Soil in Midwestern US is eroding 10 to 1k times faster than it forms
umass.edu
umass.edu
https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999
It has some striking pictures of two farm fields side by side.
One supports diverse plant life and produces nutrient-rich food. The plant roots prevent erosion, and retain water. The soil is rich and black. It's "regenerative".
The other has brown, dry, dead soil. It's tilled and irrigated and sprayed with chemicals. It grows a single crop, a monoculture.
Multiply that by a hundred years and thousands of consolidating mega farms all over the world, and you have a huge amount of erosion
---
This problem has been well understood for decades (and by other civilizations for centuries), but is repressed / conveniently ignored by a wealthy, government-subsidized food industry
Here's a 2012 documentary about a 1994 project in China to restore degraded / desertified land, and it shows how poor entire states become when the soil is poor (which I suppose is not unlike the American midwest!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ
https://rethink.earth/turning-desert-to-fertile-farmland-on-...
Chinese land has supported agriculture way longer than American land, and they have way more people, so they have these problems sooner
The US is going to get there
Dave Montgomery - Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
That means the nutrients have been depleted over the previous hundred growing seasons, and it takes more and more fertilizer to get the same level of output even as the aquifers are being depleted. We don't know how many growing cycles are left, but after the next hundred years, if we are still growing crops in the midwest, it will be because we are importing 100% of the nutrients and shipping in the water from elsewhere. We will just be using the physical space at that point, and I doubt crops grown this way can be as nutritious.
Taurine cattle thrive in cold weather. They were domesticated from animals that lived in the forests of northern Europe. The reason they don't live in the arctic is there isn't enough grass there. Many of the biggest challenges to cattle health (in a word: flies) are only present during warm weather.
I have thirty new calves on the ground right now.
According to weather.gov, the lowest low at my location in Midwest USA was -12F in 1917-12-30. It does occasionally get down to 0F, but my herd has little problem with that. I break ice and make sure they have hay.
One time, I had a little bull born overnight in a February cold snap. Due to an unfortunate interaction between its mother and a brush pile, it wandered into a ditch and couldn't nurse until I found it in the morning. I brought them both in the (unheated) barn and reminded it how to nurse. After a day in the barn I turned them back out. That bull still had a red nose when I sold it as a 2yo to a neighbor, so we called it "Rudolph".
Of course I'm in Missouri, not North Dakota, so one probably couldn't bring my heat-acclimated Red Angus crossed with Akaushi and Charolais to North Dakota and expect them to thrive. There are plenty of Red Angus herds in North Dakota, however. North of there, I guess they have to raise Scottish Highlanders?
I'm curious, how did you get into that? Are you a software person who became (forgive the term) a gentleman rancher? Was it a family business? Or do you have no professional connection to software to begin with?
We've seen a 25% increase in output over the last several years that we've only been able to explain as being the result of climate change. It is consistent across a large number of farms, so it is not one farmer's change in management practices.
I'm not sure this is the reason the midwest is poor. In relation to farming, the size of land needed to make a good living has continually increased largely due to overhead costs increasing (insurances, general cost of living, and equipment). You have a lot of farms that try to hold on and are eventually consumed by corporate farms. Then factor in the pressure of globalization on commodity prices (one of the reasons for subsidies; although the subsidies may be hurting more than they help. On top of this, other industry such as manufacturing has been greatly reduced.
Soil quality may compound these issues through reduced yield. But even with better soil, the economics of the region are unlikely to change in my opinion.
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/how-the-anti-populists-s...
Regenerative farming is cheaper in the long run because you're not buying fertilizer (they talk about how much that costs), and because soil with plant matter retains water
The yields are higher, and diverse crops mean more potential sources of income
However it probably doesn't produce results in the first year, and it takes more knowledge and skilled labor -- you can't just apply a formula to any piece of land. It takes some local knowledge, which farmers used to have, but can be lost when factory farms come in
Bill Gates is all about the environment and owns tons of farm land. Is he implementing regenerative farming, or just business as usual? I'd be interested to see if he's adopted it, or why he hasn't.
Edit: why disagree?
Soy production (in moderate quantities) is not harmful to the planet, animal agriculture is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer (primary aquifer in the midwest)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optima_Lake (lake never filled due to decrease in aquifer depth)
Food output decreases for many reasons, but famine is a political problem. During most of the worst famines in china, as elsewhere, starving regions were still exporting grain.
And for china specifically (and also very much india) I would definitely include the 19th century victorian famines. They were driven by distinctly "modern" forces like global grain market prices, and bureaucratic/political prioritization of exports over sustaining the local population. Pre-modern famines were usually more directly caused by regional failure to react to specific climate events and crop failures. Or, traditionally, just local military aristocrats hoarding the grain.
Sounds like corporate software. Software typically doesn’t make money and everyone is aware (except some developers). The business makes money and funds internal software to establish automation which streamlines the business to make money more efficiently. As such automation is the business goal for funding that software. Most corporate developers are not well trained to think in terms of automation. They think in terms of data and code. This is a massive disconnect resulting in wildly different expectations which is compounded through hiring practices and reliance on third party software developers don’t have to write. These things solve for code but fail to address automation in any direct or meaningful way.
"As such automation is the business goal for funding that software. Most corporate developers are not well trained to think in terms of automation. They think in terms of data and code. "
It's like your domain specific anger is so intense that you have to find a way to add it to unrelated conversations.
Modern farms are moving to no-till and cover crop practices to protect the soil. Fertilizer isn't as expensive as you think - ammonia and lime are pretty abundant, coupled with good old manure spreading and crop rotation, you can manage the soil pretty well.
The Midwest corn belt is in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. This area largely doesn't need irrigation. That mostly occurs west of the Missouri where wheat is slightly more prevalent due to corn's irrigation needs.
Source - I grew up on, and farmed myself on, a Midwest Iowa farm, and worked on the largest real-time data analytics pipeline in the agricultural industry for almost six years, my father still farms, and I ran an agritech startup building an autonomous applicator for 5 years.
Our real problems are distribution and storage, exports, chemical runoff, new crop diseases and climate change with more prevalent droughts and floods likely in the future. But we're in no danger of another dust bowl or sudden yield collapse. Yields today are nearly double what they were when I was a kid in the 80s.
More farmers need to plant cover crops and no-till and use set-aside land for soil preservation, but the good ones are already doing this, and profiting. Agronomists and university extension offices are educating farmers about this.
Agricultural states aren't poor - Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri and Iowa are 19, 20, 21, 22, and 31 in state GDP rankings. My State's median income is $61,000 / year and the average household income is $85,000 / year.
The cited documentary and this meta-thread seem to have some biases and/conflate Great Plains states with Midwestern states.
The point is that desertification is they thing to talk about and find incentives and ways to create that awareness.
My last personal opinion: I truly believe that GMO might be the least of all evil - covering our soils and reduce the need for pesticides…
The US has been doing something similar with its farmland for centuries. You can't have vast empty expanses of grassland that won't erode because there's _nothing_ to renew them. Hedgerows and forest cover are important to minimise losses as they act as traps, but these kinds of things are not as common as they should be in the US. It's like the actual lessons of the dustbowl were never actually learned.
>According to this display the average depth of topsoil in the year 1850 across Iowa was 14 inches. In 1900 it had decreased to 11.5 inches. After another 50 years it had dropped to 8.5 inches and in the 50 years from 1950 to 2000 it had decreased another 3 inches to 5.5 inches. If our rate of loss has stayed steady over the last 18 years the topsoil depth should now be at 4.5 inches. If this rate continues our topsoil will be depleted by 2093.
It seems we may be aggressively depleting our topsoil like we are our petroleum resources. We could just be in the final era before the plunge for both. I hope we are using what we have left to fix the problem and find new solutions.
In western Canada farming practices involve more crop rotations and less tillage, the net result has been increasing organic matter in many areas. I farm in an area with a surplus of organic matter, and too much can be a problem, so we still engage in a lot of tillage under normal precipitation conditions.
https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agriculture-and-environment...
I am a bit of gardener and my anecdotal advice is - I don't know what sense you are using the word "mulch" here so I am not sure about that but too much compost can be an issue if you are not letting it break down long enough and not incorporating into existing soils well enough. Too much compost will grow wicked-hot radishes, but your leafy greens will be ugly and taste like garbage in my experience. The thing about gardening is it is all small sample sizes.. it ain't science and it is hard to know what's up without a good old fashioned site visit!
https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-it-common-to-grow-corn-hydrop...
We had a farmer around here who seems to have learned. He somehow figured out that hedgerows help break the wind and are home to beneficial birds and other animals, even if also probably harboring not so beneficial ones such as rabbits ;)
He subdivided his fields by "planting" hedgerows again but he did it on the cheap. He threw a bunch of old branches/cutoffs around his fields and just left it there for a few years. Over time, birds and other animals probably that used the branches for shelter would drop seeds and over time an actual hedge grew all by itself. FWIW he also built a little pond in the middle of some fields, simply by digging out a hole and piling up the dug out soil around it on 3 1/2 sides.
If it is what the landlord wants, you no doubt would. If you don't there are a 100 other farmers lined up for the land who will.
We've got a system that does not provide checks and balances against that, and the world is run by the same neoliberal ideology that says the market is always right and intervention is wrong.
Sucks for our kids and their kids, but the people doing things like this do not care one iota. It's a shame that those that run the world are ideologically opposed to make them care about the damage they're doing.
This is about a lot more than ideology. People want food, and it's a whole lot harder to produce the quantities people need using better long-term farming practices. Hopefully, that changes.
These days farms have been so consolidated, and corporations dictate terms via contracts with the smaller farms that are left, that the idyllic family farm image that comes to mind when you think of American farmers is nearly a thing of the past. Those corporations, banks, etc that are involved with consolidation and dictating contractual terms with smaller farms, also tend to run the world.
There are a lot of factors at play here, though, that have lead to industrial farms crowding out all the smaller farms, eg. economy of scale, high capital investment in equipment, and dwindling workforce- fewer kids want to stick around and work the farms.
I think it's a tradeoff- a lot of better farming practices require more workers, from my understanding/experience.
Many farmers have gotten out of the game for that reason, so to answer your question, a lot of them got out of farming and whoever is left is taking the contracts.
Which helps keep the price of basic foods low in other parts of the world, such as Africa. Take that out and you've got huge famines over large parts of the world, huge famine-induced migrations and guaranteed big wars.
There's no way for a country like Egypt to feed its population of 100 million (I just checked that value yesterday on wikipedia, I still can't believe it) all by itself, that's why it needs cheap food imports to be available.
Yes, the Western subsidies for their own agricultural products directly kill most of African agriculture in the bud, but, even so, and I repeat, I don't think a country like Egypt would have been able to feed itself. Maybe a country like Congo could (population ~100 million), but the soils over there are not suitable for farming grains and then you'd have to cut down the equatorial forests to make way for said farming land. One could transform nearby Zimbabwe in the bread-basket of Africa again, but then all the environmental damages we now inflict on the US MidWest prairies and big rivers would similarly negatively affect the African savannah and rivers like the Zambezi.
Hold on to your hat: https://www.populationpyramid.net/egypt/2050/
> harder to produce the quantities people need using better long-term farming practices.
You're not wrong but "harder" does a lot of work in that sentence. Requires more labor or becomes more expensive are probably correct. Are we willing to pay for it? That's ultimately a question of values or ideology. Though of course, borrowing from future agricultural capacity also sounds like it could be very expensive.
I certainly am, but in the US we have a history now of eating rubbish and devaluing quality food, so I'm not sure how quickly the market will push farming practices. I think the labor is the more difficult issue, as fewer people want to farm.
I imagine it's a very hard choice to switch off a high production farm for a permaculture one (one I personally hope more people make).
Did "neoliberal ideology" inspire the Soviet Union to drain the Aral sea? Did neoliberal ideology inspire Easter Islanders to deplete their forests? If your only solution to environmental destruction is change the ideology of the world to match your own, then you don't really care about the environment at all.
Laissez-faire capitalism basically died as hard in the Great Depression as Soviet-style socialism did with the fall of the Iron Curtain, but while capitalism as a whole shifted in response to that, and the actual (non-conspiracy-theory) version of the WEF's Great Reset is an attempt to replace neoliberalism, communism… well, based on conversations I still have with an ex who self-identifies as anarcho-Communist (Marxist?), communism is still busy convinced that class-consciousness is only one election/strike action from taking over the world like it's 1866 and the aristocracy is still a big deal.
Well, no, stagnant state capitalism is different kind of capitalist exploitation than neoliberalism.
> If your only solution to environmental destruction is change the ideology of the world to match your own, then you don’t really care about the environment at all.
Caring about the environment is an ideological position, and obviously ideologies which reject it (as both state and market capitalism do) are going to be problematic for the goals of those who accept it as long as the latter are dominant.
Did you mean, “As long as the latter are dominant,” or are you suggesting that environmentalists* are dominant?
What I think you intend to say is “capitalists will be problematic for environmentalists as long as there are more capitalists than environmentalists,” but that’s not what you said.
* I’m using “environmentalist” to mean “people that care about the environment,” even if there’s another meaning or connotation to the word.
Yeah, kept switching the phrasing around, and apparent the last part of that sentence got out of sync with the first part. Edited it to correct.
I, too, ideologically oppose any motive to extract more from the environment than it can sustain. And I see more problem with your reflexive, defensive ideological counter reaction than GP’s correct summary and incomplete list of offensive programs.
Bizarre to blame profit when it’s bigger than that.
They keep wondering why there's drought year after year, but swear it's not because they drained all the wetlands to grow canola.
In 2020 Ireland closed its last peat moss power station
https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2020/1218/1185188-power-sta...
It's "protected" but the trail still has quite a lot of turf-cutting debris.
nothing is as easy as it seems
If you took oil out of the meta, it’s not like humanity would die off. It’d just be very different. We’d still be thriving. We’d still likely have scientific breakthroughs that increase quality of life. It’d just be so very different.
Obviously this is a ridiculously complex thing to project, but the reason I’m skeptical is that without fossil fuels, there’s still far more energy available than we need.
Perhaps an argument could be made that fossil fuels are a distraction and we would have been naturally forced towards more sustainable options. …or we just get super good at burning trees.
While it's true that's what got us there, in my experience what keeps us there is the _this is how my father did it and it worked_ attitude. Looking to the past for a recipe for success.
A lot of the old timers actually experienced a time where farming was harder than it was (it's still not an easy job). To them it makes sense to follow what was led as that made life easier.
The guys running the farms that are doing really well tend to have a large subset of their acreage dedicated to organic crops based purely on market demand. They also test their soil, rotate their off season cover crops based on those tests, have their livestock graze on the cover, and have radically different opinions than the norm on plow, vs till, vs low till, vs no till (they use them as the situation calls for it, not beholden to a particular method)
In short the successful folks question what was done and are trying to get out ahead of industry trends where most people are just blindly following a pattern that worked at some point in the past. IMO it's not too much different the tech industry.
But there are lots of other questions. We don’t have much data on rates of soil formation from underlying rock and moisture. And the problem is that actually many of the world’s best soils are the product of erosion. Often, when fields get eroded, the soil just moves downhill to another location. The Nile delta in Egypt and the Ganges plains in India are excellent soils that came from erosion in other places over millions of years.
They are right that zero till usually somewhat reduces erosion. But this technology is under threat because people claim that the herbicide Roundup used before direct seeding causes cancer. ( The evidence for that is very shaky. A large US study of about 40,000 professional Roundup applicators contracted by farmers, who must have had a high level of contact with it, had no higher cancer rates including lymphoma than the average.) Also, farmers, who use a lot themselves, are probably the healthiest demographic in the world.
It’s a complex story.
"For the first time, we know what the natural rates of erosion are in the Midwest,” says Caroline Quarrier, the paper’s lead author and who completed this research as part of her master’s thesis at UMass Amherst. “And because we now know the rate of erosion before Euro-American settlement, we can see exactly how much modern agriculture has accelerated the process.”
The numbers are not encouraging. “Our median pre-agricultural erosion rate across all the sites we sampled is 0.04 mm per year,” says Larsen. Any modern-day erosion rate higher than that number means that soil is disappearing faster than it is accumulating."
More like all the other Agronomy experts are wise enough not to mess with the Corn Subsidies money.
An unfortunately sensational title IMO.
"The long-term erosion rates are also one to four orders of magnitude lower than the assumed 1 mm yr soil loss tolerance value assigned to these locations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture."
So this paper shows the erosion is actually slower (better!) than we expected.
From the conclusion:
> We find that pre-agricultural erosion rates in the midwestern United States are on the order of 0.0001–0.1 mm yr–1. Soil loss tolerance values of 1 mm yr–1 are one to four orders of magnitude higher than pre-agricultural erosion rates. Similarly, the agricultural erosion rates are 10–1000 times greater than the preagricultural erosion rates. Our results indicate that tolerable soil erosion, as currently defined, will lead to the depletion of midwestern soils.
Btw, the nutrients that the soil carries can cause spikes in algal populations, which then lower the oxygen content of water bodies, killing large numbers of other organisms like fish.
How can algae lower oxygen when oxygen is the very byproduct of their photosynthesis? They literally turn water into oxygen. Wouldn't that increase the oxygen content?
https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/effects-dead-zones-and...
Via the wikipedia article on the Sahara desert. I think many deserts come and go based on climate patterns
https://mpimet.mpg.de/en/staff/martin-claussen/publications/...
Claussen on Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=udBYQ-cAAAAJ&hl=en
Such flawed thoughts about desertification led them to kill off tens of thousands of elephants in Southern Africa, which sped the process up much faster. Allan Savory: https://www.fastcompany.com/2681518/this-man-shot-40000-elep...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016788092...
The problem comes in when you don't defer grazing or give things a chance to regrow (see video in sib comment below). That absolutely can lead to desertification.
As populations increase and nomadism becomes nonviable (so ground is not given a rest from grazing) it appears that's what happens.
For some reason, the idea of complex organisms (in this case: mammals) migrating to new lands and fertilizing it seems counter-intuitive to me, but it does make sense in some way. I would've assumed that more simple organisms took this land long before mammals emerged.
The biggest gripe I'd have with it would be: why would they move into those lands? There's nothing there for them. But the idea of them slowly extending fertilized soil does seem intriguing.
It appears sort of counter-factual to me that we, who are (presumably) even more complex, seem to reverse this process. There seems to be a sweet-spot in evolution of a species to benefit the land on which they live on (and that around it), and we seem to be past it.
This video popped up on youtube recommends a few weeks ago (Iran).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJe8wWFh_w0
I've never seen ground that naked, not a spec of green except for trees. (and this coming from someone who lives in a very arid region of the SouthWestern US). Even very arid land (in Nevada or Arizona for instance) has significant vegetation so I wondered what was going on.
Part of the way through the video (6:09) it becomes apparent (to me anyway). Goats and sheep. Somewhere in there they are actually beating tree leaves down for the critters to eat because there is simply nothing else.
Judging by this 1977 UNESCO publication, "A Halt to Desert Advance", https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000046663, this recent IPCC report on desertification, https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-3/, and the consistency between them, it would seem grazing is indeed considered a major factor, if not the major factor in many areas, for desertification[1].
[1] Maybe the author wasn't using the terminology correctly, or the terminology shifted or was refined subsequently, but in the article, "A precarious balance upset", from the 1977 publication the author suggests that desertification can at least in principle lead to aridification as stripping the land of vegetation dries out the soil, which can ultimately effect precipitation patterns. EDIT: Okay, I think I get it now. It's the reverse: aridification can lead to long-term desertification, while there other processes that can establish long-term desertification, notwithstanding the end result is also aridity.
One thing that terrain is not though is part of the Lake Urmia watershed, as it's high mountains that have obviously been inhabited for a long time.
It’s often overstated as goats being destroyers. They aren’t or don’t have to be. The goats are the agent of destruction, but the herders are the actual destroyers.
For the restoration of the loess plateau in China, they mandated that goats had to be corralled instead of ranged, to allow the restoration to get a foothold instead of ending up as the most expensive goat meat ever.
https://www.livescience.com/4180-sahara-desert-lush-populate...
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/swimmin...
>Over time the southernmost parts of Sumerian Mesopotamia suffered from increased salinity of the soils, leading to a slow urban decline and a centring of power in Akkad, further north.
I was surprised recently when I was watching an Iowa corn farmer on youtube who is the new generation taking over the farm and trying to change things for the better by doing "new" things such as no till farming. I remember reading about no-till as a kid back in the 80s and there are still people who are just now getting the memo and trying it. I loved farming but didn't take over the family farm because my dad was reticent to trying new things, and chose computer programming instead.
I remember as a kid in the 80s watching people try it. They either went bankrupt or soon pulled the old iron back out of the shed. But the march of technological progress continues. The tools on the market now aren't the same tools they had in the 80s. It stands to reason that it is going to be tried again.
Not no-till related, but I recently bought an implement for my farm and my grandfather was concerned because a similar tool he had decades ago didn't work well on the farm. But the new tool is only similar on the surface. When you start looking at the details it is very different, benefiting from decades of advancement. It's worth trying again.
The Dust Bowl in the US occurred after a drought coincided with recently-arrived dryland farming (unirrigated land) and overtilling. The topsoil from the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles was deposited across the U.S. at points east, as far as New York City.
Tilling itself can expose and degrade carbon in the topsoil, which is why various no-till farming methods are increasingly employed.
Wikipedia has a good overview:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_erosion#Physical_processe...>
I read the book "the rational optimist" where it turns out mining coal and drilling for oil helped save the whales (replacing whale oil) and forests (replacing firewood).
So I am saying maybe solar (or well designed nuclear) could help with energy and pollution.
That said, all the bay area redwoods were clear cut to rebuild the city after the earthquake and fires in 1906. Only a handful of old-growth redwoods exist.
At what cost though ? Sounds overly optimistic to me
https://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Media/Images/igphoto/20007518...
Nearly and inch of soil loss per year since the land was first drained to farm. But this is less erosion and more just decay of organic matter exposed to air I think.
Also important is whether the erosion is accelerating, constant or decelerating.
My field was eroded clay when I bought it 20 years ago. Left fallow (well, planted in cover crops) it now has 4" topsoil. It can also rebuild you see.
Topsoil is not vital for agriculture. The best corn grows on eroded clay hillsides - because it's well-drained. The fertility of topsoil is largely irrelevant because everybody uses liquid ammonia fertilizer.
The midwest is where the glaciers melted, leaving 100+ feet of silt, sand and gravel. A long way to bedrock most places. So what, 1000 years before we have to worry?
Sure we should understand it and measure the processes. But let me tell you it's light-years better than when I was a kid, and every field was a mass of ruts and washout. Because farmers over the last half-century were educated. They do contour plowing to avoid fast-moving water after a rain. Now many do no-till planting where the plow never touches the soil, not for years anyway.
You want to know where the real erosion is now? Construction sites. They are allowed to suspend the rules about soil conservation entirely.
I didn't put two and two together and realize it was from the field until one spring when I noticed a fine layer of what smelled like manure on my bicycle.
The above is a vague sensationalized press release written by a PR flack at the university.
-FDR
> [...] makes use of a rare element, beryllium-10, or 10Be, that occurs when stars in the Milky Way explode and send high-energy particles, called cosmic rays, rocketing toward Earth. When this galactic shrapnel slams into the Earth’s crust, it splits oxygen in the soil apart, leaving tiny trace amounts of 10Be [...]
I would say 10Be is formed by cosmic rays hitting the crust, then it occurs there. And "rocketing" is far slower than the speed at which these particles travel (almost light speed). Also, comparing subatomic particles to "shrapnel" (a macroscopic object) sounds a bit strange to me, but since these are parts broken off from atoms, similar to the way shrapnel breaks off from a grenade, it might make sense...
Humans gonna deplete.