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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 rumi
by 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.
- giantg2 4y agoTo be frank, they are already not very nutritious, both due to the type/genetics of the crop and the depleted soil providing fewer minerals.
- theGnuMe 4y agoUmmm... it gets cold in the midwest, so cold catle will freeze if not kept warm.
- jessaustin 4y agoUmmm... bullshit. Taurine cattle thrive in cold weather. They were domesticated from animals that lived in the forests of northern Europe. The reason they don't live in the arctic is there isn't enough grass there. Many of the biggest challenges to cattle health (in a word: flies) are only present during warm weather. I have thirty new calves on the ground right now.
- theGnuMe 4y agoSo like in -20F excluding the polar vortex? Open ranging them and running them around?
- jessaustin 4y agoDude... stop digging. According to weather.gov, the lowest low at my location in Midwest USA was -12F in 1917-12-30. It does occasionally get down to 0F, but my herd has little problem with that. I break ice and make sure they have hay. One time, I had a little bull born overnight in a February cold snap. Due to an unfortunate interaction between its mother and a brush pile, it wandered into a ditch and couldn't nurse until I found it in the morning. I brought them both in the (unheated) barn and reminded it how to nurse. After a day in the barn I turned them back out. That bull still had a red nose when I sold it as a 2yo to a neighbor, so we called it "Rudolph". Of course I'm in Missouri, not North Dakota, so one probably couldn't bring my heat-acclimated Red Angus crossed with Akaushi and Charolais to North Dakota and expect them to thrive. There are plenty of Red Angus herds in North Dakota, however. North of there, I guess they have to raise Scottish Highlanders?
- prottog 4y ago> I have thirty new calves on the ground right now. I'm curious, how did you get into that? Are you a software person who became (forgive the term) a gentleman rancher? Was it a family business? Or do you have no professional connection to software to begin with?
- jessaustin 4y agoIn my family we have always had livestock. I was in software for a while, and am open to certain aspects of that work still. I have other jobs too, because agriculture is not a dependable long-term venture. (That is more related to the fact that antitrust regulations are not enforced in USA, than it is to any inherent quality of agriculture.)
- randomdata 4y ago> it takes more and more fertilizer to get the same level of output We've seen a 25% increase in output over the last several years that we've only been able to explain as being the result of climate change. It is consistent across a large number of farms, so it is not one farmer's change in management practices.