The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

smithsonianmag.com

I have done a little quick and dirty looking around, trying to get an idea of how much damage was done in the Dust Bowl and what the long term consequence were (as a point of comparison/trying to find a thing that might help mentally model where this is going). Here are a couple of links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl#Long-term_economic_i...

https://www.softschools.com/facts/us_history/dust_bowl_facts...

I run r/UrbanForestry and have recently posted some soil-related pieces there and I'm trying to get a handle on a complex topic without having to get a PhD in it. If anyone can suggest some good sources for me, I would appreciate it.

YouTube soil health videos has all you need. Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta presentations are easy to consume. Dr. Elaine Ingham focuses more on the soil life in greater detail than most care about but she does provide some important to understand details on rhizosphere interactions. Living Web Farms has quite a lot of lectures about regenerative practices. There are also a myriad of academic papers on soil health as well.

This video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A , by Gabe Brown set me on the regenerative path.

If you dont want to consume hours of information here is the gist. The soil is alive. Plants use microbes and fungus as an external stomach. Direct sun and disruption/tilling kill the soil life. Without life in the soil you eventually have a desert as the organics are sifted out of the sand by weathering.

It would probably be worth contacting someone at the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which is part of the USDA. It was literally created as a response to the soil lost during the dustbowl and was originally called the "Soil Conservation Service". They may already have studies that cover exactly what you are asking about:

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/abou...

Agriculture also reduces the root depth as crops are harvested fast and regular iterations. This was a large cause of the Dust Bowl issue. There was a great post on this on reddit that has photo for reference. [1][2][3]

Cover crops help this now to prevent Dust Bowl like conditions and bad soil where possible [4].

Side note: Most carbon capture also happens in the root of wild grasses and plants. It isn't just agriculture but all our landscaping types that prevent root depth. We need more trees, and more wild growing but we cull it all back for the Stepford style perfect landscaping. HOAs in Arizona for instance hate wild grass and wild flowers, but they capture more carbon and can look amazing. Planting trees and plants that are more natural with deeper roots can help climate change and help the Gray-Green divide that highlights inequality on the amount of green in urban areas [5].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/mdocyn/c...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/microgrowery/comments/mdyb3h/compar...

[3] https://preview.redd.it/sp1n9tf6hdp61.jpg?width=509&auto=web...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/business/cover-crops-a-fa...

[5] https://www.geographyrealm.com/gray-green-urban-divide-wealt...

HOAs are a scourge. I’d love to see more states scale back the power of HOAs.

I doubt there’s much State’s can do to stop HOAs from existing. It’s a contract between the homeowners. There’s a lot of economy of scale for group maintenance as well (e.g. landscaping costs are significantly less for adjacent properties).

Like most things in the USA, you can vote with your wallet and live somewhere that doesn’t have an HOA.

A lot of contract clauses have been found void and unenforceable. Same could (and should) happen to many HOA covenants. The fact that you are unable to buy housing in many zip codes without HOA, and there are even some states (ie Texas) where you can be forced into an HOA (even if you own the house clear of one) is just insane.

The power we are giving to HOAs is insane. They can ruin your life. There is a case that I know where a person of color was accused by his white neighbors for WFH, thus using his house for business purposes, thus violating the HOA contract, thus they initiated an eviction.

It is an ablolute mess.

Sounds like a CNN article.

It makes sense for HOAs to be able to prevent someone running stuff like a car repair shop or a mail order business from their garage.

However, what is desperately needed is some sort of appeals process in front of an actual court that could intervene in such obvious cases of abuse.

No, it doesn't make sense.

Restrictions on land use at a local level are already handled via zoning.

The state can decline to enforce contracts it considers against the public interest.

States like Colorado require all new subdivisions to have HOAs

Is that a State law or just a common practice for most suburban development?

I think it's just common practice, but nearly 100% of modern developments either have an HOA or a "special district" which is a quasi-government entity that functions like an HOA.

No, they could make them illegal, it's not an issue other than lack of will.

Thanks for your efforts. Here’s a podcast[1] episode about regenerative farming, with an anecdote from a farming couple in MN who note lower cost per bushel of corn and soybeans over the past seven years after transitioning to no-till. They also observe more birds on their farm, presumably eating more insects, eating more-numerous smaller life forms supported by the soil which is up from 1-2% organic material to 5% (previous prairie, under management by pre-colonial humans, had about 12%)[1]. One of the podcast hosts is Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, editor of a recent book[2] about actions we can take as the climate changes.

[1] How to Save a Planet, episode 2021-01-07 titled “Soil: The Dirty Climate Solution”

[2] Johnson and Wilkinson, editors (2020); All We Can Save: truth, courage, and solutions for the climate crisis; ISBN 978-0-593-23706-9

Yes. But most of the crop grown in that 'corn belt' is not for human consumption, it's for feeding livestock. We're destroying farmland to feed our need for meat. The rest of the crop in the Corn Belt--soybeans--is mostly exported abroad.

I don't believe that's fully the case: https://www.sacredcow.info/blog/qz6pi6cvjowjhxsh4dqg1dogizno...

Lot of corn and soybean oil produced, animals get whats left, generally.

I believe it is, as does the USDA: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgra...

Ethanol is a factor, but again--most production overwhelmingly ends up as livestock feed (as the USDA points out).

Where I’m from in the Midwest it’s nothing but corn fields, but the farmers themselves claim that most of it goes into horse feed and the rest is pop corn (which until I was an adult I didn’t realize was actually a type of really hard corn that is grown, not normal corn that is then dried.)

Are we talking about weight or by plant?

If a plant is 60% by-product is 40% human edible product, and we give all the by-product to animals and all the edible parts to humans, then 60% of the crop weight goes to the animals, while 100% of the crop goes to both animals and human.

As it is, there are four primary ways corn is used as feed.

1: Is to take the entire plant and chop it up and turn it to feed.

2: After harvesting the cobs for human consumption, the stalks, leaves, husks can be turned into feed.

3: The remaining stalks and left over cobs can be grazed on.

4: byproducts for ethanol or other refining processes can be turned into feed.

The only one which is an actually problem here is the first one where the human edible part get turned into animal feed. As I understand it is also the most expensive feed. The linked source does not seem to define how large percent of the yields are used in this way.

Or ethanol. Same happens in part of Europe where I live. But in this case there is subsides rapseed being grown for additions to fosil fuel. Not forgeting to mention, that its being fertilized with petrochemical based fertilizers

I was watching a video about regenerative agriculture the other day (I can't remember which one) and one of its claims was that food isn't as nutritious as it used to be because of current farming practices.

The theory was that when farmers fertilize crops the fertilizer only has common nutrients like nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, but like us plants need a wide variety of nutrients, and those don't exist in the soil anymore.

Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? (i.e. links to papers)

Yes it is true. But, its not that the nutrients dont exist. It is that there is no life in the soil to make them available to plants.

https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/blog/nutrie...

It doesn't have to be this way.

E.g. "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A

Regenerative agriculture is profitable (Brown makes money) and build soil volume and fertility year on year.

Case study of large-scale profitable regenerative agriculture in Brazil: https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/regenerative-or...

Modern farming is not the bucolic system drawn on the food packages in the supermarket.

It's an extractive industry little different from mining or oil drilling. In fact industrial food is largely eating oil, both in energy intensity itself and the use of oil as feedstock for fertilizers and food additives.

Exactly.

I worked on a farm in my teens in 90s upstate ny that was like the last dying breath of the traditional family farm. It was a property that was intact since a land grant from a Dutch patroon and continuously farmed until around 2000. Today the family still owns it, and boards a few horses to pay the taxes.

The farmer was an old-school conservative farmer. He was a local Republican Party leader for awhile, a conservationist and just overall hardworking guy. The modern farm is more like an oil company. I think that 75 years from now, when we lament the fate of the impoverished Midwest Desert and will see the 1970s/1980s as a watershed moment where we flipped our entire governance philosophy to short term P&L, despite then obvious and already learned lessons of the past.

This is a romanticized view of the small family farm. Our farmibg practices in the US were imported from Europe and were not adapted to our climates. Settlers spread like locusts across land that was so fertile that even if they didn't know what to do, the soil would rescue them. Until it was finally so used up that it couldn't support crops.

This is a weird take on history, it contradicts directly what I was taught and understood to be true. The dust bowl was pretty bad but as far as I understood it there was very little fertility to much of the land in what we now call the USA, which is why life was difficult for the early European settlers.

I saw something recently that showed the dustbowl was from loss of native grasses that had deep roots to crops that couldn't contain the soils and hold the bio-mass... Eventually without the root mass of the native grasses, it withered away...

The treatment of the soil as if it is infinite and something purely to be extract is exactly like oil and mineral mining no matter the scale...

Regardless of the dust bowl and the types of farmers that caused it, the hopes are that we learned how to farm within the ecology of the region(s) we live in and how those regions may vary from one another and we should build adaptive farms that work in harmony...

Can you explain all of the people who were living and farming here prior to the European invasion?

The land in the US is fertile. The prairies were incredibly fertile.

The reason I brought it up was because most farms in Native American USA were largely unproductive, and even agriculturally heavy tribes had to supplement their farms with hunting in winter.

Settlers didn't intuitively know how to farm the land at home, whether that was in the Mediterranean climate of the south of Europe or the temperate one in central Europe, or the colder one further north. And it's certainly not as if the European continent is somehow especially farmable without knowing anything about farming.

The wikipedia article on crop rotation[1] explains quite plainly that this has been evolving over eight thousand years, with a recent development pre-WW2 being in the southern US, and the most recent one being a shift to stopping crop rotation and instead switching to chemicals. That last particular update should be setting the alarm bells ringing.

The evidence doesn't really support your claim unless you think the entirety of Northern America had no concept of farming until colonialism arrived a few hundred years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation#History

The settlers had every opportunity to learn local farming practices from the Native Americans.

Instead, they did everything in their power to force their farming practices onto the land where they occupied.

Native Americans farmed. They farmed different crops that were actually suited to the local biome.

> The settlers had every opportunity to learn local farming practices from the Native Americans.

> Native Americans farmed. They farmed different crops that were actually suited to the local biome.

But many didn't. and those that did were often captured and conquered by those that didn't. The Comanche were the best known ones, but their were others. [0] That omission alone is what allows for many people to romanticize the horrible warfare and slavery that took place amongst the native people's perpetual state of warfare.

Also, it's kind of hard to learn from a people who once exposed to European diseases were wiped out in absurd numbers long before the settlers and colonizers would actually arrive.

Colonialism happens in waves, and can span long periods; it's worth reminding that the the first wave were people not interested in establishing a homestead lifestyle and a family farm but abject conquest, for that required the more disenfranchised and honestly peasant/pleb classes to be able to get to the 'New World' much later.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nomadic_peoples#Americ...

I think you're being ungenerous to settlers from Europe; my ancestors were some of them. Soil conditions varied a lot! In Indiana, where my ancestors settled, there was largely forest, and great soil for farming, but the plains weren't that way. But regardless, yes, humans have very radically changed not only the soil ecology, but the entire ecology of North America over our entire time. But it's really picked up in the last 50 years. We're way past sustainability now.

The practices of 100 or 200 years ago were much more sustainable than what we have now. They had no pesticides or fertilizers, and they couldn't till the soil so thoroughly. Farms were smaller and the increased biodiversity of "pests" was actually better for the soils, if not for yields.

What has really tipped the balance is the "amazing" 4x crop yield increase over the last century. It came at the expense of literally every other living thing associated with the land: pests, grasses, trees, animals, birds, you name it. And it required juicing everything up on steroids, genetically modifying and breeding different crop varieties, and carpet-bombing an entire phylum of life with chemical warfare.

We are not past sustainability.

Maybe in the broadest possible sense that it may yet be possible to live sustainably, but we are currently in overshoot, and it's not even close.

https://www.overshootday.org

The practices of 150 years ago destroyed the soil. Farmers had to stop those in the 1930s. Since then plows have gone out of style and reduced soil loss greatly. Farmers who get 4x the yields are actually building soil, they have to because the soil they were left with by the 1980s wouldn't support those yields without doing things to build up the soil. It is years to build up though, if you can add 1mm of soil in a decade that is good. However you can also make what is left better without adding more.

Not at all. My respect for my late friend and employer may sound romanticized, but the business was a real and practical thing.

I think a farm being a vital business since the 1670s qualifies as adapted to the local climate.

In my region of the country, water and topsoil is abundant. But you can’t compete with massive western operations.

This makes me think of the Grapes of Wrath:

>Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.

>You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.

The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.

Maybe we shouldn't burn ethanol in cars. Maybe we shouldn't load up every food product with corn syrup.

if you think about it, it is ridiculous that we burn food as fuel in our cars and add unhealthy amount of sugar syrup into everything

Food is fuel, always has been. An internal combustion engine is efficent compared to biological processes of motion.

Corn in the US is heavily subsidized. It's why corn syrup is so prevalent in US foods, because the subsidies mean it's cheaper than any other sources of sugar.

In the US, Iowa is the largest producer of corn [1] (producing nearly 40% more than the next, Illinois,) and thus the greatest beneficiary of those corn subsidies. Could we reduce those corn subsidies? No, it's politically nonviable, in part because Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must have the first primaries in the US [2][3]. No candidate that has ever said anything against corn subsidies has won a primary.

[1] https://www.cropprophet.com/what-state-produces-the-most-cor...

[2] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-iowa-and-new-hampshi...

[3] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/01/why-the-iowa-cau...

And if you believe in a link between obesity, diabetes, and the prevalence of corn products in our food, the chain of causality looks even worse.

Big corn. Amazing plants have enslaved us.

There’s a brilliant chapter in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind about how as we domesticated wheat, it domesticated humans in return. Grains are thought to have been dropped along trade routes which allowed for humans to be less nomadic as crops became established. Then we got comfortable. Fascinating to think about.

> Corn in the US is heavily subsidized.

So is oil. So farming corn is actually subsidized at-least twice!

> Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must have the first primaries in the US

I'm confused, how can a single state unilaterally require that its primary is the earliest in the nation? What's to prevent another state from passing a law that its primary must be one day before Iowa's?

Does this mean that if another state organizes a primary earlier than Iowa's primary, that Iowa will reschedule their primary to be even earlier than the other state?

This is basically what happened in 2008.

They can't stop other states from competing to be first.

If another state scheduled their's ahead of Iowa's, Iowa's state officials would be legally required to reschedule Iowa's ahead of this other state's.

It would be super fun if another state passed a similar law.

Infinite corecursion!

[edit] apparently corecursion isn't the correct term for when two functions call each other recursively? I thought there was a term for it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_recursion

Thanks!

is it bad of me that I want this to happen to end the madness. I can just imagine Iowa trying to sue another state for doing this.

I want this to happen too

They wouldn't have to. At the national conventions all delegates from states that go before iowa will be unable to vote by the existing rules and that limits what States would even be willing to try.

> I'm confused, how can a single state unilaterally require that its primary is the earliest in the nation?

It can’t, it requires cooperation of the other states.

This claim, often repeated, is misleading to the point of dishonesty.

Corn isn't really subsidized, and iowa corn farmers are not the benefactors of the agricultural bills. Cattle producers and chemical corporations are subsidized, and the way they're subsidized is by a myriad set of policies which encourage grain prices to stay very low. This makes cattle feed cheap and corn and soy inputs to chemical plants cheap.

If the price of corn doubled, farmers could afford to pay their mortgage and taxes without trying to extract every bit of possible yield. But then the price of beef would go up and the profits of 3M and Dupont would go down, and that's a far more powerful force than farmers in Iowa.

I don't know much about direct corn subsidies, but we could talk about sugar tariffs -- which you could interpret as a subsidy to any substitute product producer -- like maybe corn syrup producers.

I'm kind of puzzled by this. Your post defies conventional wisdom (which you say is misleading). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because conventional wisdom is often misleading. But these links seem to indicate that in fact corn farmers ARE directly subsidized, both in terms of crop insurance (cheaper than market insurance is clearly a subsidy), as well as price protection. See that second link, especially ARC and PLC, which compensates farmers if their prices fall below benchmark rates set by Congress.

Is that not a direct subsidy? Are they wrong? (genuinely curious - your post is interesting enough that I felt I had to do some research to clarify my own thinking)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/examining-americas-farm-subs...

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

Subsidies have transitioned away from direct payments to subsidized insurance. The insurance isn’t just about natural disasters or crop loss, it guarantees minimum revenue based on farmed area, basically resulting in direct payments whenever prices are low. That has been successfully rebranded as “not a subsidy”.

https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn

The second link here is a deeply biased political position advocacy opinion piece, so it's a little bit onerous to 'refute' because every section is sort of a misleading half-truth. (I'm not sure what the best example would be, but I'm sure you've read something before where an author was cherry-picking statistics or casting factual elements in dishonest light so that they could support their stance, whether that was about vaccines or immigration or encryption or guns or whatever).

One thing that it does get right, is the section "they induce overproduction, inflate land prices, and harm the environment" which is absolutely true. My point in my previous post was that this systemic overproduction is to the benefit of corn buyers (cattle production, food processors, etc) and the detriment of corn producers.

In essence, the aggregate result of the myriad laws and programs impacting agricultural production is that grain producing farmers are left sitting helpless on a knife's edge. The only way to avoid bankruptcy is to pump your land full of petrochemicals to maximize yield. ARC is based on revenue, not profitability- it's encouraging high-cost, high-yield farming practices to guarantee plentiful grain supply to buyers. PLC is even more brazen- after completely distorting the true market price for animal feed by forcing grain growers to overproduce, we let them buy corn for less than it costs to grow and then force the farmers to rely on an insurance payment that's just enough to cover their debt & tax payments.

Basically, the grain producers are pawns in the ag subsidy game and the grain buyers are the kings.

The government subsidies on corn pushes Iowa farmers to produce more than normal (depleting the soil faster) and sell their corn regardless of the market price. This is mostly done at the behest of other industries and huge food corporation lobbyists. It's a perverse economic incentive to say the least. I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I also don't think there's a bright line between corn subsidies and Iowa somehow playing kingmaker in the caucuses.

It’s my understanding that these subsidies came into existence in the Great Depression when farming was unprofitable even while people were starving. The government came to the realization that free market forces are not enough to stabilize the supply of food, and when food becomes unavailable... bad things happen. Car companies can go out of business and the country will survive, airlines can fail and the country will survive, movie theaters can go bankrupt and the country will survive, but food? That’s an existential crisis for the whole nation. When large masses of people start to starve, you’re looking at political change. You don’t fuck around with your food supply. You can’t just leave that up to supply and demand. Hence it’s subsidized and managed.

Sarah Taber covers this very well on her Twitter (even though she has a particular anti-dairy ax to grind)

There is more than one twitter account that comes up when you search for that name. I assume you mean this one (whom I happen to be following already and didn't realize it):

https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww

Yes that’s her.

From what I understand we probably all should.

Mark Shepard also complains from time to time that dairy supply is outstripping demand to the point where farmers can't make money off of it. That's dumb in it's own right but if you consider the ecological footprint, then we have a problem.

Most important is nitrogen-based fertilizer, that can easily be produced from any kind of electricity. Most of the other stuff are minerals that are cheaply mined anywhere and won't run out for the next few thousand years.

The most important oil consumption is for driving farm implements, but that can easily be changed to rapeseed oil in the short term and other green energy in the long term.

So no cause for panic.

Well I agree that the oil argument isn’t very good. But I don’t think the conclusion is “no cause for panic.”

I think water loss (especially from aquifers but also just drought and river diversion in California), soil erosion, habitat loss, and homogenisation are big worries. We’ve seen big problems from soil loss before in America where the prairie grass with its deep root systems holding the soil together was replaced by cereal crops with short roots and plowing exposing the soil. The result was the dust bowl.

Rapeseed oil isn't green energy. It's just more big-Ag.

With that attitude we can just go back to the caves. Big-anything is what makes our society and level of population work, without Big-Ag we couldn't feed everyone. Without Big-Trans we couldn't distribute the food. Without Big-Trade, you would have to inefficiently buy from 20 small shops selling one item each. Without Big-Industry, your kitchen implements would be a pot and a kettle above the fireplace.

Rapeseed oil maybe isn't a perfect solution. But whining about everything that makes headway just because it isn't perfect yet also holds us back.

What a strange stance to take in a thread about how big-Ag has destroyed a third of US topsoil.

You've been brainwashed.

Explain the reaction that turns electricity into nitrogen based fertilizer. What are the other inputs and outputs of the process? Are you forgetting the most important ingredient?

The Haber-Bosch reaction is what turns atmospheric dinitrogen (N2) into ammonia. Ammonia can be oxidized to make nitric acid and nitrate fertilizers, combined with carbon dioxide to make urea, or used as-is for fertilizer. The inputs to the Haber-Bosch reaction are hydrogen and nitrogen gases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

The nitrogen is easily separated from air. The hydrogen is the energetically expensive input. Most hydrogen is presently made by steam reforming fossil fuels. Hydrogen can also be produced from water and electricity via electrolysis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water

In the 20th century, surplus hydroelectric power from dams was used to electrolyze water for making ammonia. More direct demand for electricity and cheaper processes for making hydrogen from fossil fuels gradually eliminated it. Now people are planning to bring back large scale electrolytic hydrogen for fossil-free hydrogen from renewables:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/canada-is-set-to-have-one-th...

https://www.chemengonline.com/uniper-unveils-plans-for-germa...

So the process can hypothetically run from renewable energy in the future, but the primary energy source and primary source of hydrogen are probably both methane right now.

Methane can be and sometimes is produced from biomass.

And there are a few plants in operation that produce without any fossil inputs, but most of them aren't switched over yet, mostly because green hydrogen production isn't at the necessary scale yet and will probably be used for steel making first.

Perhaps a simple explanation would be to quantify the inputs and outputs, maybe from year to year. For instance the carbon footprint of farming should be shrinking if all of these green measures are coming online.

If you don't have topsoil you don't have water retention and you don't have organisms and structure that avoids the need to till for aeration and mineral movement. That means the garbage soil we're left with must be watered from aquifers when it's not constantly raining, and we must till the soil then work in fertilizers, which wastes gas and time.

The path you say has "no cause for panic" is a path to cyclical famine in 50-100 years.

The path to famine is exponential population growth. No need for agriculture to fail as well. We do have bigger fish to fry than worry about soil quality as long as it is still fixable with fertilizer.

Personally I think the way of life that is destroying the topsoil is at the heart of most of our problems, and if we reverted to a more pastoral life where people are more connected to nature and the food they eat in some way a lot of issues we're facing would magically disappear. Most depression, obesity (with related health issues) and a good part of climate change are all a result of our messed up lifestyles.

I'm not worried about the soil, I'm worried about the water. The Ogallala Aquifer is shrinking. The more it shrinks, the more there will be compaction preventing it from refilling to previous states. We can always grow food in water but getting clean water will be an increasingly difficult task. Look how bad it already is in CA.

We can grow crops with far less water. Look at farms in Israel. The problem is that water prices don't account for externalities or sustainability, so in the short term farmers have little incentive to conserve.

How much of the water that Israel’s farms consume, depends on desalination? So, if it really long-term sustainable?

Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting factor is electricity. And renewables continue to deliver Moore's law like improvements in the price and quantity of electricity, without any environmental externalities.

> Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting factor is electricity.

Disposal of the extracted salt is a serious issue. You can’t just inject brackish water back into he ocean as it screws up the ecology of the near shore environment (or wherever else you’re willing to squirt it.

Most desalination plants do just inject saline water back into the ocean. There's no where else to put it. In most cases the outflow pipe runs some distance offshore into deeper water to reduce the environmental impact.

Why does desalination produce brackish water (this is a new term to me)? From context I expected "brackish water" to mean water that is saltier than seawater. But when I look it up, it's apparently water with salinity between fresh water and seawater.

definitions aside you should be able to understand that if you add salt to ocean water it will be saltier, not less salty, than it was before

Actually, you can. It messes with very local ecology a bit, but is otherwise a drop in the ocean.

I love this comment :) Messing a bit with drops in the ocean is how we got here in the first place.

Aggressive farming messes with the environment a bit. There is just so much land, we can't possibly deplete all of it.

Did you see how much air we have? Yeah burning dirty stuff pollutes it, but then the wind blows and it's clean again.

> There is just so much land, we can't possibly deplete all of it.

Given that we are currently using 40% of the world's land area for agriculture, and that we are using ~0.0003% of the world's water, I don't think this is a fair criticism of my post. Only a fool would think that former isn't something to keep an eye on.

> I love this comment :) Messing a bit with drops in the ocean is how we got here in the first place.

No, we got here in the first place by messing with carbon and water and nutrient cycles that take tens of millions and hundreds of thousands of years to cycle through.

The atmospheric water cycle, on the other hand, operates on a scale of weeks. Seawater gets separated into brine and fresh water, fresh water irrigates crops, fresh water evaporates into clouds, clouds precipitate over the ocean. All of humanity's historic water consumption is quite literally a drop in the ocean. [1]

The volume of the oceans is 1.3 * 10^18 m^3. Humanity's annual consumption of fresh water is 4 * 10^12 m^3. Annual worldwide precipitation is ~5 * 10^14 m^3.

> Did you see how much air we have? Yeah burning dirty stuff pollutes it, but then the wind blows and it's clean again.

[1] Meanwhile, all of humanity's carbon emissions dwarf the ability of natural carbon sinks to absorb - because in hundreds of years, we have released carbon that took tens of millions of years to accumulate. The atmospheric water cycle operates on an entirely different scale. [2]

[2] The orders of magnitude between the unsustainability of <carbon use>, <land use>, <freshwater use>, and <seawater use> are each ~two orders of magnitude removed from eachother.

It's not the use of water that's the problem, it's the releasing of the brine. This will destroy the local ecosystem and historically we haven't been able to predict the consequences of that at all.

I actually think that desalination and solar are a good pairing but

> without any environmental externalities

doesn't sound quite right to me. In particular I think there are reasonable concerns regarding lifetime energy and environmental costs of solar panels, mining of and disposal (or recycling) of the rare materials used in the panels, etc.

TANSTAFL

Desalination is sufficiently cheap to not be a material problem for US consumers (or other developed countries). State-of-the-art desalination plants in Israel are fulfilling contracts at ~$0.40/m^3 [1] and the per-capita water usage in the US is ~1200 m^3/yr [2]. Even if we assumed that the current price of water is $0, this would only amount to a $480/yr increase in expenditure per American which would constitute a one-time 1.4% increase of yearly expenditure for the median American. Note that this accounts for all agricultural production in the US; if we consider just water for domestic use such as drinking, bathing, and watering the lawn the average person only uses ~100 m^3/yr [3] which is ~$40/yr which is within reach of every household. This also assumes that increased water prices will not result in changes to water usage which is very doable as the US uses ~3-4x as much water per capita as other peer countries such as France and Germany and 10x the water of Israel which already needed to adjust to a regime of desalination water prices.

All in all, considered merely in economic terms, desalination is a perfectly viable solution to the water crisis in developed countries and would incur at most a relatively minor economic impact by this analysis. Note that this does not necessarily apply to developing countries where a $40/yr expenditure increase could be catastrophic. I am also not making any statement about non-economic considerations such as possible effects on the environment that may occur as a result of the need for increased power generation for mass desalination.

[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/05/27/203950...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263156/water-consumption...

[3] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts

Your analysis above is remarkably detailed, but it misses the point. When I used the term "sustainable" I was speaking of resource usage and environmental impact, not whether the practice was affordable.

We aren’t going to run out of seawater anytime soon

The resource constraint that matters for desalination right now is not obviously seawater. It is the energy input for desalination, which in many areas still depends on hydrocarbons.

So... the average person in Israel actually spends less on water (even though it is more expensive) because they use less?

That is remarkable.

Do you have any papers on compaction induced reduction in water bearing capacity? This idea does not mesh with my understanding of the Ogallala as being generally coarse grained and thus not as at risk of what you’re suggesting. Compare to consolidation of fine grained soils which does have a hysteretical behavior relating to storage capacity.

It seems to me that aquifers aren't sustainable water sources to begin with--we shouldn't treat them as a primary water source, but rather as a reserve source for scarce years. On the other hand, topsoil could be sustainable (at least for very large time scales) provided it's properly managed.

You should be worried about soil. Increasing the soil organic matter improves its water holding capacity, improves tilth and increases infiltration rate. In turn that decreases how much water is needed for crops in dry times and allows recharging of aquifers.

With the currently degraded soil, farmers worry about a couple inches of rain causing washouts or flash floods. Water runs over the top of the soil into surface waterways. Healthy soil can infiltrate many inches of rain an hour.

Infiltration example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggDY35gGBkA

Longer soil health vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBnsgzeNIng

I'm not worried about the water, I'm worried about the phosphorus! Almost all of the fertilizer in the world is made from phosphorus that comes from Morocco and Western Sahara, and it appears that we're depleting it very quickly.

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/p...

(actually, I'm worried about the water and the soil too)

All the minerals needed for plant life are available in the sand, silt, and clay in soil. Soil life is the key to breaking down aggregate minerals into plant usable nutrients. In healthy soil fertilizing is not necessary.

It is hard to talk about soil life without sounding like a kook to most people. But, our practices of using synthetic fertilizers and spraying fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides are literally killing the soil's capacity to feed plants.

I's not an "either/or". You should worry about both. Some areas are having a problem with soil, some with water and some with both.

> I'm not worried about the soil, I'm worried about the water.

Then quite frankly,m you only understand half of the problem; water will always be an issue even in times of abundance, the fact that when California goes from drought to deluge conditions nothing has been done to try and build infrastructure to replenish the aquifers that have been drained for decades.

The best we get, for all the taxes and myopic city planning is black ping pong balls, and then diverting the water into the Pacific Ocean. In my entire lifetime I will never understand how infinitely stupid this state has been about water despite Central Valley being such a vital to not just the US' food supply chain, but also for a lot out the rest of the World.

Desalination was always thought to be untenable until the preiumus could justify it, but the truth is I forsee some very affluent communities in SoCal (Carlsbad) will be the biggest benefactors of a near monopoly for reliable water sources.

Worth noting is that many Pharma megacoprs are in Carlsbad and the greater San Diego area who have learned from Nestle's business model to water rights in the developing world.

I come from a long line of farmers. My father was the last of our family to try to hold onto the farming tradition. He grew up on a farm, along with all my aunts and uncles. His generation was the first go to college. He chose business. He made a ton of money, and hated it. After leaving the business world in the mid 1980s to return to farming, it was not the same, and he soon returned to what was effectively day trading in the early to mid 1990s.

The transformation of farming is a direct result of corporatization and globalization, like almost every other sector of the economy. It's just more of the machine eating the world. Small, family farms, the kind that my ancestors toiled on, since unrecorded history, literally centuries, back to central Europe, were chewed up and spit out by the machine. The forests, the land, the local wildlife, now, too, the soil, all chewed up and digested in the pursuit of the one thing that the machine really craves: money.

It's the legacy of our entire economic focus on profit, growth, scale. No big conspiracy, no evil bad actors you can hate forever, just the summation of our value system expressed in the invisible hand of the market, jostled or cajoled here and there by policy, or retarded briefly by it, but always pointing in the same direction, eventually to consume all the natural resources, dipping over the threshold of sustainability to the reservoir of resources behind it, extracting and emptying it, until eventually there is nothing left.

I'm not sure how much this actually scales and makes enough money but it sure is an awesome tale (saw the movie on Netflix - https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829):

https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/

Your dad might love it, even if just for the nostalgia.

That said, I think some of the lessons in there are awesome. Both the ones about biodiversity but also perseverance in the light of 'disaster' striking and staying strong and going on with the biodiversity path instead of just resigning and saying "yep, alright, Big Farmer is right, this doesn't work".

it's a wonderful feel-good movie (i loved it), but i'm not sure whether this is actually a sustainable farming solution. afaik they make the farm profitable tourism, i.e. the guided tours, which wouldn't scale.

When I think of sustainable farming I envision the explosion of production coming out of the Amish community in south eastern Ohio (the area I know) right now. Long green houses (high tunnels) bursting with crops, solar panels everywhere, and markets and stores established nearby to make and sell value added goods from that food and to sell it fresh. These people are literally getting rich and they barely use any fossil fuels and they are merely a blip on the food radar.

Probably depends on the exact practices. If they till a lot to work manure into the ground, that loosens the soil allowing it to blow away.

Others use tractors, buy fertilizers and other crop treatments like anyone else.

Makes me think of easter island. When our civilization perishes, money will seem as useful as those statues.

Modified meme caption: Yea, we destroyed the environment, but for a brief moment, we sure mined a lot of Bitcoin.

> Modified meme caption: Yea, we destroyed the environment, but for a brief moment, we sure mined a lot of Bitcoin.

It's hysterical that Bitcoin is the punching bag, because when economies that are prone to hyper inflation give way, its BTC that is used in many of those same countries. Who also, resort back to subsistence or local Ag. And guess what, destroying your land is kind of antithetical to the whole farming thing...

Anyhow, regenerative Ag can now be a massive boon if the infrastructure bill gets properly allotted; I'm skeptical but this could really come to define late millennials and gen Z to ensure that the problems they inheritance from the most wasteful generation (boomers) has some chance of being remediated prior to it being depleted and ensuring famine.

I agree that Bitcoin is too easy a punching bag, but "we found a lot of hashes with leading zeros" didn't have the same brevity to it.

I am open to wondering if CO2 emissions are also too easy a punching bag. Crops can go way nonlinear when lacking mined water, lacking fertilizer, and lacking soil/biomes etc. I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag.

> I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag.

It's pretty vague, to be honest; but from what I've gathered many of its proponents are using it as a phase-in from the core of the New Green Deal, and is essentially a massive works project.

As a former farmer (Biodynamic) myself and a person that did Supply Chain I think that critical infrastructure doesn't just apply to the roads upon which freight travels on, also having a horrible factory farmed centralized food system is what created shortages during COVID and were revealed for all to see. There is no denying it that this model cannot function with just the slight amount of variance, 3PL continued to work and even improved during COVID in some industries, but none of that mattered in the end.

This incidentally led to crop losses due to a lack of labour, and many unnecessary deaths of workers like at meat packing plants had a shocking enough effect that made CSA memberships (shares in the Farm that grant you boxes of vegetables) the more viable option and revealed something that I knew from experience in the aforementioned industries (also culinary): the less food travels, the more savings can be passed on to the consumer, but also the higher a premium it has to it's targeted demographic.

The reason I highlight this is because critical infrastructure, as in the stuff that is of national security, after COVID has to include manufacturing of things like PPE and medical equipment as well as farming in a far more distributed manner--ventilators were just one of the examples of how far the US had fallen.

And the truth is the Department of Ag already has a lot of sound programs to help young, first time farmers: but a concerted effort to incentivize them with low to no interest loans for farming equipment and livestock for 10+ years would be a boon for so many wanting to get into farming and revitalize so many disenfranchised communities that were displaced in the 80s when mega pharmacorps forced their way that led to this big Ag system.

Simply removing a lot of subsidies to corn, soy farmers and using that to float the low interest loans would pay for itself in added revenue, moreover many farmers markets are now obligated to accept things like WIC and foodstamp programs to be accepted so we can readily pivot a low income community's diet in a decade, as seen in Detroit.

I'd include water/desalination as well, but to be honest I'm not sure that will be explored this go around, but may at a later time.

Money is very useful now, very very useful. Things do not need to last forever to have value.

Self sustaining societies will always be out competed and subsumed by extractive ones.

Not always, but as long as the unsustainable extraction lasts. By definition, it has to run out of the stuff it's extracting.

Extractive ones will always burn out in the long run as they will run out of resources to extract. They either learn to live in the waste they've produced, i.e. they become recyclers, or they simply die off. It's a question of how much collateral damage they do over their lifetime.

No matter how bad they screw up, in the very long run, Earth has a tendency to figure out how to recycle the raw materials. After all, Earth's ecosystems are the result of surviving cataclysm after cataclysm, from volcanism to asteroid strikes to climate change, to invasive species after invasive species. It's got a lot of experience dealing with giant debris piles left over from one shitstorm after another, be that a biological plague or the ash of an impact event.

Yeah, mother earth is fine.

Whether humanity will suffer a catastrophe of our own making is another question.

"Mother earth is fine." I think this ignores the human status as a thinking animal, and the glaringly obvious responsibility we collectively share for keeping our biosphere in good condition. That is, that we keep the remarkable diversity of life intact, and do not pointlessly throw the most unique and precious part of our universe in a chipper to make more particle board furniture.

It is interesting that by incrementally converting the life-support system of our planet into dollar store trash, we could have similar impact on the biosphere as an ELE meteor impact! The tragedy is that, at least theoretically, this particular cause is avoidable. Or was. (Maybe science really is to blame? Wouldn't that be sad.)

While I think our views are similar, I clearly have a differing take on "Mother earth is fine."

To me, it implies that planet earth is as implacable as the rest of the universe. It doesn't have feelings. It doesn't care. And it will still be here for millennia yet.

This changes the conversation from:

"We're hurting mother earth."

"We're thinking animals and yet we're making a poor future for ourselves."

https://www.gocomics.com/joelpett/2009/12/13

I'm much more fatalistic for humans than either of you. We've been downright nasty to all other forms of life on this planet for millenia, and now we've stepped up from just being nasty to being positively ecocidal, ratcheting up the biodiversity loss with each new techno-monstrosity we create. We are 100% headed for the trash heap, IMHO.

You're right that we are "thinking animals", but we've got a global animus now that is obsessed money and growth. We're infected with a greed virus that I think is fatal to its host.

And the problem, as I see it, and alluded to in my OP, is that local incentives are all wrong now. Nearly every decision that is rewarded by the markets at a local level is bad in the long term. You can teach a small fraction of people so that they may become enlightened, but greed spreads faster, and is better rewarded. In a game-theoretic view of this, it will always pay to defect from those conserving and living sustainably, as you externalize the losses onto an unseen and uncared-for future, and spread that loss among everyone else. Moral hazard, everywhere. But now, with global civilization and industrialization, and instant communication, we've become more than a diseased troop of chimps headed for a brawl in the forest; we're an insanely overpowerful superorganism driven by unquenchable lust for exponential growth and armed with millions of years of energy reserves--even nuclear weapons! There's literally nowhere on Earth that we can't or won't go in search of resources or vacation potential.

As much of an atheist as I am, I can't help but feel a pang of spirituality about this, and that pang is, unfortunately, despair for the inhabitants of this green jewel that is being ravaged. And by inhabitants, I'm broad in including all living things, regardless if they are cute or have fangs and spit venom. All those funny animals, frogs, plants, fungi. They got fucked because money.

I'm not sure it's about money, per se. Consider all the societies that had money and didn't get as "successful" as the current one, not anywhere close.

The culprit is the scientific method, and in particular it's ability to give people repeatable, inhuman action-at-a-distance that amplified moral hazard 10000-fold.

The longer the distance between extraction and consumption the more fucked your civilization is.

As horrible as that sounds, there is a beautiful symmetry: science gives hope to spread life beyond Earth, and yet it is also provides a real path to the destruction of Earth, our only home.

Clearly Nature thinks the gamble is worth it.

I see it as a conjunction of the two.

Science is a good tool for getting things done. The how.

Money is the motivation for getting them done. The why.

You've both got good points.

Scientific capability enables fucked because money.

It's very curious to me, the connection between science, mind, learning, and economy. They are all optimization processes; narrowing the gap between the model of the world and the actual world, with science being a method of modeling and validating models, a method of learning. Minds are collections of learned models, and economy is the actualization of those models to accomplish the acquisition and use of resources.

I used the word "machine" before, and also the word "superorganism". I get this creepy feeling we're part of a cybernetic superorganism more akin to a slime mold, digesting the world not with funky stomach acids, but the humming sounds of a million bulldozers, pile-drivers, hammers breaking down and building up again. And now, in the 21st century, some kind of Star Trek computer sounds as the digitized stock market whirs away at a speed incomprehensible to these little pink-gray bundles of nerves prone to chemical stimulation.

All of those learning and optimization processes are harnessed, in bulk, towards the economy--harnessing the energy and mineral resources of this planet to create "wealth" for the value system of that machine. Even as just a software person, being light-years away from a bulldozer or a harvester, everything I have done inevitably feeds into making that machine more "efficient". I am rewarded, so my little life is improved. (I guess I shouldn't complain, the machine has made me relatively wealthy so far!?)

Well, you and I are just two tiny specks of the traveling wavefront of "Life" that started some billions of years ago, and which includes everything currently living, on every timescale. (another way to think of it is that every individual is characterized by the 4D path of its center of mass, describing a world-line totally unique in the lifetime of the universe, and that these paths intersect and when you zoom out, speed up time, the network becomes invisible and you just see something like a time-lapse of slime mould growth. It's as beautiful an image as it is disturbing, for some.)

One element of the world which is clearly already a "cybernetic organism" is the everyday "Corporation" - it is an actual fusion of humans and machines to achieve a goal. Corps have many emergent properties, none of which have their root in any individual person or machine. And note that this was true pre-information revolution! (And note: corps ALSO have a center of mass! Although this usually isn't the most useful characterization, its accurate.)

This is an interesting take on it. But it gives me great concern.

When it comes to evolution, individual organisms are needed by the thousands.

If we have one superorganism subsuming the whole planet, then what if it turns out this isn't the ideal evolutionary path?

Fermi Paradox Great filter comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

I agree with your thoughts as a general picture, except I think humans as a species will survive and not be a total wipeout.

But given how hard it is to predict the future, the details are : how much will it hurt?

How much of humanity will survive? How much biological diversity will we lose?

Aside, I don't think atheism/religion enables or precludes empathy for the living things in the world. 'Tis a sad future in many ways.

We don't have any "responsbility" to anyone or anything but our own desires.

You may not have loyalty, but if you're enjoying the fruits of society there is also responsibility to that society, otherwise one should probably extricate himself from society and see how long he makes it in the woods without it.

When I was referring to our own desires I was including human society.

The problem with psychological egoism is that it doesn't say anything.

Mother earth will be fine only until the sun expands to the point that it boils off the oceans and completely sterilizes all life within the next billion years.

I guess the dead rock ball will still be fine.

My grandparents were all farmers. They did it for money, not because they loved corn and the smell of pig shit.

As soon as they paid off the loans for the land, they rented the farms out to someone else to work and moved to town to get easier jobs.

I love the smell of capitalism in the morning. Smells like...better than pig shit.

Yeah, a nice goal would have been "100,000 new small farms in the first 100 days." The USDA should be promoting small speciality crop farms. The farmers markets are doing pretty good but if you shift policy to make factory vegetables reflect their true price it would increase profitablity of smaller farmers through more volume. You wouldn't need much to encourage a swell of speciality crop production farms. The impact from reduction to greenhouse gases would be immense if you had thousands of more local farms growing staples like broccoli, lettuce, spinach, green beans, peppers, tomatoes, and onions. "Speciality crops."

An observation I’ve made is that the strongest and most tangible criticism of modern farming practices comes from small/family farmers and homesteaders.

The two groups have almost no philosophy and practices in common. Different worlds.

My dad came from a farming family (dad worked in construction, but 3 of his brothers and 2 sisters had farms). Over time, they all lost or gave up their farms because they couldn't compete against the corporate farms. Two of them continued to farm their own land after selling their farms, but they no longer lived there.

> globalization

this is it right here. we're extracting all nutrients from a concentrated area and sending the yields far away. There's no replenishment.

Even the water shortages in California is not as simple as "farmers are using all the water". It's the demand for food far, far away.

One argument in "Sapiens" [0], is that all of human history is a continuous repeat of this trove: We hunted the megafauna to extinction, converted the land to agriculture, and so on not because of evil, but because that for the individuals living at any given time this was the most beneficial course of action.

[0]: Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

This is wonderfully written, and really hit me in a way this topic hasn’t before.

There's nothing bucolic about farming -- ever. Both my wife and I come from farming families. I lost a great grandfather who effectively worked himself to death in his early 30s and my wife had a great grandfather who died from being attacked by a bull. Farming has always been very hard work. I have friends in tech who grew up in farming families and they are the few people in tech who can easily get up early in the morning because that's also a part of farming life -- get up before the sun is even up.

I don't know where the romanticized idea of farming life came from because it was never that great. Historically, it was just a way to provide food for your family and maybe make a profit on the side if you're lucky.

It's a shame we don't have satellite imagery dating back to when Europeans first arrived on the continent. I suspect the whole western US was once far more lush and green than it is today. The central valley in California, for example, used to have several natural lakes. Who knows how much impact the damming the Colorado river has on the ecology of the southwestern deserts. I can't imagine that concentrating water into man-made reservoirs combined with intensive agriculture has done much to help the drought conditions we see today across the US.

When spaceX arrive in Mars, I am sure "Google Mars" will start logging time lapse for Mars.

I have heard that the creeks in the central valley used to run most/all of the year because the water table was practically at the surface. This also allowed for the healthy salmon runs we used to have. Now all the creeks are dry by early/mid summer.

That's true in silicon valley too, I remember seeing fish drowning in tiny pools of water because the creeks dry up so much. The floodplain of the san francisco bay has just been so heavily developed that there's just not enough water to go around.

Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil. Don't know if it's true but someone once told me nothing will grow in a corn field for 5 years afterwards unless it is roundup ready.

There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...

*Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years*

We are f...ed the way things are going. Might have to start gardening locally (back yard) or hope Indoor vertical farming takes off.

> Might have to start gardening locally (back yard)

No reason not to start now depending on where you are. I grow for flavour and value not calories.

i see neighbors using Glyphosate all the time. don't know how its even still sold in stores.

Really simple. Heavy lobying and no public opposition.

It is about the safest chemical gardeners use. Check the safety data on the fertilizers they apply sometime.

I believe it takes 4 years after the end of applications before it can be certified organic. Stuff will grow the following year or so. I think the half life is 90 days. Plus farmers have to pay for the chemicals they spray and try to apply the right amount since over application would cost more. So it should resolve itself fairly fast.

Instead of repeating lies you can look this up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate half life is between 4 and 197 days.

Glyphosate binds strongly to soil, so even when there is glyphosate in the soil it doesn't affect seeds in the ground but not growing yet.

> Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil.

Found this:

> A typical field half-life of 47 days has been suggested.

> Glyphosate adsorbs tightly to soil. Glyphosate and its residues are expected to be immobile in soil.

> The median half-life of glyphosate in water varies from a few days to 91 days.

http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/glyphotech.html#env

5 years should be more like 2 years, but its direct impact on the soil is relatively short. We're not talking DDT or Agent Orange, here.

The recommendation is to wait one to three days after applying glyphosate to plant grass, herbs, or fruit. It mostly depends on what else is in the herbicide.

You might wait a week for the previous plants to really die before cutting them off.

When replacing areas of random noxious weeds with grain I wait three days after the glyphosate and have no problems with my regular old, low tech oats or barley.

(I do grain because it gets tall kind of fast and helps choke out the next batch of weed seeds waiting to sprout, the birds like it, and it’s pretty when it gets dry and wavy.)

Three centimeters in a thousand years is without any management. All soil is built through the process of succession. We can drastically speed up that process with regenerative ag practices.

If anyone is curious I am working on an open source farming robot meant to be used for regenerative agriculture techniques.

My hope is that we can build robotic tools that work the land more like human hands do instead of the big tools and poisons we use today.

If you like that kind of thing please take a look:

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...

On the plus side, your rover is going to work better with contour planting, which is part of the solution to our problems.

The downside is that most of the post-modern agricultural variants embrace observation as being critical, and we of all people should know that statistics and graphs are not a substitute for actually looking at things. Having a robot phone home is not the same as knowing what's going on.

As an aside, I think you're going to need chonkier wheels on that thing, and better resistance to mud (what are those boxes right above the wheels?) Also you should research fork rake, and how it relates to the tendency of a wheeled vehicle to maintain or change direction. There may be a wheel design that affords you more cycles for other activities besides keeping the vehicle tracking straight.

Thanks!

Yes I do dream of contours cut all through a town where small robots can tend to locally grown food. And of course for large farms it’s still a help if there are any hills.

Having people on the ground is very important. Sometimes in my mind I imagine a fully automated farm but I try to push back against myself and think more of how this can be a tool to help people do their work. For observation I do want to be able to provide high resolution images stitched together and geolocated so that a record of observations is available for review now and for posterity. There’s no substitute for walking the field and observing with human eyes. Bending down and looking close. Picking a leaf, breaking it open, and smelling it. I do think we will need great optics and high resolution imagers, plus a high res imager on an arm for detailed remote views. I do want to teach these machines to do some diagnosis on their own. But ultimately this will be a tool to aid a farmer, not replace them.

I have a new video coming soon that shows our replacement drive system. You’re right that the system shown in that video was susceptible to mud. The new system has operated for weeks in the rain and mud and done well. It’s a fully sealed geared hubmotor system.

Rake is on our minds too. I think we might move to a custom fork soon.

Thanks for your comments!

That thing is worse for the soil than a big tractor. It has to make more tire tracks to cover the field, and soil compaction is sub liner with weight so overall it is doing more damage. Sure where the tractor tires are it is worse, but the tractor tires skip a lot of space those harm.

Reducing soil compaction has been an important goal of ours. The machine is extremely light compared to a tractor (I can lift one end of the machine on my own), and it is designed to be easily made different widths. I’m pretty confident the total soil compaction would be less with our machine especially with an extra wide version.

Right now there is no financial incentive to preserve topsoil. In the future there will be.

So why artificially create incentive to pay the higher cost now when we can punt to the future where technology will be so much better and the cost will probably be lower?

Topsoil takes a long time to build up. If you wait until it's an emergency to start trying to change farming practices, it'll take 10 years for farming practices to change, then another 10 years to build topsoil, and a lot of people will starve.

>“In 150 years or so, we’ve lost over half of that rich topsoil—if not all in some places.”

If the timescale of the solution is decades we are good, because the time scale of the problem is centuries.

50 years from now

"We've got 100 years left before we have to worry about this!"

100 years from now

"We've got 50 years left before we have to worry about this!"

145 years from now

"This is a crisis, if only we had 150 years to work on this maybe we could get somewhere, but as it is..."

Same problem with climate change.

1) You assume technology will be better. There is no guarantee that this will be true.

2) Externalities like mass migration or civil unrest that could occur from food shortages would mean we don’t have a chance in the future to tackle the problem effectively.

Nuclear power can solve climate change now. Technology doesn't need to be better.

People don't want to solve the problem now because

1) We don't need to solve it now

2) Fear of impending doom is a great way to push a wide array of agendas (ideological, economic, political) forward.

"Why can't we just wait until some magical future time when technology has fixed everything?"

Exactly the type of do-nothing idiocy I'd expect from this place. What exactly do you think you're contributing here?

On every single important topic, HN consistently pushes to the top whatever sentiment contains the least actionable information.

People here are simpletons that can't even fathom anything other than the status quo, even to the point that they'll condone killing off all other life on the planet as long as they don't have to address their own gluttony and revolting ignorance.

Insults are not an argument.

What makes your you think that in the future there will be financial incentive?

If there is no financial insetive in the future it's because we don't need top soil in the corn belt and we saved ourselves and he cost of dealing with this problem which ended up being irrelevant.

There has been financial incentive to preserve topsoil for years. You cannot buy subsidised crop insurance if you don't adopt soil conserving practices. You can't get record yields out of your land if you haven't spent the previous seven years carefully building up your soil .

Why force future generations to solve a life-or-death problem and rob them of freedoms that people enjoy today?

I hope in 50 years the entire adult generation of today is mocked and ridiculed for how they destroyed the only known inhabitable planet for our specifies.

Because over time humans get better at solving problems.

Are you predicting the earth will become uninhabitable in 50 years?

I guess we'll have to replace it

"Artificial soil: quick and dirty"

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526161-700-artifici...

Requires a subscription.

'Replace it' is a little imprecise here, allowing for substitutes. I'm sure some people are trying to make substitutes but we know a lot more about how soil becomes these days and we're able, to an extent, to create it by introducing food to the right food chains.

Unfortunately for perennial crops, you have to build that food chain up orders of magnitude more than you do just for annual plants. At the same time the carbon content and resiliency are much much better.

Elaine Ingham is worth some time in a search engine.

I don't have a subscription. I found it by googling, maybe that gives you a one time pass

Here in SW Ohio I’m not sure there ever was an abundance of rich topsoil. I have 5 acres which has never been farmed and the native soil is dense, sticky clay. It is hard to get anything other than weeds to grow in it. Yet the corn farms around here always seem to produce.

> I have 5 acres which has never been farmed

If your records don't go back to the 1700's then you don't know that for sure. SW Ohio was the eastern tip of the savannas, so even if it wasn't farmed, someone busted the sod for your forebears to stake a claim.

We're ~60 years from running out of topsoil globally if we continue degrading it at the current rate: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...

We’ll probably be eating lab-grown meat and hydroponically-grown vegetables by then.

If we’re not all uploaded to a server embedded in the planet’s core or orbiting the sun.

Good news! we're orbiting the sun now, well ahead of target date

Didn’t think the words “in an artificial sattelite” were really needed to convey the idea.

Hydroponically grown vegetables tend to be nutrientless sponges.

Hydroponically grown celery tastes like water. Fresh, dirt-grown celery is nearly inedible because of how sharp and metallic the flavor is.

Industrial and lab-grown meat will face the same problems.

I've heard exactly the opposite about hydroponic vegetables. I suppose it depends on what nutrients the plants are given in the water. What is your experience?

It's 100% the nutrients + minerals. When you get right down to it, you're just trading one growing medium for another.

That said, hydroponics allows for a level of control in nutrients that soil does not, generally leading to weighty, tasteless veggies.

Uhm... no.

Ever actually had any? How do you what lab-grown meat will taste like? And why do you think lots of pot-smokers insist on the hydroponic kind? For the weak watery effect?

It can go either way, depending on how much fertilizer you use. Farms that cheap out will have an inferior product.

As someone in the industry, this is absolute rubbish and misinformation.

Lab-grown meat will taste exactly the way consumers expect meat to taste, for the same reason orange juice does.

[1] because we will engineer the process to a terrifying degree.

I don't believe that's accurate. The main issue or limitation of hydroponics/aquaponics is that many types of vegetables cannot be grown via the method. It's suited to leafy greens and not, for example, root vegetables.

I googled "hydroponic potatoes" and I kid you not, the first words in the results were "Potatoes are one of the easiest crops to grow with a hydroponics system".

I've also had grown and eaten hydroponic potatoes myself and they were great.

Huh, my knowledge is outta date. Thanks for correcting!

This claim has been contested

https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans#:~:text=But%20the%....

Where does the topsoil go? Doesn't it, by definition, just become topsoil somewhere else?

Well no. Just like a rainforest doesn't just fly in the wind to become a rainforest somewhere else if you burn it. Soil is a ecosystem, not a raw material.

That was a spectacular analogy.

Sure, soil is an ecosystem, but topsoil is the top part of that soil. The surface layer. If you bulldoze a rainforest, there's no more rainforest. But if you scrape away topsoil, you have subsoil, and you have a big pile of topsoil.

It doesn't have to go anywhere, it can just "die" - lose its ability to hold water, nutrients, fungus, microbes - everything necessary for it to be beneficial to plants.

So they've done what's all too common these days... gone and changed what a word means.

Dead topsoil is dead topsoil. It doesn't become rock or subsoil or something else.

The title of this post is "corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil". It should be "a third of the top soil in the corn belt is badly degraded" or something like that.

Have they? It's common vernacular to say we lost something even if it isn't "i lost my keys" but "We lost the last dodo bird"... doesn't mean we can't find it, but, what we had will never be again.

Why would it never be again? The ingredients to making good topsoil aren't a mystery. The topsoil can be fixed.

In many cases of periods of time longer than humans live...

We're shitty stewards... I've seen jeepers drive over tundra and do donuts not realizing their burnouts won't recover in a lifetime and other morons see them out there and think it means they can follow suit and before long the entire basin is destroyed...

sure... it will recover... when humans are dead, or when we pull our heads out of our asses :)

If the soil is dead it isn't topsoil, it is just dirt.

It gets eroded by wind and water, with the end result being at the bottom of oceans and lakes.

Where everything eventually ends up. In the ocean!

No, topsoil is more than mere dirt, it is an entire ecosystem that lives in the soil. It takes 50-100 years of build up and fertilizer and very careful tending, with less than optimal yield, to turn lifeless dirt into healthy topsoil.

>Settlers began systemically clearing the Great Plains prairie in the early 1800s as the John Deere plow became a staple of conventional tilling, which is the practice of digging up the topsoil to plant seeds. Later, gas-powered tractors made ripping up fields even easier.

Here's how this would read without the emotionally manipulative language:

> The Great Plains prairie was first tilled by European settlers from the United States in the early 1800s with animal-drawn cast iron ploughs like the ones designed by John Deer. In the 20th century, tractors replaced horses and oxen for pulling ploughs.

I'm not sure what purpose demonizing farmers is serving here but I don't like it.

I think everyone needs to learn from the ancient wisdom on the Punjab province in India and Pakistan.

Open Google earth and zoom into Punjab. It is the greenest agriculture zone in the entire world. Just look at it yourself.

Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive for the world.

And one more thing. The GMO crops being introduced I that region needs to STOP. It will kill the best farming land we have and then there will be no ability to rewind time.

Read about the recent farmers protests there to also know more about the problems the farmers are facing.

GMO crops allow us to grow more food with less space/nutrients/etc. They are a solution, not a problem, and when people fear monger about them it hurts everyone.

So you'd prefer that farmers get screwed by the onerous IP clauses surrounding them?

No, just remove the onerous clauses rather than GMO crops.

The most interesting patents have already expired.

Most of the clauses you think of as onerous are non issues to real farmers. Hybrid seeds don't breed true, so no farmer is saving their seed in the first place.

This is a false dichotomy, and really just a red herring.

GP claimed "GMOs ... will kill the best farming land we have"

The parent you replied to refuted that point. Onerous IP clauses surrounding crop seeds is an IP issue, not one of agriculture and topsoil quality.

And quite frankly, if onerous IP was the cost we HAD to pay, compared to the depletion of a resourse that is "non-renewable in human timescales," [1][2] yes, that's easily worth it.

1: Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN, http://www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-detai... "Soil is a finite resource, meaning its loss and degradation is not recoverable within a human lifespan."

2: US Forest Service, way back in 2003 https://web.archive.org/web/20170531160340/https://www.fs.fe... Section 11.2 "On human time scales, fertile topsoil is not a renewable resource."

Thanks for highlighting the protests-it’s getting really bad over there. My dad is a farmer from Punjab originally and while he’s in America now and doesn’t farm he has a slightly different perspective. He tends to be far more concerned about todays farmers using harmful pesticides and overworking the land than GMOs. Maybe Punjabis on HN can shed more light, but at least from what I’ve heard GMOs are not the big issue in contemporary Punjabi farming

You seem to think that GMOs mean scientists are injecting mutant genes into corn and wheat in order to increase yield. This is wrong.

GMO means the crop itself has been selectively bred over time to increase desirable qualities, yield being one of them. Taste, perhaps another.

Are you afraid of GMO foods? Perhaps you should avoid orange carrots, and sweet corn, then.

> GMO means the crop itself has been selectively bred over time to increase desirable qualities

That's one thing GMO means. It can also mean genetically modified species that are resistant to a specific herbicide. For example, Round-up ready crops.

That doesn't necessarily mean breeds that have been genetically altered are bad or worse than ones bred over time, but it's incorrect to say that GMO means breeding.

A genetically modified organism (GMO) is any organism whose genetic material has been altered using *genetic engineering* techniques.

Selective breeding is something else. It is very difficult to somehow selectively breed a marine mollusk gene into a carrot.

You are right, however at the same time, the vast majority of GMO work is done with the entire purpose of increasing yield, even if top soil is already being over-utilized and dieing. We could use it to make food tastier and more nutritious, but is a20% tastier apple going to sell 20% for more? 20% higher yield will. And having usable top soil in 50 years doesn't get the same financial incentive as using up in 20, selling off used up land to developers, then buying out the properly tended soil from struggling farmers who didn't fuck their land.

This is a frustrating, mystical simplification of agriculture. We can understand how these things work, and implement best practices, rather than appealing to tradition and eschewing things like synthetic fertilizers and GMO crops purely out of how "unnatural" they are.

Much of the woes in North American agriculture are down to the refusal of farmers to implement known best practices and the incredibly distortionary effect of endless layers of agricultural subsidies.

Ancient practices may have interesting things to teach us, but they're not inherently good. And to actually fix things, the people who control the land need to actually care about doing the right things.

> Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive for the world.

The locals' knowledge is likely highly specific to their local environmental conditions and crop varieties, so not exportable.

The farming practices in the Indian Subcontinent are not as mechanized and not as geared towards profit maximization, which certainly helps.

However, the main reason why that region is always fertile is the immense amount of rich soil brought by the Indus River from its origins in the Himalayas. There is no such replacement mechanism for the US Midwestern plains; the soil was created over millennia and once it’s gone it’s gone forever.

Indian Punjab has used tube wells and free/low cost electricity to drain and deplete its aquifers far more efficiently than Pakistani Punjab (which has its own problems with waterlogging, salinity, maintenance of British canal system and lack of catchment for rain and floodwaters). Kalabagh Dam will probably get built the fifth of never if Sindh has any say about it.

Yes, the Punjab region is beautiful. But maybe you should read about it more: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/parched-punjab-20535 http://water.columbia.edu/research-themes/water-food-energy-... https://theprint.in/india/governance/save-punjab-from-desert... The region is not green because of the agricultural practices, it was always green and is now dying due to the destructive agriculture.

Thank you for the context.

The Green Revolution in India refers to a period in India when agriculture was converted into an industrial system due to the adoption of modern methods and technology, such as the use of high yielding variety (HYV) seeds, tractors, irrigation facilities, pesticides, and fertilizers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution_in_India

Ah, no problem.

Just exchange it with micro plastics

https://soil.copernicus.org/articles/6/649/2020/

In case that is not enough, there still is Soylent Green.

Did you know, before the introduction of artifial fertilizers, they used the human bones from Napoleonic battlefields?

https://medium.com/study-of-history/the-bones-of-waterloo-a3...

...

Dust in the Wind.

Dirt in the Ground.

The Earth dies screaming.

I will survive.

Tangentially related, I want a dataset of all cultivated lands and what crops they are growing? Is there a dataset for it? I mean, I give GPS coordinates and I get back crops growing there.

General data is in government reports. The farmer who owns that GPS coordinate has it, but considers it sensitive data and won't tell you. There are big databases, but they respect the farmers not wanting to share and won't talk. The admins of those database are registered with the SEC as having inside information and so they cannot trade in relavent markets.

Interesting. I can't imagine it being so sensitive. Someone can look at satellite imagery and figure out what those crops are, even on a country wide scale.

You want the Cropland Data Layer from USDA/NASS. 30m resolution, updated yearly:

- https://nassgeodata.gmu.edu/CropScape/

- https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Cropland/Rele...

- https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/...

Thx. This looks cool.

Us gardeners topdress our soil with organic matter to prevent topsoil loss and erosion. Personally, I often use unfinished compost because my compost is usually not done yet.

Many farms use a hydrogen-fixing cover crop, but they probably don’t let it live long enough to get the full benefit.

It's as if humanity is squeezing the planet like a lemon for every last drop. There's not much left...

The planet will be fine, but we are sawing off the branch we are sitting on

this is a terrible title. what the article says is, a third of the corn belt has lost all of its topsoil. the rest of it has lost a large percentage of it (some of which may just have migrated). so the situation is actually quite a bit worse than the top line. of course the good thing is all of that is repairable, the bad thing is it will take centuries to fully restore the grassland if you leave it alone - which of course can't happen!

Google earth timelapse now confirms this, just put the camera over the US, push play and watch how brown/desert looking middle america becomes.

Corn is one of the worst crops... water intensive, land intensive, and bad for your health too.

The next wave of VC and Tech companies should be in Bio and Food Tech.

There is so much that needs to be done.

To me this is just another example of how humanity often doesn't think and act for the long term until its too late- along with the problems of our poor planning for climate change, pandemics, plastic pollution, and consistently choosing to invest in shiny new things versus investing in maintaining current infrastructure.

Does anyone know if land application end use of biosolids can convert to top soil?

This is probably in part because so much of it is nothing but corn.

corn-derived ethanol is an environmental crime.

Always be wary of studies conducted by people taking a political assumption and turning it into the basis of their paper.

It's not coincidal that said studies either lack specifics in some areas, while being over-specific in others or are cited in the same manner (leaving out details where it helps the political camp, being over-specific in others).

One can already see this turning up in general rebuttals of agriculture, or citations that leave out the critical detail that soil erosion is caused by corn specifically, not crops in general. Or which kind of geographic reagion was used. Or how well farmes tilled their land (see the picture about erosion down-hill: its just a question of the right tilling-technique to prevent that from happening).

And as a last resort you can always toss it into some meta study to "prove" your point.

I have lived in the corn belt my whole life. I was just surprised that anyone might think there is significant topsoil left. The average field is continually beat to hell by machines that create magnificent dust storms twice each season--spraying glyphosate and planting, and then harvest.

All the major farmers in my region use no-till but they dump lots of fertilizers and/or must rotate between corn and soya (beans create and accumulate nitrogen at the roots, leaving it behind in the soil for the next crop).

All the fields I'm used to are very pale and clayish. Dark soils in newish-virginish soils stand out like a sore thumb and can really only be found in small non-factory fields.

These topsoil crisis stories have been running since the 1930s, and are still nonsense. Modern farming doesn't depend on soil nutrients. The soil is tested, then minerals and petrochemical fertilizers are added. The soil is basically a growing medium.

Funny because when I saw the headline it reminded me of the same crisis in the 80’s that never came to pass.

I sometimes wonder if these crisis stories are just written by journalists he need to meet their clickbate quota for the week in this Google Adsense driven industry… naaaaa

Wasn't the dust bowl caused by topsoil degradation?

That seemed like a very substantial crises for wide swaths of the country's population.

>Wasn't the dust bowl caused by topsoil degradation?

No. It was caused by extensive deep tillage as method of pest control.

We have better tools and methods now.

It was caused by lack of cover plants. Farms are using cover crops like ryegrass more because it helps keep water in the soil better.

"These topsoil crisis stories have been running ever since that time that topsoil crisis killed thousands and caused widespread food insecurity. Utter hogwash. Well, it would be hogwash if any of the hogs had anything to eat."

The chemical fertilizer revolution happened in the 1950s.

(which didn't disconnect productivity from soil condition, but it loosened the relationship)

That is a different issue, a serious one. The claimed problem here is that farming relies on topsoil, which is not correct. Our factory farming doesn't rely on topsoil nutrients to feed the crops. Our current farming methods leave a lot to be desired.

That is the problem in a nutshell

> The soil is basically a growing medium.

This is absolutely false and is the idea that got us to where we are today with heavy tillage, fertilizer application and biocide application. Those practices are demonstrably destroying our environment and are wholly unnecessary.

Luck the environmental lobbyist have got the suckers into only caring about CO2 levels, and not harming the planet.

That said, if this reduces productivity that would mean more forests to cut down but I'd need to see a more full report on what is happening.

Loss in land value and productivity should also be happening to back this up. The entire region will not suddenly become useless at once.

And if there's anyone left who cares about the environment not CO2, helping quantify this at land sale level would help push some market forces.

So we short or long soy/corn?

Insurance regarding farming crops and futures though is a very interesting topic, one that I wish to have learned more about. Tons of big things.

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