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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 becau

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
    It seems likely to me, since topsoil erosion is very hard to avoid when you are trying to farm the land. Creating new topsoil is mostly done by letting old organic material decay, but there's no time for that if you need to plow it up to plant the crops for next season.
    - JamisonM 4y ago
      Zero-till farming will come to parts of the mid-west in fits and starts as farmers realize that the current methods are unsustainable, in most places there is no need to "plow it up". In western Canada farming practices involve more crop rotations and less tillage, the net result has been increasing organic matter in many areas. I farm in an area with a surplus of organic matter, and too much can be a problem, so we still engage in a lot of tillage under normal precipitation conditions. https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agriculture-and-environment/soil-and-land/soil-organic-matter-indicator#a https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agriculture-and-environment...
      - Mistletoe 4y ago
        What kind of problems do you see with too much organic matter? I really like to garden and often find myself going overboard on mulch and compost and paradoxically seem to notice slower growth sometimes when I use them. I wonder if it is too much organic matter?
        JamisonM 4y ago
        I can't speak to the exact circumstances in your garden but too much organic matter can have the effect of "tying up" nutrients in the organic matter in a way that makes them inaccessible to crops - if you grow to large a microbial biome in the organic matter they immobilise nitrogen.. I am not an expert on this so I only understand it in broad strokes. I am a bit of gardener and my anecdotal advice is - I don't know what sense you are using the word "mulch" here so I am not sure about that but too much compost can be an issue if you are not letting it break down long enough and not incorporating into existing soils well enough. Too much compost will grow wicked-hot radishes, but your leafy greens will be ugly and taste like garbage in my experience. The thing about gardening is it is all small sample sizes.. it ain't science and it is hard to know what's up without a good old fashioned site visit!
  - Mistletoe 4y ago
    As far as I know hydroponics isn’t really feasible for grains like wheat and corn. It’s great for growing salad items like tomatoes and lettuce but those won’t keep us alive as a staple. https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-it-common-to-grow-corn-hydroponically https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-it-common-to-grow-corn-hydrop...
    - alar44 4y ago
      That's not something that would really need to be considered unless you're talking completely apocalyptic, no soil at all.
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.

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
  It seems likely to me, since topsoil erosion is very hard to avoid when you are trying to farm the land. Creating new topsoil is mostly done by letting old organic material decay, but there's no time for that if you need to plow it up to plant the crops for next season.
  - JamisonM 4y ago
    Zero-till farming will come to parts of the mid-west in fits and starts as farmers realize that the current methods are unsustainable, in most places there is no need to "plow it up". In western Canada farming practices involve more crop rotations and less tillage, the net result has been increasing organic matter in many areas. I farm in an area with a surplus of organic matter, and too much can be a problem, so we still engage in a lot of tillage under normal precipitation conditions. https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agriculture-and-environment/soil-and-land/soil-organic-matter-indicator#a https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agriculture-and-environment...
    - Mistletoe 4y ago
      What kind of problems do you see with too much organic matter? I really like to garden and often find myself going overboard on mulch and compost and paradoxically seem to notice slower growth sometimes when I use them. I wonder if it is too much organic matter?
      - JamisonM 4y ago
        I can't speak to the exact circumstances in your garden but too much organic matter can have the effect of "tying up" nutrients in the organic matter in a way that makes them inaccessible to crops - if you grow to large a microbial biome in the organic matter they immobilise nitrogen.. I am not an expert on this so I only understand it in broad strokes. I am a bit of gardener and my anecdotal advice is - I don't know what sense you are using the word "mulch" here so I am not sure about that but too much compost can be an issue if you are not letting it break down long enough and not incorporating into existing soils well enough. Too much compost will grow wicked-hot radishes, but your leafy greens will be ugly and taste like garbage in my experience. The thing about gardening is it is all small sample sizes.. it ain't science and it is hard to know what's up without a good old fashioned site visit!
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  As far as I know hydroponics isn’t really feasible for grains like wheat and corn. It’s great for growing salad items like tomatoes and lettuce but those won’t keep us alive as a staple. https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-it-common-to-grow-corn-hydroponically https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-it-common-to-grow-corn-hydrop...
  - alar44 4y ago
    That's not something that would really need to be considered unless you're talking completely apocalyptic, no soil at all.

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.