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"and it shows how poor entire states become when the soil is poor (which I suppose is not unlike the American midwest!)"

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.

Funny thing is that (small back then ?) farmers were the ones that fought for globalization (and against railway barons), with their Populist party, for easier export of their goods worldwide !

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/how-the-anti-populists-s...

The documentary talks a lot about economics of farming, including the perverse incentives created by government subsidies

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

Sure, you could grow diverse crops. Some small farms do and then sell it restaurants, sell their "system" or knowledge, etc (and theres still debate about their economic viability). However, that won't apply to all the land. Commodity crops are in demand, so the majority of the land will be used for that. Most farmers wouldn't be interested in diverse crops due to the cost of various equipment, difficulty in marketing, and potential labor needs.

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.

Those crops are only in demand because of ridiculous subsidy making them cheap

I highly doubt that. What else are we going to feed the animals for meat? If we cut back on meat, we would likely see an increase in soy demand. The subsidies might have created the demand, but now that we are in this lifestyle removing the subsidies will not reverse it fully.

Edit: why disagree?

More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production.

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

Ok... and what replaces that if we just decide not subsidize soy anymore? Under the current conditions, it seems consumption will only drop slightly and people will simply pay more. Just as we saw in the pandemic with China sourcing its soy.

Is soy the natural prey of cows, pigs, and sheep or do they eat other things if left to their own devices?

When they're factory farmed, they aren't left to their own devices...

That's exactly my point, why not replace soy with what they would normally eat...?

It won't support the rapid, fatty growth the factory farms require, nor the overall output that the market demands.

Got any citations that support that claim?

No, we should decide to stop subsidizing meat/dairy.

Soy production (in moderate quantities) is not harmful to the planet, animal agriculture is.

Soy monoculture farming is harmful

Soil fertility is similar to irrigation. As fertility decreases, it can be compensated (to a point) by fertilizer, but at an increased cost. As the aquifers are pumped faster than they are replenished, water can be pumped from deeper depths, but also at an increased cost. Both impact the economics of farming. And for many communities where agriculture is the economic foundation, decades of non-sustainable practices have created economic headwinds.

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)

Things can certainly get worse. However, I don't see cheaper water or less fertilizer changing the economic outlook. Even with a slight increase in profit, you still have things like health insurance that are ever increasing, and the top line is too low to begin with.

The US already got there in the 30s. Government subsidies are what disincentivized overproduction and got the US out along with better soil preservation techniques.

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.

Also a huge "Save Soil" campaign by Sadhguru, an Indian ascetic, to recruit millions of volunteers planting trees around the world

I don't mean to diminish the concerns you are raising, which are serious, but until the modern era China was beset by regular famine, and civilizations of the past did not necessarily farm in a more sustainable way -- it just doesn't matter if you're doing slash-and-burn agriculture with a small enough population relative to the land at your disposal.

Aren't like 4/5 of china's famines in the modern era? They certainly happened before but became much more prevalent after it was connected to the emerging global market system. A trend repeated in many other places.

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.

Depends how you want to define "modern" I guess; I wouldn't count anything before the Communists took power but that still leaves the big one ending in 1962.

I had in mind "late modern period" as frequently used by historians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_modern_period

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.

I was thinking more about how completely its governance had taken the form of a modern state, which I'd say was an incomplete process even in the Nationalist period.

I also want to suggest this YouTube lecture on the subject which I’ve enjoyed listening to a couple of times.

Dave Montgomery - Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

https://youtu.be/sQACN-XiqHU

Just watched the documentary on netflix. It’s sad to me that it is very one-sided especially on the chemicals/pesticides. Farmers don’t use pesticides just for fun - it’s more of economic security to reduce risk - sometimes you are more or less forced to.

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…

> 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

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.

I love how you managed to pivot from soil quality to tech. It seems an innocent comparison at first but then you can't help yourself by devoling into complaining about what you feel are issues in modernsoftware development.

"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.

Maybe, but that doesn’t make the comparison less valid.

And now they're moving into Alaska to destroy that land is pollute it with chemicals too

The good and bad news is there ain’t much soil to destroy over there, it’ll take a few years at most.

If the midwest has poor soil, I'd love to see good soil. Must not exist in the US.

The midwest used to have great soil. But the soil in the midwest is not meant to grow crops, but to raise cattle (nature put buffalo there as well as other ruminants). If you have grassland with ruminants, you can take a small portion of that and grow some corn or other staple for a few years, and then return it to grassland (what the Native Americans did) so that it is naturally fertilized by ruminants and the decaying roots of grass. But in order to turn it into millions of acres of soy or corn that are constantly and intensely being harvested, you need to add lots of synthetic fertilizer and then deplete the aquifers, because the midwest is a semi-arid plain.

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.

To be frank, they are already not very nutritious, both due to the type/genetics of the crop and the depleted soil providing fewer minerals.

Ummm... it gets cold in the midwest, so cold catle will freeze if not kept warm.

Ummm... bullshit.

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.

So like in -20F excluding the polar vortex? Open ranging them and running them around?

Dude... stop digging.

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 have thirty new calves on the ground right now.

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?

In my family we have always had livestock. I was in software for a while, and am open to certain aspects of that work still. I have other jobs too, because agriculture is not a dependable long-term venture. (That is more related to the fact that antitrust regulations are not enforced in USA, than it is to any inherent quality of agriculture.)

> it takes more and more fertilizer to get the same level of output

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.

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