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
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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!)
"and it shows how poor entire states become when the soil is poor (which I suppose is not unlike the American midwest!)"
I'm not sure this is the reason the midwest is poor. In relation to farming, the size of land needed to make a good living has continually increased largely due to overhead costs increasing (insurances, general cost of living, and equipment). You have a lot of farms that try to hold on and are eventually consumed by corporate farms. Then factor in the pressure of globalization on commodity prices (one of the reasons for subsidies; although the subsidies may be hurting more than they help. On top of this, other industry such as manufacturing has been greatly reduced.
Soil quality may compound these issues through reduced yield. But even with better soil, the economics of the region are unlikely to change in my opinion.
The documentary talks a lot about economics of farming, including the perverse incentives created by government subsidies
Regenerative farming is cheaper in the long run because you're not buying fertilizer (they talk about how much that costs), and because soil with plant matter retains water
The yields are higher, and diverse crops mean more potential sources of income
However it probably doesn't produce results in the first year, and it takes more knowledge and skilled labor -- you can't just apply a formula to any piece of land. It takes some local knowledge, which farmers used to have, but can be lost when factory farms come in
Sure, you could grow diverse crops. Some small farms do and then sell it restaurants, sell their "system" or knowledge, etc (and theres still debate about their economic viability). However, that won't apply to all the land. Commodity crops are in demand, so the majority of the land will be used for that. Most farmers wouldn't be interested in diverse crops due to the cost of various equipment, difficulty in marketing, and potential labor needs.
Bill Gates is all about the environment and owns tons of farm land. Is he implementing regenerative farming, or just business as usual? I'd be interested to see if he's adopted it, or why he hasn't.
I highly doubt that. What else are we going to feed the animals for meat? If we cut back on meat, we would likely see an increase in soy demand. The subsidies might have created the demand, but now that we are in this lifestyle removing the subsidies will not reverse it fully.
Ok... and what replaces that if we just decide not subsidize soy anymore? Under the current conditions, it seems consumption will only drop slightly and people will simply pay more. Just as we saw in the pandemic with China sourcing its soy.
Soil fertility is similar to irrigation. As fertility decreases, it can be compensated (to a point) by fertilizer, but at an increased cost. As the aquifers are pumped faster than they are replenished, water can be pumped from deeper depths, but also at an increased cost. Both impact the economics of farming. And for many communities where agriculture is the economic foundation, decades of non-sustainable practices have created economic headwinds.
Things can certainly get worse. However, I don't see cheaper water or less fertilizer changing the economic outlook. Even with a slight increase in profit, you still have things like health insurance that are ever increasing, and the top line is too low to begin with.
Funny thing is that (small back then ?) farmers were the ones that fought for globalization (and against railway barons), with their Populist party, for easier export of their goods worldwide !
The US already got there in the 30s. Government subsidies are what disincentivized overproduction and got the US out along with better soil preservation techniques.
Modern farms are moving to no-till and cover crop practices to protect the soil. Fertilizer isn't as expensive as you think - ammonia and lime are pretty abundant, coupled with good old manure spreading and crop rotation, you can manage the soil pretty well.
The Midwest corn belt is in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. This area largely doesn't need irrigation. That mostly occurs west of the Missouri where wheat is slightly more prevalent due to corn's irrigation needs.
Source - I grew up on, and farmed myself on, a Midwest Iowa farm, and worked on the largest real-time data analytics pipeline in the agricultural industry for almost six years, my father still farms, and I ran an agritech startup building an autonomous applicator for 5 years.
Our real problems are distribution and storage, exports, chemical runoff, new crop diseases and climate change with more prevalent droughts and floods likely in the future. But we're in no danger of another dust bowl or sudden yield collapse. Yields today are nearly double what they were when I was a kid in the 80s.
More farmers need to plant cover crops and no-till and use set-aside land for soil preservation, but the good ones are already doing this, and profiting. Agronomists and university extension offices are educating farmers about this.
Agricultural states aren't poor - Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri and Iowa are 19, 20, 21, 22, and 31 in state GDP rankings. My State's median income is $61,000 / year and the average household income is $85,000 / year.
The cited documentary and this meta-thread seem to have some biases and/conflate Great Plains states with Midwestern states.
I don't mean to diminish the concerns you are raising, which are serious, but until the modern era China was beset by regular famine, and civilizations of the past did not necessarily farm in a more sustainable way -- it just doesn't matter if you're doing slash-and-burn agriculture with a small enough population relative to the land at your disposal.
Aren't like 4/5 of china's famines in the modern era? They certainly happened before but became much more prevalent after it was connected to the emerging global market system. A trend repeated in many other places.
Food output decreases for many reasons, but famine is a political problem. During most of the worst famines in china, as elsewhere, starving regions were still exporting grain.
Depends how you want to define "modern" I guess; I wouldn't count anything before the Communists took power but that still leaves the big one ending in 1962.
And for china specifically (and also very much india) I would definitely include the 19th century victorian famines. They were driven by distinctly "modern" forces like global grain market prices, and bureaucratic/political prioritization of exports over sustaining the local population. Pre-modern famines were usually more directly caused by regional failure to react to specific climate events and crop failures. Or, traditionally, just local military aristocrats hoarding the grain.
I was thinking more about how completely its governance had taken the form of a modern state, which I'd say was an incomplete process even in the Nationalist period.
Just watched the documentary on netflix.
It’s sad to me that it is very one-sided especially on the chemicals/pesticides. Farmers don’t use pesticides just for fun - it’s more of economic security to reduce risk - sometimes you are more or less forced to.
The point is that desertification is they thing to talk about and find incentives and ways to create that awareness.
My last personal opinion: I truly believe that GMO might be the least of all evil - covering our soils and reduce the need for pesticides…
> 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
Sounds like corporate software. Software typically doesn’t make money and everyone is aware (except some developers). The business makes money and funds internal software to establish automation which streamlines the business to make money more efficiently. As such automation is the business goal for funding that software. Most corporate developers are not well trained to think in terms of automation. They think in terms of data and code. This is a massive disconnect resulting in wildly different expectations which is compounded through hiring practices and reliance on third party software developers don’t have to write. These things solve for code but fail to address automation in any direct or meaningful way.
I love how you managed to pivot from soil quality to tech. It seems an innocent comparison at first but then you can't help yourself by devoling into complaining about what you feel are issues in modernsoftware development.
"As such automation is the business goal for funding that software. Most corporate developers are not well trained to think in terms of automation. They think in terms of data and code. "
It's like your domain specific anger is so intense that you have to find a way to add it to unrelated conversations.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
In 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.)
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?
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.
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.
>the world is run by the same neoliberal ideology that says the market is always right and intervention is wrong.
Did "neoliberal ideology" inspire the Soviet Union to drain the Aral sea? Did neoliberal ideology inspire Easter Islanders to deplete their forests? If your only solution to environmental destruction is change the ideology of the world to match your own, then you don't really care about the environment at all.
You have had a knee jerk reaction to the description of an opposing ideology, but if you hadn’t you would see that the description of the problem was factual and ideologically neutral apart from rejecting the problem.
I, too, ideologically oppose any motive to extract more from the environment than it can sustain. And I see more problem with your reflexive, defensive ideological counter reaction than GP’s correct summary and incomplete list of offensive programs.
Warped? I can understand the desire for such a framing, but I think that is unhelpful, partly because nobody likes being told their ideology is warped, and partly because all ideologies are misaligned — it's not like anyone really has a perfect idea of what a well-aligned ideology even looks like, though we can all see the failures after they happen, rather we just tell ourselves that we do know and it's «insert your own preference here» that is The One True Way.
Laissez-faire capitalism basically died as hard in the Great Depression as Soviet-style socialism did with the fall of the Iron Curtain, but while capitalism as a whole shifted in response to that, and the actual (non-conspiracy-theory) version of the WEF's Great Reset is an attempt to replace neoliberalism, communism… well, based on conversations I still have with an ex who self-identifies as anarcho-Communist (Marxist?), communism is still busy convinced that class-consciousness is only one election/strike action from taking over the world like it's 1866 and the aristocracy is still a big deal.
> Did "neoliberal ideology" inspire the Soviet Union to drain the Aral sea?
Well, no, stagnant state capitalism is different kind of capitalist exploitation than neoliberalism.
> If your only solution to environmental destruction is change the ideology of the world to match your own, then you don’t really care about the environment at all.
Caring about the environment is an ideological position, and obviously ideologies which reject it (as both state and market capitalism do) are going to be problematic for the goals of those who accept it as long as the latter are dominant.
> Caring about the environment is an ideological position, and obviously ideologies which reject it (as both state and market capitalism do) are going to be problematic for the goals of those who accept it as long as the former are dominant.
Did you mean, “As long as the latter are dominant,” or are you suggesting that environmentalists* are dominant?
What I think you intend to say is “capitalists will be problematic for environmentalists as long as there are more capitalists than environmentalists,” but that’s not what you said.
* I’m using “environmentalist” to mean “people that care about the environment,” even if there’s another meaning or connotation to the word.
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.
USDA, EPA, make policy that are reflections of US culture, as you'd expect in a representative system. This includes Iowa farmers, who probably do have extra margins of influence regarding practices in their industry in the same way software engineers inevitably have influence over practices in their industry, on top of whatever representation they support as individuals or in industry groups.
> harder to produce the quantities people need using better long-term farming practices.
You're not wrong but "harder" does a lot of work in that sentence. Requires more labor or becomes more expensive are probably correct. Are we willing to pay for it? That's ultimately a question of values or ideology. Though of course, borrowing from future agricultural capacity also sounds like it could be very expensive.
> Requires more labor or becomes more expensive are probably correct. Are we willing to pay for it?
I certainly am, but in the US we have a history now of eating rubbish and devaluing quality food, so I'm not sure how quickly the market will push farming practices. I think the labor is the more difficult issue, as fewer people want to farm.
I imagine it's a very hard choice to switch off a high production farm for a permaculture one (one I personally hope more people make).
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.
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.
> 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)
Iowa farmers don’t run anything, other than their farms, and a hilarious influence on the tone of national elections in the most powerful country on the planet.
The Iowa ag lobby had a huge hand in 1) getting ethanol to be subsidized, 2) forcing open Mexico’s protected maize market, thereby indirectly causing most of the border troubles we face, and 3) pushing corn syrup on unwitting consumers and turning half the USA obese.
Yeah my comment was probably way too clever in my own mind for its own good. Iowa farmers have vastly more influence on all sorts of things than they should, in no small part because of their weird symbolic early influence on elections.
I think your underlying assumption that there's no coordination or conspiracy going on is probably right. What scares me is that most people had good intentions along the way here (plus a light dusting of completely predictable greed) but made all of these negative outcomes happen.
The people who came up with and enforce the regulations farmers need to adhere to, by definition, are running the world.
These days farms have been so consolidated, and corporations dictate terms via contracts with the smaller farms that are left, that the idyllic family farm image that comes to mind when you think of American farmers is nearly a thing of the past. Those corporations, banks, etc that are involved with consolidation and dictating contractual terms with smaller farms, also tend to run the world.
Organic Valley is a cooperative of independent Farmers. One of the voices of modern permaculture, Mark Shepard, came up through that cooperative. He’s said in a number of presentations that he wants more people to start new co-ops. It’s the only way to get enough leverage to accomplish anything. Get enough people to run your own slaughterhouse, grain elevator, whatever. Otherwise you’re selling commodities and getting the shaft, while destroying your land at the same time.
These evil corporations aren't mandating devastating farming practices. Certainly, big corporations, supermarket chains having huge contracts with few industrial farms for example, have played a big role in the consolidation.
There are a lot of factors at play here, though, that have lead to industrial farms crowding out all the smaller farms, eg. economy of scale, high capital investment in equipment, and dwindling workforce- fewer kids want to stick around and work the farms.
I think it's a tradeoff- a lot of better farming practices require more workers, from my understanding/experience.
They're mandating contracts where farmers are forced to adopt practices with negative externalities just to keep their heads above water and meet their contractual obligations, and so they don't have to literally sell the farm.
Large consolidated farms can outcompete them at scale and automation, so they either enter contracts with thin margins or they literally sell the farm, which will likely end up being part of yet another consolidated farm.
Many farmers have gotten out of the game for that reason, so to answer your question, a lot of them got out of farming and whoever is left is taking the contracts.
Conservation of soil/water is a directive of the USDA [1], and they provide the guidelines mentioned in the article, but I don't know what actual legal power they wield in this regard.
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.
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.
Yeah your land lord is some big conglomerate I’m sure they have very strict rules on what to can/can’t do. But since you don’t care you do the bare minimum as you should
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
Overnight? We'd lose a lot of people during the transition war. If you took out natural gas overnight, half of Europe would start freezing to death. I don't think people appreciate how much the 20th century was the oil century.
By the way, most of the petroleum we use doesn't really come from dinosaurs. The consensus among researchers seem to be that it mainly comes from dead planton and algae that sunk to the bottom, although there are also some heterodox theories of abiotic oil formation as well. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Formation)
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.
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
Yes, lower than USDA limit. Except it turns out USDA limit is 25x higher than pre-agriculture erosion rates (which I guess no one had actually measured before).
“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,’”
Soil erodes into waterways which spill into oceans.
Btw, the nutrients that the soil carries can cause spikes in algal populations, which then lower the oxygen content of water bodies, killing large numbers of other organisms like fish.
> spikes in algal populations, which then lower the oxygen content of water bodies
How can algae lower oxygen when oxygen is the very byproduct of their photosynthesis? They literally turn water into oxygen. Wouldn't that increase the oxygen content?
This is similar to how mulch works to suppress weed growth. Mulch is decaying matter and nutrients like nitrogen are temporarily 'locked up' during the decay process.
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.
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.
> 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.
I sometimes wonder if places like Egypt used to be covered in much more fertile land and perhaps they overdid the agriculture for a couple 100 years which turned it into an arid wasteland (I'm a total geology noob.)
No, ancient Egyptian civilization was always been dependent on the Nile not just for water but for the flooding that brings eroded trace minerals and deposits them along the basin. That's why we have so much material on ancient Egyptian civilization: the desert is so arid and has been for Egypt's entire history that the normal processes that would break down papyrus or other organic matter were significantly slowed down as long as they were buried far enough away from the Nile.
10,000 years ago monsoons hit the sahara, but they stopped about 5000 years ago and it turned back to desert. There are carved stones of giraffes and such. The society with Pharaohs etc. emerged around the time the sahara dried.
A recent HN comment implied that camel herding was a significant factor in aridification of North Africa and the Middle East. The context and tone made me wonder if the comment simply reflected anti-nomad (i.e. anti-Bedouin, anti-Berber) prejudice, but there could just as well be something to it. I'm trying to avoid rabbit holes so I put it out of mind.
The comment seems incorrect. Herds are good for the soil. They flatten grasses keeping moisture in, allowing for more growth. In the past, people believed the opposite - and this is perhaps still believed in parts of the world.
Managed properly, yes. The soils of the Midwestern US were formed largely by herds of migratory bison for instance.
The problem comes in when you don't defer grazing or give things a chance to regrow (see video in sib comment below). That absolutely can lead to desertification.
As populations increase and nomadism becomes nonviable (so ground is not given a rest from grazing) it appears that's what happens.
> The comment seems incorrect. Herds are good for the soil. They flatten grasses keeping moisture in, allowing for more growth. In the past, people believed the opposite - and this is perhaps still believed in parts of the world.
For some reason, the idea of complex organisms (in this case: mammals) migrating to new lands and fertilizing it seems counter-intuitive to me, but it does make sense in some way. I would've assumed that more simple organisms took this land long before mammals emerged.
The biggest gripe I'd have with it would be: why would they move into those lands? There's nothing there for them. But the idea of them slowly extending fertilized soil does seem intriguing.
It appears sort of counter-factual to me that we, who are (presumably) even more complex, seem to reverse this process. There seems to be a sweet-spot in evolution of a species to benefit the land on which they live on (and that around it), and we seem to be past it.
Goats are also a harbinger. They can and will eat any last remaining plant matter in an area, tipping it fully over to desert.
It’s often overstated as goats being destroyers. They aren’t or don’t have to be. The goats are the agent of destruction, but the herders are the actual destroyers.
For the restoration of the loess plateau in China, they mandated that goats had to be corralled instead of ranged, to allow the restoration to get a foothold instead of ending up as the most expensive goat meat ever.
I've never seen ground that naked, not a spec of green except for trees. (and this coming from someone who lives in a very arid region of the SouthWestern US). Even very arid land (in Nevada or Arizona for instance) has significant vegetation so I wondered what was going on.
Part of the way through the video (6:09) it becomes apparent (to me anyway). Goats and sheep. Somewhere in there they are actually beating tree leaves down for the critters to eat because there is simply nothing else.
That's a fascinatingly stark landscape. I've visited rural communities in Mexico (semi-arid), Ecuador (highland grass lands), and SE Asia (jungle) that have that same remote village vibe, and the lifestyle similarity makes the contrast with the landscape all the more fascinating. I've also visited the Gobi desert (at least, the edge of the Gobi, where the mile-high sand dunes meet the endless grass lands) and that landscape in Iran somehow seems so much more desolate.
[1] Maybe the author wasn't using the terminology correctly, or the terminology shifted or was refined subsequently, but in the article, "A precarious balance upset", from the 1977 publication the author suggests that desertification can at least in principle lead to aridification as stripping the land of vegetation dries out the soil, which can ultimately effect precipitation patterns. EDIT: Okay, I think I get it now. It's the reverse: aridification can lead to long-term desertification, while there other processes that can establish long-term desertification, notwithstanding the end result is also aridity.
A similar thing happened in south Texas - the land that Big Bend state park now occupies was grassland in the 1880s but because it featured low rainfall, was quickly overgrazed. The owners ended up giving the land to the state because it had been turned into worthless desert, coincidentally in 1935. Now 85 years later it still hasn't recovered to grassland but has beautiful desert vegetation. It is simultaneously beautiful and horrible.
I don't think it's the goats! I think it's the salinity found in parts of the Zagros mountains and this video was probably recorded in the Lake Urmia watershed. Pistachios are especially salt tolerant so they're the only plants that can grow there, despite the marine deposits.
>Over time the southernmost parts of Sumerian Mesopotamia suffered from increased salinity of the soils, leading to a slow urban decline and a centring of power in Akkad, further north.
As others have noted, water erosion is a major factor, but there are others.
The Dust Bowl in the US occurred after a drought coincided with recently-arrived dryland farming (unirrigated land) and overtilling. The topsoil from the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles was deposited across the U.S. at points east, as far as New York City.
Tilling itself can expose and degrade carbon in the topsoil, which is why various no-till farming methods are increasingly employed.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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...
Regenerative farming builds soil, capturing carbon, improving water retention. It costs a bit more than conventional farming, in the short-medium term.
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).
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
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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://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