Can American soil be brought back to life?
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All of these lists of wants are at cross purposes. All of it is based on self-interest. Very little of it is based on a wider responsibility for all citizens and the country that supports them.
This won't change as people won't give up on their list of wants. The attitude of "us and them" just reinforces the basic problems. Is there a solution? Most certainly. But it requires a change in the basic attitudes of every citizen and most will object to having to face who and what they are.
When a society is focus on "rights" instead of responsibilities then the society loses its ability to think in the large. When a government is focussed on it continuation and power it loses sight of its responsibility to build society.
There is no short term solution that is a quick fix. In the case of America, it is heading down the path of civil war and devastation because pretty well every level in the American society is in the mindset of "them and us". This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes. Law enforcement has forgotten that they are there to serve and protect the citizenry and not themselves. Government is self-serving. Corporations are treating their customers as slaves and a resource to control. The general population is focussed on their own little problems of day to day self-gratification.
Responsibility, sacrifice, conformity, keeping your head down, deferring to your betters on questions of government policy and administration... these features have been dominant in human societies across the globe and over millennia. Maybe because it's the only enduring architecture. Still, I have to admire the American experiment in saying "fuck all that."
This attitude of Americans that you are presenting is probably the biggest cause for your downfall. The participants in the formation of your nation (the creators of your constitution) recognised the fact that sacrifice is necessary and that being responsible is essential for the well-being of society.
Responsibility and sacrifice do not have to be associated with conformity and keeping your head down. Nor do they have to be associated with deferring to your betters,
You have a very poor understanding of what responsibility and sacrifice actually mean if you associate them with the latter characteristics.
The American self-image is very much a "holier than thou" mindset and has engendered a response such that any American is to be considered a useless arrogant busy-body who has little or no understanding of anything.
Considering that, as a nation, American has a foundation in its constitution that surpasses pretty much every other nation, American falls to the bottom of nations in which justice, mercy and freedom exist.
I have dealt with Americans that I have thought very highly of. Unfortunately, these have been the very small minority. The rest have been inattentive, ignorant, bombastic, arrogant know-it-alls who have failed to show any desire to actually be part of the solution. They have acted in every way to be a part of (if not all of) the problem.
The inherent problems in American society, the lack of justice, of mercy and of freedom, are a result of this attitude. In many ways, America today is no different to China and Russia or any other tin-pot country around the world.
If Americans actually took a serious interest in the American constitution and actively took part in building their society, we might actually find something worthwhile to emulate. American has become a place that many have no interest in ever visiting because it has no justice, no mercy and certainly no freedom.
Let's take Chelsea Manning as an example, shall we? She broke the law and went to jail. Justice was served. Obama commuted her sentence. She was shown mercy. Now she is no longer incarcerated. She has freedom.
I could go on for days listing examples, but I need only list the one to counter absolutist statements.
There are many honest reasons to complain about America. I'm not sure why you'd go that route.
You government approves of and participates in the confiscation of money and goods from people who are never charged with any crime. What do they call this - civil forfeiture?
When a government breaks its own constitution and laws or makes laws that allow some activity to be legal only for the government but prisonable for the citizenry, then you have a very serious problem. Killing its own citizens, stealing from its own citizens, treating its own citizens as criminals first - these go on for page after page after page. There is no justice, no mercy and no freedom in America today. So it's not hyperbole, it's the reality of what America has become.
> Responsibility and sacrifice do not have to be associated with conformity and keeping your head down. Nor do they have to be associated with deferring to your betters
Interestingly, Manning is a good example of exactly that. Even better would be Snowden, who took extra care to not do any harm to innocent people who could be endangered by the leaks.
Yes, that is hyperbole. America has faults, plenty of them in fact. But, I gave examples of all three of the things you claimed we had none of.
And yes, yes we do have faults. Man, have we got faults. We aren't all bad or in truly dire straights. We do have Nazis marching in the streets but, in the US, they are free to do so - and we are free to counter march. Not only are we free to do so, we have the liberty to do so.
I came up with this:
I'm not sure how to accurately relay that to people such as the person I was responding to. For some reason, they have this really biased view of America. Don't get me wrong, America has its faults.
However, to say that justice, mercy, and freedom don't exist here? Then, they compound it by saying it's not hyperbole - meaning they really believe that?
I wish I were better at communicating. My verbosity indicates my inability. All of those things exist in America - I can see them daily. It's not like I'm a huge nationalist - and I've traveled across the globe.
I'm not sure how one gets to be that biased or what information they're using to draw those conclusions. I don't wish them ill, I feel sorry for them. They're obviously being fed propaganda - and they believe it as gospel. They remind me (and this isn't very nice) of a brainwashed cult member.
I have no solution, or even a path to find a solution. America has lots and lots of things wrong with it. But the three they listed certainly do exist and, while they could improve, to say there is none of any of them is just a sign that they're consuming some very biased media - or, perhaps, mentally ill. I'd like to think it's harmless, but I see those ideas crop up here and there. It's not frequent, but often enough to where I've noticed it.
Ah well... I'll mull it over some more.
Let's look at mercy. When prosecutors and Law enforcement are only interested in numbers jailed (irrespective of the level of the crime), when citizens are treated as dangerous and so cannot travel with no indications of what or why the citizens are treated as the enemy, when extra-judicial murders are initiated because of blah, blah, blah, when lives are destroyed because of government embarrassment, there's mercy.
Let's look at freedom. When ICE and Homeland Security treat citizens as serfs and that the constitution free-zone as existing from the border to hundreds of miles inland, when the LEO's consider everyone to be a criminal because of the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" and every other "war on", this is freedom?
Many of the citizens of America are to be liken to the frog living in slowly heating water. They can't see the danger they are in and the losses of justice, mercy and freedom that have happened.
I live in a nation that has no such constitutional protections. My own nation is going downhill fast, but America is leading the charge to perdition and we are just following in its footsteps.
When push comes to shove, America is seen as a demon amongst nations for its lack of justice, mercy and freedom. When allied nations to America are officially telling their own citizens not to go there because of the fundamental problems in America, it behooves all to start analysing what is going on. From an external POV, your popular choices for president were a globalist murderer or isolationist incompetent. Neither were going to do any good for your nation. But, what the heck, you have made your bed and you are sleeping in it now. The proof of the pudding will be the next couple of years and unless there is a fundamental change in the grass roots citizens, I expect America to head further downhill at an even faster rate than it is currently undergoing.
So back to my original comment, soil fertility is a symptom of the the underlying problems in America. No justice, no mercy, no freedom, no responsibility, no sacrifice.
It's strange that you claim that; as the American Constitution ranks right at the bottom in terms of forcing social accountability. It's an outdated document that allows individuals to get away with everything a reasonable society has at least some claim to punish or direct, and it's something that has held American social progress back. No hate speech laws, extensive rights against self-incrimination, no "right to be forgotten", no socialized medicine, very few equality-of-outcome initiatives, and the like.
And as a result, you've correctly noted that the American commons is horribly polluted and everyone acts as if they were a (little) king.
>Responsibility and sacrifice do not have to be associated with conformity and keeping your head down.
Yes they do- they're inextricably linked. Let's take the example of a father providing for his children- given the choice of a risky venture vs. a more stable position at another company, the choice is now to prevent loss rather than obtain gain. So we see that as responsibility increases, so does the requirement to not rock the boat, so to speak. Never change a running system.
Now let's extrapolate that attitude to individuals in a society. The more that individual feels beholden to it, the more they'll limit risky action in favor of stability. Their window of tolerable risk shrinks- and while they're very unlikely to do anything that costs that society, they're also unlikely to make it prosper. And as a result, any (read: above-average) member of the society has already checked out because even if they have something that will work, it's less likely they'll find others willing to risk what little individual time/capital they have on it (and it's not like they'll ever see a meaningful reward for that risk either as the society feels entitled to most of it).
So either you have a society in which individuals feel beholden to it, in which case you get something that's pretty good for everyone but can't properly reward the people who end up doing most of the work (it's more important than usual that those people believe they owe society something); or you don't, in which case the poor get barely-passable treatment but being objectively useful tends to bring big rewards (and incentivizes advancing the capabilities of the human race).
You can't both encourage deference to society and thinking outside of that society's standards at the same time- you either pick one or the other and live with the benefits and detriments. It'd sure be nice to have both, but you can't beat human nature or reality.
>Yes they do- they're inextricably linked.
I see this in a different light. When you conform to American ideals, as they exist today, you are conforming to the celebration of the self and the celebration of consumerism, which are both at odds with responsibility and sacrifice.
A desire to help people at your own loss does not equate to conformity. If it did, the world would be a much better place, because we know that people have no problem conforming.
What? No! America's constitution was designed to establish a "natural aristocracy" of major landowners! Our much-vaunted First Amendment never stopped them from putting Eugene Debs in jail, you know.
From the consumers perspective, there is little indication as to the quality of soil something has been grown in. But there must be an effect on the plant itself if it is grown in poor soil in the form of lower macro, trace minerals and other indicators of plant health detectable within the plant.
Like the organic standards that cover production methods, we need an opt-in food quality standard. If plants were tested after production for indicators of plant health and labels could be put on vegetables indicating quality. Self-interest of the consumers buying higher quality foods would quickly incentivise farmers into increasing plant quality, which in turn will correct our soil.
He passed onto me a conversation he had had with one of his farmer friends. He was told that the soil was totally infertile and was only there to hold up the cane. All nutrients came from fertiliser that they put into the soil.
In this case, the results is sugar which you can't tell how good the plant is.
There have been a number of farmers over the years in that area who did crop rotation and field resting. But they were far and few between. In other areas, they are using recycling methods to put organic matter back into their fields. However, this is not common, even though there are groups of farmers who see the benefit of these processes for themselves and the surrounding environment.
Part of an education process that we undertake with our young people is for them to understand where food comes from, including when we have the opportunity to teach them gardening (vegetables), animal husbandry and the killing, dressing and butchering of animals for food (sheep and goats).
Some take the lessons well, some do not. But they do start to understand where their food comes from.
Too many people have no idea of what is needed to produce the food they consume. No idea.
Testing foods can be quite simple. The taste of good quality well grown food (meat, vegetables, fruit, milk, eggs, etc.) is quite different to those that are grown in the common farming practices of today.
I am currently enjoying eating 7-8 year old mutton and it is better than the best spring lamb that I have had. They ate and they wandered and were not stressed.
Where do you get this?
I have 2 acres just on the edge of town and for many years, we have run some level of stock on it. All of the various beasts have ended up in my freezer. The last lot I killed, dressed and butchered myself (with the help of a number of young people) out of necessity as no butcher would come in for just 3 sheep.
As the sheep had little need to run anywhere and had luscious feed, they turned out to be so tender. I did try to source some more via the local butchers, but found that would be extremely expensive as most of the sheep are culled for lamb and not kept for wool in our region.
If you ask around, you might find some appropriate beasts that you can get cheaply (whether that be steers, goat or sheep). Though you may find getting them to the abattoir and then to the butcher somewhat expensive.
The thing with putting everything in complex chains of economy is that important indicators can be easily masked, and stay invisible until it's too late. In this case, low soil quality will primarily affect yield. Which, between farming methods, subsidies, futures and other forms of economic magic, is completely invisible to the customer.
> You've hit the problem on its head, but the solution is not to try and change people's behaviour on a large scale, but to incentivise based on the self-interest you've mentioned.
Indeed. Unfortunately, the same problems extend on the meta-level. You need to incentivize important actors to incentivize people, based on the formers' self-interest. Like:
> If plants were tested after production for indicators of plant health and labels could be put on vegetables indicating quality
Try doing that, and you'll find plenty of opposition from actors who earn money on production not being evaluated for quality. Also, even if you set this up, you'll likely face an increase in food costs for the transition period in which the producers readjust. And that is a political no-go.
It has to start the same way organic food did - As a choice - Not something that is done across the board. That would never work for some of the reasons you've stated.
Higher quality food would naturally be more expensive, there's no way around that. That cost needs to be passed on to the consumer and then the consumer can decide price vs likely better taste and higher nutrition quality.
It's a fine idea until Monsanto, et al., find a way to subvert the standards and bend them into an anticompetitive regulatory mote via government lobbying.
What we really need, as Step Zero in any plan for wholescale reformation of American society, is to reimpose and reinforce campaign finance restrictions and sever the direct financial ties between our big corporations and the politicians who serve them.
Some readers may choose to see this as a line item on the progressive wish list. I see it as a necessary precondition to any attempted societal change whatsoever. Right now, the very heart of our issue is that the government no longer serves the people of this country; it serves moneyed interests, nakedly and shamelessly.
Obligatory Star Trek reference: America has become Ferenginar. We think we're the Federation, but we're headed down the wrong path for that. We are effectively an oligarchy at this point, heading in the direction of totally dysfunctional kleptocracy. The "us vs them" mindset tearing us all apart right now is a symptom of political polarization, which the lobbyists would consider to be a feature and not a bug. Until our voices matter to politicians more than David and Charles Koch's billions, we're fucked. Nothing will change, and anything we try to change will be immediately corrupted and turned against us. The fox bought the whole damned henhouse.
I don't disagree, but it seems to me that it is only possible to legislate such a thing when the problem such legislation would solve doesn't exist.
I tend to prefer even less likely solutions, such as term limits, or diffusion and decentralization of one or both of the legislative bodies, but these solutions run up against the same problem as campaign finance reform - the people with the power to enact the change are the ones who benefit most from the status quo.
If you want to take an actionable item away from this article that fits (potentially) the skillsets of your friends and neighbours on Hacker News, it is this one. This is a data problem and an actuarial problem. Solving it can result in net social benefit disproportionate to the investment in infrastructure, politicial capital (to change legislation), and (already existing) government programs required.
I don't know if, politically, there are any groups who would be organized to swing into action in opposition to federal crop insurance reform, but they or any who may shake out of the math (presumably there's some practices and crops cough corn that benefit from less information, relatively speaking) have an uphill battle to fight against a variety of constituent-motivating narratives. It's hard to argue against big government spending when tens of millions of dollars is at stake.
And I looked up what I think is an actual rule regarding Crop Rotation when it comes to the FCIC[0]:
>(B) ASSIGNED YIELD.—If the producer does not provide satisfactory evidence of the yield of a commodity under subparagraph (A), the producer shall be assigned— (i) a yield that is not less than 65 percent of the transitional yield of the producer (adjusted to reflect actual production reflected in the records acceptable to the Corporation for continuous years), as specified in regulations issued by the Corporation based on production history requirements; (ii) a yield determined by the Corporation, in the case of— (I) a producer that has not had a share of the production of the insured crop for more than two crop years, as determined by the Secretary; (II) a producer that produces an agricultural commodity on land that has not been farmed by the producer; or (III) a producer that rotates a crop produced on a farm to a crop that has not been produced on the farm;
Just search the doc for "rotate". It is only mentioned once. I think the FCIC only applies to wheat and some other grains.
[0]https://www.agriculture.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/75-30%20-%2...
Working with horses was slow, hard and laborious work but it was a lot of fun! Much more fun than doing the same with tractors (which I also think is quite fun).
Unfortunately, going back to horses or oxen never going to be viable in a large scale. The recent trends in agriculture have been making machines larger and larger to reduce the amount of labor required, causing the soil to be packed even harder, requiring more tilling for the next crop.
Maybe autonomous farm equipment could reverse the trend, as machines could be made smaller without increasing the amount of human labor.
As of 1800, you still had largely wooden plough, with an iron ploughshare, drawn by a horse or oxen. The acre is actually a unit of work -- the amount of land a man and horse could work in a day, and the German term, Tagwerk (literally, "day's work") directly reflects that. The working time wasn't a full 8-hour day, as the animals would both tire and needed to forage. I believe ~4 hours was more typical.
By the mid-19th century, all-iron, and finally, steel, ploughs were available. In the United States, the first combination ("combine") harversters were drawn by teams of up to 40 horses. (Simply managing the daught of those animals, distributed through swingletrees, was a significant undertaking.)
As of 1900 or so, the U.S. had a population of ~20 million horses, peaking at 25 million by 1920. These consumed 20% of the agricultural production of the country. Cities such as New York had populations upwards of 200,000 horses, with concommitant impacts on street pollution and hygiene. (Interestingly: railroads increased the demand for horses and mules as these were the best solution to the "last mile" problem of bringing goods and people to and from railway depots.)
http://www.cowboyway.com/What/HorsePopulation.htm
The first viable tractors started appearing shortly after 1900, and didn't have tremendous power by modern standards (20hp is pretty common). (There were some earlier mobile designs, and even stationary traction distribution systems based on steam power.) Once reliable, these were popular as they could be worked all day, fuel was cheaper than feed, and there were no vet bills.
I find the history of this (and other ag elements) pretty fascinating. Much of the information is drawn from Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History (1992) which discusses the evolution of history from a lens of energy and fuel sources. He's revised the book tremendously with Energy and Civilization, out just this year.
This was actually one of the most surprising takeaways of doing farm work with a horse, needing to take frequent breaks to let the horse and the farmer rest for a while. Of course I knew there was going to be breaks, but their frequency and duration surprised me. It was much harder work for the horse than I had anticipated (but it's good exercise and not harmful to the animal).
And it was perhaps what made it so much more enjoyable than working with machines. Even though it's hard physical labor, you take a break for oats, drinks and scratchies for a while and bond with the animal and the rest of the crew. It wasn't the least bit monotonous or boring the same way as doing 2x4h stints in the cabin of a tractor or in front of a computer.
Mechanization is of course the main driver of soil compaction, but here too there are advances in technology that mitigate issues without having to revert back to horses (or needing revolutions like swarms of small autonomous bots). For example, soil compaction can be reduced to the point where it doesn't affect plant growth significantly any more by using the correct tire pressure on tractors; i.e. (much) lower pressure when the tractor is on the field. But those pressures are not suitable for riding on roads or longer distances, so many farmers (actually, generally the contractor doing the work, although this varies by region/country) don't deflate their tires because it takes so much time to adjust them every time.
So, modern tractors have automatic inflate/deflate installations, making it much easier to use the right pressure for every task and on every soil type. Of course this costs extra, so you still need to convince people of the need for it, and enforce the habit on those actually doing the work.
- http://www.fwi.co.uk/machinery/tractor-tyres-make-sure-your-...
- http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/field/news/croptal...
Now I'm not a soil scientist, but I am a programmer who's for the last year or so been programming models for assessing soil threat risks, including soil compaction (one of the biggest soil threats in agriculture); and work with some of the world's foremost expert scientists in this field, as well as with representatives of e.g. machine manufacturers. They all say that compaction is mostly due to increases in weight of machinery, and that proper tire pressure is the most important mitigation measure we have available. Liquid-filled tires are never mentioned in this context, it's a rarity.
You claim that 'most' tractors run liquid filled tires - I'm not sure what you're basing that on, or what locality you're talking about, but while I do not have any numbers at hand, I have never heard of this being something other than an incidental thing. For example, the Michelin site (http://agricultural.michelinman.com/us/Properly-use-your-tir...) mentions it as a possibility, but not as something that 'most' tractors would have.
I'm pretty sure the ship has sailed as far as tractors being used over horses, but surely there are ways to improve tractors' technique by drawing lessons from horse tilling, so it leaves the soil in better shape.
Crop rotations and other things matter but the weight and pressure are the biggest difference as far as I know.
Yes, manure is a good fertilizer and promotes a good ecosystem of microbes but it needs animals on pasture (an element in good crop rotation) or bringing it from elsewhere to get the kind of quantities needed.
A well-educated farmer, focused on a plot of land that is meant to be kept for generations without a profit focus can certainly do it. I suspect if you try to scale this process up, the issue is its more expensive if you were a corporation who has to pay a better educated class of labor to maintain soil quality.
Till, fertilize, water is alot simpler than trying to build an ecosystem that spans a 4000 acre plot of land.
I think until society values externalities more accurately, it is unlikely to catch on like so many other things that cost even a tenth of a percent of the overall corporate profit margin.
I also believe there is a substantial minority that would prefer a more sustainable approach to many things in the interest of long term sustainability.
The reality is our level of infrastructure spending, to the way we produce power, to the condition of the majority of the arable land is fundamentally unsustainable for more than another 50 years without substantial technological change. This does not even get into climate change related impacts on agriculture.
1. hunting whales for lamp oil
2. cutting down trees for fuel to make glass and build ships
3. using natural rubber
4. no sanitation in the cities
5. using horses for transportation
6. using well water in cities
As these became unsustainable, alternatives were discovered and developed.
The development of synthetic rubber was a direct result of high prices and inability to increase natural rubber production.
Not if there is nobody alive anymore to raise prices. This theory works well for progressive change but doesn't hold for long-term brutal changes, e.g. maybe historically if people dried the only well in their village there was no price increase (or there was an instantaneous price increase to infinity if you prefer) because the village was doomed.
Whale hunting stopped when synthetic oils became available and cheaper than "natural" ones. I think the natural ones were still cheap enough.
Coal, and later oil, was a better (-> cheaper) fuel than trees, so people switched. Shipbuilding materials changed as new fuels and new weapons became available. We're not running out of trees, the alternatives were just better.
Sanitation AFAIK was purely a result of scientific discoveries finally being accepted by practitioners, and then by masses.
Horses were definitely useful and cheap enough for transportation - internal combustion engine created a cheaper/better alternative.
I won't comment on natural rubber and wells in cities, because I don't know anything about it.
My point is - at least with some of your examples, there was no strong price increase signal, and thus we can't use them to support the idea that market pressures will always occur right in time to save us.
Whaling originally was plentiful right off the coast of Massachusetts. These were depleted, and whalers had to go steadily farther out, then into the Pacific, then to the edges of the Pacific. These voyages got longer and longer, and more and more dangerous, and so price increases would have accompanied them.
http://www.petroleumhistory.org/OilHistory/pages/Whale/price...
> cheap enough
It's a tautology that people will use something that is "cheap enough" until there are cheaper alternatives.
The other part of the above is getting that extra $10/year in profits needs 7 years of investment, until year for you make less profit, and the next 3 years you are more or less even (obviously each farming practice has a different payoff period, the above example is for no-till). Again, big farmers have the money to spare to try the new practice and when they see results they turn more fields over to the new system.
The only time it pays in the long run to mine the soil is when the land will go to someone else in a couple years. A farmer who sees the big city wanting his land for a new development in a couple years should mine his soil. In all other cases farmers who care for the soil as an investment will make more money in the long run than farmers who mine the soil.
from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system
> In the Norfolk four-course system, wheat was grown in the first year, turnips in the second, followed by barley, with clover and ryegrass undersown, in the third. The clover and ryegrass were grazed or cut for feed in the fourth year. The turnips were used for feeding cattle and sheep in the winter. This new system was cumulative in effect, for the fodder crops eaten by the livestock produced large supplies of previously scarce animal manure, which in turn was richer because the animals were better fed. When the sheep grazed the fields, their waste fertilized the soil, promoting heavier cereal yields in following years.
Unfortunately that sounds a bit like 'no true Scotsman'.
Note that crop rotation itself (2 course/3 course) is much, much older. And Wikipedia claims it was first done in the 16th century in what now is Belgium.
Actually, there are a bunch of things presented as 'new' in the article while I read nothing which I never read before, and many of the solutions bascialy come down to 'do it as our ancestors did it' so it's not all that new either. The vast scale of it though is new. And the rigid economic system attached to it.
What's so significant about all this stuff is that this agrarian revolution lead to greater food productivity, increasing populations, and started to increase the labour pool available for other tasks. This stuff basically kick started the eventual industrial revolution. That's part of why it's so strange to see it coming around again
It's not just sewage either. Every time you till the earth, you expose it to the air. This oxidises the minerals and often makes them unavailable for the plants. Because the fertiliser we add is very water soluble it drains through the water table and ends up in the rivers and eventually washes out to sea (or just clogs the rivers with algae).
Tilling and pesticides also kill the organisms that are responsible for moving nutrients around under the earth. Additionally, we tend to plant mono-culture crops with short root structures. This stops a variety of plants from breaking down nutrients in the soil and moving them to the top layer of humus. So either we till deeper (exacerbating the problem) or we essentially lock all of the nutrients below the level that the plants can access.
In the end, you basically are slowly extracting all of the bioavailable nutrients out of the soil, and depositing them in the sewage treatment fields. At the same time you are oxidising what's left and washing everything else out to the sea. Any fertility that remains is below the access of the plant roots (and probably not in a form that can be utilised right away).
"Closing the loop" means looking at the places where we are losing fertility and making sure that it is looping back. So, if you take nutrients out in the form of food, we return it in the form of sewage. You avoid tilling and you plant a variety of crop varieties that circulate the nutrients in the soil layer. You avoid adding highly water soluble salts that simply leach out of the soil and into the water table.
It sounds simple-ish, but it's actually quite a bit challenge. We don't really do a lot of research in this area (as far as I can tell). Most agricultural research is geared toward increasing yields and reducing costs as opposed to sustainability.
Mulch, sun and water. I also dug a large bio-char pit I've been using to reduce wood-stuff into carbon and potash. I am eventually going to ammoniate these products and redistribute throughout the plot.
I also underestimated the biochar hell-pit and buried and hosed-down a hot-burning pyre and one week later woke up to a tendril of smoke curling up from the pit which later turned back into a fire with additional fuel.
I found it alarming and remarkable so be sure to be safe with pyrolysis, folks!
This is hardly news. How come Norfolk crop rotation has been 'forgotten'? See this Britannica article: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system
The article mentions that even common composting helps, but the problem tends to be how to prevent it from running off. No wonder. As anything in biology, soil regeneration takes time. Having your fresh biomass flow elsewhere runs counter to the purpose.
A good book published in 1975 written by Masanobu Fukuoka called "One Straw Revolution" is very informative on this subject easy reading and obtainable for free by searching it's title followed by .pdf in your favorite S.E.
Or from 1911: https://permaculturenews.org/files/farmers_of_forty_centurie...
More: http://soilandhealth.org/
Adding rock dust works wonders too: https://remineralize.org/
My wife and I wrote a FOSS garden simulator in the 1990s (a six+ person-year labor of love) to help people understand some of this: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html
I got the idea while working as the Program Administrator on summer for the NOFA-NJ Organic Farm Certification Program in the later 1980s, but it took many years (including more education in grad school in biology) to make the software.
See especially from the help system of that software on how conventional agriculture destroys the soil: http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/help100/00000385.htm "In the soil, tiny charged particles called micelles usually have many areas of negative charge (called sites) on their surfaces. Positively charged ions (cations) are drawn to these negative charge sites and stick to the clay particles (are adsorbed). In most soils, 99% of soil cations can be found attached to micelles (clay particles and organic matter) and 1% can be found in solution. Mineral cations in the soil (mainly Ca2+, Mg2+, K+ and Na+) maintain an equilibrium between adsorption to the negative sites and solution in the soil water. This equilibrium produces exchanges -- when one cation detaches from a site (leaving it free), another cation attaches to it. Therefore the negatively charged sites are called cation exchange sites. The number of these sites per unit weight of dry soil is called the cation exchange capacity, or the capacity of the soil to hold cations. Because any cations loose in the soil solution are vulnerable to leaching as water flows out of the soil, a high cation exchange capacity is always desirable. Cation exchange sites act as a sort of mineral buffer for the soil, storing minerals important to plant and animal growth for long periods of time. The attraction of cations to cation exchange sites is strongest for H+ ions (which make the soil acidic) and for polyvalent ions such as Ca2+ and Al3+. The weakest attraction is for monovalent ions such as K+. When ammonium nitrate fertilizers are added to the soil, the ammonium ions (NH4+) are strongly attracted to cation exchange sites because of their high valence (4). The ammonium ions displace many other cations which are then leached out of the soil and lost to plants. Some of the ammonium ions are converted to nitrate during nitrification (by aerobic soil bacteria); the process produces excess H+ ions which acidify the soil (causing earthworms and other soil organisms to die or desert the area). (For an excellent description of cation exchange capacity, see Widdowson's Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach.)"
That's a big reason why organic agriculture which focuses on building up organic matter in the soil (which increases cation exchange capacity) is better for soil health (and human health too, as the plants are better fed). That's reflected in the article when it describes two lumps of soil put on wire mesh that behave differently -- one falling apart as dust (from lack of organic matter and so not much CEC) and one clumped together (more organic matter and CEC).
Wish I had time to bring that Delphi app to the web as a JavaScript app... And improve it further.
I don't know the exact numbers to completely quantify this, but I suspect poor farming practices on the US prairies that have reduced (in some places) six feet of topsoil to six inches of top soil have released a vast amount of carbon from lost organic matter into the air and contributed to climate change.
It's been twenty years, so I could not answer detailed questions about it of the top of my head without digging into the code (and maybe not even then). But the core parts of the soil percolation model should be very close to EPIC's code and data. The source code for the soil models references the EPIC equations and the related scientific literature.
The simulator was written under earlier versions of windows (Win 3.1 and 95), and from around WinXP and later it seems the code that updates the registry causes an error. Not sure how to easily work around that.
You can download the source here: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997...
Or, I just put it up on GitHub right now for you: :-) https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997...
Here is the file you would want to focus on first, and it does mention nitrogen fixation and nodules, but you'd have to make your own decision about how useful that was to you as a reference: https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997...
Here are the lines to look first inside that file: https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997...
Remember that a lot of EPIC is empirically derived functions and values from US soils in certain climates -- so it may not be totally applicable elsewhere, even if it is a place to start.
And here is a 100 page programmer's manual: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/progmanlong.htm
I put our PlantStudio and StoryHarp code up on GitHub (which share some common code with the garden simulator) and have been meaning to someday put the garden simulator code there.
I spent a couple of months about a decade ago porting part of the code base to Java and also Python which involved writing a Delphi parser and translation tool, but the result is not a finished work. But the converted code for the garden simulator is not on GitHub (yet). You can see some of the converted plant drawing code here though: https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio
I had wanted to help develop self-replicating space habitats and helping people grow their own food better seemed like a good first step towards that which both had short-term on-Earth benefits plus long-term benefits for space settlement. We did this all on our own money from consulting and also credit cards. When they were maxed out (~US$100K) we took unrelated programming jobs at IBM Research and elsewhere to pay it all back on-time with interest -- it took many years to get back to zero -- and we never got a chance to do that much more with the simulator...
Our (at first shareware) PlantStudio software was a spinoff for breeding virtual plants which got substantial interest from 3D modellers -- but even there, we did not have time to keep improving it since we were both working full-time the at IBM. PlantStudio was mainly my wife's project in response to user feedback from the Garden Simulator that people liked playing with the plant design part of it. We eventually made that free and then open source. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm
And then we had a kid: :-) http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/historyandfuture.html
After that effort on our own, I'd get a bit annoyed I got when I'd watch NASA and other places give big grants to people who then made proprietary software with it. That motivated me to write essays like this back around 2001: http://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html "As a software developer and content creator, I find it continually frustrating to visit web sites of projects funded directly or indirectly by government agencies or foundations, only to discover I can't easily improve on those projects because of licensing restrictions both on redistribution and on making derived works of their content and software. ..."
But I can give kudos at the USDA ARS BRC and the EPIC team for developing their code in-house and putting it in the public domain. The EPIC developers (but not administrators) were annoyed a bit themselves at our own plan originally to make proprietary software from their models, which was another factor in our making that garden simulator effort FOSS.
Our hope had been to keep improving those models and getting more people involved in that process online with a 2.0 version of the software as a shared modelling environment. But our few small efforts to find funding to continue in that direction were not productive. I guess we were just better software developers than sales people. :-) Plus we have learned a lot since then about a more incremental development style. http://gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm
Anyway, I can hope that using that Garden Simulator software as an initial reference point can help a next generation of soil scientists and free software developers create even better software for research, education, and applications from bringing soil anywhere back to life. :-)
Land is a common resource and no one business should have unfettered control of it.
It is the big farmers that care the most for the land. They are big enough that they have collected the data and seen that investments in the land pay off. When you have one field it is really hard to test for yourself how different practices pay off. The university will tell you "go no till, after 7 years your yields will be bigger than if you till the land every year", but small farmers generally think "yeah right, it works for your soils over there, but here we have different soils and so that won't work". By contrast the large farmers have enough fields that they are willing to try every new practice in a couple places to see if it really works for them. The largest farms are now able to scientifically show that they are building soil every year.
Second, in Iowa corporations are banned form owning farms. There are exceptions for seed companies and equipment manufactures, but those are specific loopholes with limits to what can be done. I work for John Deere (but of course do not speak for them), and we have to be very careful that the places where we test our prototypes does not count as farms. (generally the crop is destroyed before harvest - I don't know how the harvester division does their testing though)
https://www.amazon.com/New-Roots-Agriculture-Farming-Ranchin...
(No, I don't have specific sources for this, it's mostly a combination of what I've read from the Permaculture folks and personal observation in my own garden over the past 5 years.)
https://www.google.co.in/search?q=book+the+forest+and+the+se...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marston_Bates
I thought it was a pretty good and informative book.
You can argue that there is a better solution to the problem, but don't argue against subsidizes without a different solution.
Switch to rabbit meat, for instance.