looking to the past for a recipe for success. A lot of the old timers actually experienced a time where farming was harder than it was (it's still not an easy job). To them it makes sense to follow what was led as that made life easier. The guys running the farms that are doing really well tend to have a large subset of their acreage dedicated to organic crops based purely on market demand. They also test their soil, rotate their off season cover crops based on those tests, have their livestock graze on the cover, and have radically different opinions than the norm on plow, vs till, vs low till, vs no till (they use them as the situation calls for it, not beholden to a particular method) In short the successful folks question what was done and are trying to get out ahead of industry trends where most people are just blindly following a pattern that worked at some point in the past. IMO it's not too much different the tech industry.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Doesn't mean what you think it means. Topsoil is not vital for agriculture. The best corn grows on eroded clay hillsides - because it's well-drained. The fertility of topsoil is largely irrelevant because everybody uses liquid ammonia fertilizer. The midwest is where the glaciers melted, leaving 100+ feet of silt, sand and gravel. A long way to bedrock most places. So what, 1000 years before we have to worry? Sure we should understand it and measure the processes. But let me tell you it's light-years better than when I was a kid, and every field was a mass of ruts and washout. Because farmers over the last half-century were educated. They do contour plowing to avoid fast-moving water after a rain. Now many do no-till planting where the plow never touches the soil, not for years anyway. You want to know where the real erosion is now? Construction sites. They are allowed to suspend the rules about soil conservation entirely.