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>Perhaps Australia - not just a country, but an entire continent! - doesn't have to be so arid. One limiting factor is that the soils are pretty gutless in man
by MrVandemar 4y ago
>Perhaps Australia - not just a country, but an entire continent! - doesn't have to be so arid.
One limiting factor is that the soils are pretty gutless in many areas - as the settlers discovered when they arrived and found that the bushland was highly evolved to survive in those conditions (we have a great diversity of carniverous plants because of this), and farming wound up being much, much more challenging than they thought.
- FridayoLeary 4y agoAnother issue that would only be discovered later was that the trees in Australia kept the water table low. A couple of years after the deforestation and farming of a plot, the water level would rise, bringing with it salt from deep underground and depositing it on the surface. Effectively this permanently destroys the soil. Not only that, but i believe that the water also disappears a while after wreaking all this havoc. This is just something from a vaguely remembered lesson so i might have forgotten some detail.
- hgomersall 4y agoApparently a big part of the solution is introducing a bit of organic matter into the desert soil which is one of the factors to kick start the process. I don't know much about it, but that's my understanding.