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Comment by talideon | Hacker News Reader

That's entirely unsurprising. We have a related problem in Ireland around bogs: bogs have historically been cut for fuel, and are not a renewable resource because they don't reform that quickly. Yet you have people treating them as if they are renewable.

The US has been doing something similar with its farmland for centuries. You can't have vast empty expanses of grassland that won't erode because there's _nothing_ to renew them. Hedgerows and forest cover are important to minimise losses as they act as traps, but these kinds of things are not as common as they should be in the US. It's like the actual lessons of the dustbowl were never actually learned.

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As long as there is a profit to be made, people will do it. The consequences of their actions won't be felt by them and they know it.

We've got a system that does not provide checks and balances against that, and the world is run by the same neoliberal ideology that says the market is always right and intervention is wrong.

Sucks for our kids and their kids, but the people doing things like this do not care one iota. It's a shame that those that run the world are ideologically opposed to make them care about the damage they're doing.

Personally, I wouldn't say Iowa farmers run the world. We have systems, eg. the USDA, EPA, etc. that are supposed to protect against long-term damage. They just might not be doing enough in many cases.

This is about a lot more than ideology. People want food, and it's a whole lot harder to produce the quantities people need using better long-term farming practices. Hopefully, that changes.

I don't think "long term soil health" on private lands is regulated by anybody.

Conservation of soil/water is a directive of the USDA [1], and they provide the guidelines mentioned in the article, but I don't know what actual legal power they wield in this regard.

1. https://www.usda.gov/directives/directives-categories

I believe all compliance with the guidelines in voluntary.

The people who came up with and enforce the regulations farmers need to adhere to, by definition, are running the world.

These days farms have been so consolidated, and corporations dictate terms via contracts with the smaller farms that are left, that the idyllic family farm image that comes to mind when you think of American farmers is nearly a thing of the past. Those corporations, banks, etc that are involved with consolidation and dictating contractual terms with smaller farms, also tend to run the world.

These evil corporations aren't mandating devastating farming practices. Certainly, big corporations, supermarket chains having huge contracts with few industrial farms for example, have played a big role in the consolidation.

There are a lot of factors at play here, though, that have lead to industrial farms crowding out all the smaller farms, eg. economy of scale, high capital investment in equipment, and dwindling workforce- fewer kids want to stick around and work the farms.

I think it's a tradeoff- a lot of better farming practices require more workers, from my understanding/experience.

They're mandating contracts where farmers are forced to adopt practices with negative externalities just to keep their heads above water and meet their contractual obligations, and so they don't have to literally sell the farm.

This sounds like sharecropping or something. Why are farmers signing contracts like this?

Large consolidated farms can outcompete them at scale and automation, so they either enter contracts with thin margins or they literally sell the farm, which will likely end up being part of yet another consolidated farm.

Many farmers have gotten out of the game for that reason, so to answer your question, a lot of them got out of farming and whoever is left is taking the contracts.

Organic Valley is a cooperative of independent Farmers. One of the voices of modern permaculture, Mark Shepard, came up through that cooperative. He’s said in a number of presentations that he wants more people to start new co-ops. It’s the only way to get enough leverage to accomplish anything. Get enough people to run your own slaughterhouse, grain elevator, whatever. Otherwise you’re selling commodities and getting the shaft, while destroying your land at the same time.

People have food. There is more than enough food for everyone in the US. The US produces a large surplus. The federal government intervenes with generous subsidies, to guarantee over production.

> The US produces a large surplus.

Which helps keep the price of basic foods low in other parts of the world, such as Africa. Take that out and you've got huge famines over large parts of the world, huge famine-induced migrations and guaranteed big wars.

There's no way for a country like Egypt to feed its population of 100 million (I just checked that value yesterday on wikipedia, I still can't believe it) all by itself, that's why it needs cheap food imports to be available.

Yes, the Western subsidies for their own agricultural products directly kill most of African agriculture in the bud, but, even so, and I repeat, I don't think a country like Egypt would have been able to feed itself. Maybe a country like Congo could (population ~100 million), but the soils over there are not suitable for farming grains and then you'd have to cut down the equatorial forests to make way for said farming land. One could transform nearby Zimbabwe in the bread-basket of Africa again, but then all the environmental damages we now inflict on the US MidWest prairies and big rivers would similarly negatively affect the African savannah and rivers like the Zambezi.

> There's no way for a country like Egypt to feed its population of 100 million (I just checked that value yesterday on wikipedia, I still can't believe it)

Hold on to your hat: https://www.populationpyramid.net/egypt/2050/

USDA, EPA, make policy that are reflections of US culture, as you'd expect in a representative system. This includes Iowa farmers, who probably do have extra margins of influence regarding practices in their industry in the same way software engineers inevitably have influence over practices in their industry, on top of whatever representation they support as individuals or in industry groups.

> harder to produce the quantities people need using better long-term farming practices.

You're not wrong but "harder" does a lot of work in that sentence. Requires more labor or becomes more expensive are probably correct. Are we willing to pay for it? That's ultimately a question of values or ideology. Though of course, borrowing from future agricultural capacity also sounds like it could be very expensive.

> Requires more labor or becomes more expensive are probably correct. Are we willing to pay for it?

I certainly am, but in the US we have a history now of eating rubbish and devaluing quality food, so I'm not sure how quickly the market will push farming practices. I think the labor is the more difficult issue, as fewer people want to farm.

I imagine it's a very hard choice to switch off a high production farm for a permaculture one (one I personally hope more people make).

Iowa farmers don’t run anything, other than their farms, and a hilarious influence on the tone of national elections in the most powerful country on the planet.

The Iowa ag lobby had a huge hand in 1) getting ethanol to be subsidized, 2) forcing open Mexico’s protected maize market, thereby indirectly causing most of the border troubles we face, and 3) pushing corn syrup on unwitting consumers and turning half the USA obese.

Yeah my comment was probably way too clever in my own mind for its own good. Iowa farmers have vastly more influence on all sorts of things than they should, in no small part because of their weird symbolic early influence on elections.

I think your underlying assumption that there's no coordination or conspiracy going on is probably right. What scares me is that most people had good intentions along the way here (plus a light dusting of completely predictable greed) but made all of these negative outcomes happen.

There’s already so much intervention with farming you can’t even attribute market effects anymore.

It's only market intervention if it makes them lose money.

>the world is run by the same neoliberal ideology that says the market is always right and intervention is wrong.

Did "neoliberal ideology" inspire the Soviet Union to drain the Aral sea? Did neoliberal ideology inspire Easter Islanders to deplete their forests? If your only solution to environmental destruction is change the ideology of the world to match your own, then you don't really care about the environment at all.

Those environmental disasters were clearly created by other warped, bad ideologies. Neoliberalism is another example.

Warped? I can understand the desire for such a framing, but I think that is unhelpful, partly because nobody likes being told their ideology is warped, and partly because all ideologies are misaligned — it's not like anyone really has a perfect idea of what a well-aligned ideology even looks like, though we can all see the failures after they happen, rather we just tell ourselves that we do know and it's «insert your own preference here» that is The One True Way.

Laissez-faire capitalism basically died as hard in the Great Depression as Soviet-style socialism did with the fall of the Iron Curtain, but while capitalism as a whole shifted in response to that, and the actual (non-conspiracy-theory) version of the WEF's Great Reset is an attempt to replace neoliberalism, communism… well, based on conversations I still have with an ex who self-identifies as anarcho-Communist (Marxist?), communism is still busy convinced that class-consciousness is only one election/strike action from taking over the world like it's 1866 and the aristocracy is still a big deal.

I would call any ideology that destroys the environment of the society that holds it "warped" and "bad" but maybe that's just my personal bias.

> Did "neoliberal ideology" inspire the Soviet Union to drain the Aral sea?

Well, no, stagnant state capitalism is different kind of capitalist exploitation than neoliberalism.

> If your only solution to environmental destruction is change the ideology of the world to match your own, then you don’t really care about the environment at all.

Caring about the environment is an ideological position, and obviously ideologies which reject it (as both state and market capitalism do) are going to be problematic for the goals of those who accept it as long as the latter are dominant.

> Caring about the environment is an ideological position, and obviously ideologies which reject it (as both state and market capitalism do) are going to be problematic for the goals of those who accept it as long as the former are dominant.

Did you mean, “As long as the latter are dominant,” or are you suggesting that environmentalists* are dominant?

What I think you intend to say is “capitalists will be problematic for environmentalists as long as there are more capitalists than environmentalists,” but that’s not what you said.

* I’m using “environmentalist” to mean “people that care about the environment,” even if there’s another meaning or connotation to the word.

> Did you mean, “As long as the latter are dominant,”

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.

You have had a knee jerk reaction to the description of an opposing ideology, but if you hadn’t you would see that the description of the problem was factual and ideologically neutral apart from rejecting the problem.

I, too, ideologically oppose any motive to extract more from the environment than it can sustain. And I see more problem with your reflexive, defensive ideological counter reaction than GP’s correct summary and incomplete list of offensive programs.

I think you need to replace “profit” with benefit since even subsistence farmers used inefficient farming techniques.

Bizarre to blame profit when it’s bigger than that.

Absolutely agreed. There are so many things and old practices that could deal with this but people seem to completely ignore it all. Or maybe they just don't know.

We had a farmer around here who seems to have learned. He somehow figured out that hedgerows help break the wind and are home to beneficial birds and other animals, even if also probably harboring not so beneficial ones such as rabbits ;)

He subdivided his fields by "planting" hedgerows again but he did it on the cheap. He threw a bunch of old branches/cutoffs around his fields and just left it there for a few years. Over time, birds and other animals probably that used the branches for shelter would drop seeds and over time an actual hedge grew all by itself. FWIW he also built a little pond in the middle of some fields, simply by digging out a hole and piling up the dug out soil around it on 3 1/2 sides.

You would never do this with rented land. Most farmers rent the land so they have no interest in improving soil

You certainly wouldn't against the wishes of the landlord who doesn't want to clean up your mess after you move on. That's a good way to get kicked out.

If it is what the landlord wants, you no doubt would. If you don't there are a 100 other farmers lined up for the land who will.

I think you are vastly overestimating the number of people who want to be farmers.

Well, being a farmer, I have to compete against them and have a good handle on who else wants the land I have been able to rent, and who has taken the land I wished to rent but lost out on. So, no, I don't think so. That doesn't even get into the people who wish they could farm but can't because there are already so many lined up in front of them.

Yeah your land lord is some big conglomerate I’m sure they have very strict rules on what to can/can’t do. But since you don’t care you do the bare minimum as you should

https://soilsolutions.net/save-the-topsoil/

>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.

I feel like we're going to end up moving towards hydroponics and the like before/instead of resolving the topsoil problem

Nah we just need to stop growing food for diesel

The distillers grain that is left over from biofuel production is fed to cows and makes up a significant fraction of all cattle feed. If we stopped, that corn would still be planted but beef would get more expensive.

Well, we also need to eat less meat. The American west can sustain vast herds of ruminants in land that is not suitable for farming.

We don't all need to do anything. You can do as you please.

Seems like lower corn prices, higher beef prices, some marginal environmental benefit, and lower fuel prices is kind of reasonable trade off all-told if that was where it netted out.

I think we are rather going to have starvation and collapse.

If you’re just looking at calories the US has a massive surplus of arable land.

It seems likely to me, since topsoil erosion is very hard to avoid when you are trying to farm the land. Creating new topsoil is mostly done by letting old organic material decay, but there's no time for that if you need to plow it up to plant the crops for next season.

Zero-till farming will come to parts of the mid-west in fits and starts as farmers realize that the current methods are unsustainable, in most places there is no need to "plow it up".

In western Canada farming practices involve more crop rotations and less tillage, the net result has been increasing organic matter in many areas. I farm in an area with a surplus of organic matter, and too much can be a problem, so we still engage in a lot of tillage under normal precipitation conditions.

https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agriculture-and-environment...

What kind of problems do you see with too much organic matter? I really like to garden and often find myself going overboard on mulch and compost and paradoxically seem to notice slower growth sometimes when I use them. I wonder if it is too much organic matter?

I can't speak to the exact circumstances in your garden but too much organic matter can have the effect of "tying up" nutrients in the organic matter in a way that makes them inaccessible to crops - if you grow to large a microbial biome in the organic matter they immobilise nitrogen.. I am not an expert on this so I only understand it in broad strokes.

I am a bit of gardener and my anecdotal advice is - I don't know what sense you are using the word "mulch" here so I am not sure about that but too much compost can be an issue if you are not letting it break down long enough and not incorporating into existing soils well enough. Too much compost will grow wicked-hot radishes, but your leafy greens will be ugly and taste like garbage in my experience. The thing about gardening is it is all small sample sizes.. it ain't science and it is hard to know what's up without a good old fashioned site visit!

As far as I know hydroponics isn’t really feasible for grains like wheat and corn. It’s great for growing salad items like tomatoes and lettuce but those won’t keep us alive as a staple.

https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-it-common-to-grow-corn-hydrop...

That's not something that would really need to be considered unless you're talking completely apocalyptic, no soil at all.

To be fair... Ireland has also been doing this to bogs since time immemorial. It was just only the locals collecting the peat moss for heat.

In 2020 Ireland closed its last peat moss power station

https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2020/1218/1185188-power-sta...

Same with the Canadian prairies.

They keep wondering why there's drought year after year, but swear it's not because they drained all the wetlands to grow canola.

Colonial era sod was so thick that they built cabins out of it. Those perennial grasses in the Midwest had crazy deep roots. We removed them to plant corn.

I live next to the largest intact raised bog in Europe (it's in Ireland) and the profound ignorance of people who claim to love the land is staggering. They have no clue about how bogs form, how long it takes to replenish (basically forever, especially considering drying), and mostly think climate change is great news for making winters warmer (they're not familiar with the AMOC).

It's "protected" but the trail still has quite a lot of turf-cutting debris.

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