It seems to me like we might have to make a big push towards solar-powered hydroponics or something of that nature.
How depressing. Maybe soylent green is more of a realistic future than we thought...
Organic dryland cereal farming depends on tillage for weed & pest control. Not only is the land plowed during planting and after harvest, every third year the land is left fallow. While left fallow it is plowed monthly.
Conventional farmers have substantially reduced their usage of tillage increasing their chemical usage instead. Those chemicals may be not be good for the ecosystem, but they result in orders of magnitude less soil loss.
Also, it is a matter of relative severity of problems. Soil loss is much worse than depletion of soil nutrients. As said, organic is potentially much worse for soil loss (although different practices like intensive use of cover crops can help).
I couldn't get through any of the paywalls, but there are articles out there that suggest that it is.
A lot of other factors are important too. Good rotation, being careful about what strains are used (many crops have been bred/modified for high yields, but that yield often comes at the expense of the soil).
This is very much a solvable problem. The 1000 year number in the article is how long it can take under just normal circumstances, but that can be sped up a LOT using various techniques including proper tillage, animal grazing, etc.
The big "problem" is that all of these things will make crops more expensive, but any other solution is going to quickly become even pricier than that so it should still be done.
> It seems to me like we might have to make a big push towards solar-powered hydroponics or something of that nature.
Right now the costs (particularly start-up costs) are too high for this to be totally viable, but I think it will become a much more significant method of growing food down the line.
But in reality the faster people realize that genetically modified products are more nutritious and less harming to nature, the better are our chances of survival.