The second dust bowl cometh for America, supercomputer warns
theregister.com
theregister.com
Another huge win that a lot of people are not aware of is using mobile electric fences to quickly move cows through fields. They eat, poop, stomp and move on. That adds an incredible amount of fertility into the ground without needing fertilizer.
For those interested in industrial production of healthy food with healthy soil (+18 inches of rich organic porous soil with trillions of cool characters, diversity and nutrient sharing super highways), check out "Kiss the Ground" on netflix (great intro to soil), then the "The littlest big farm" on netflix (see a 7 year transformation from barren monoculture hydrophobic dirt to rich soil farming in California), then check out youtube for Gabe Brown (soil expert), Joel Salatin (regenerative mobile cheap farming nut), Richard Perkins (regenerative farming expert), and Allan Savory (holistic management, how animals help soil).
What you state isnt far off, as tractors have got bigger so the plough cuts deeper and the soil erosion increases.
When horses pulled ploughs, they didnt cut too deep into the soil so that white root mass you find in soil which hasnt been dug over in years is not far from the surface, but now you have to dig several inches deep before you hit any root mass of sorts, when todays tractors have been over it. Its the root mass which helps reduce the soil erosion, but also have plenty of small ponds and lakes also keep the water table up.
Whats also interesting, there is only one agricultural machinery manufacturer that I know of who is R&D'ing smaller equipment to make into robots, and they are German, in order to tackle the soil erosion, and make their equipment more usable in smaller fields.
Because Japanese food is so expensive partly because of the lack of land, you can be sure its of the highest quality, similar efforts are being seen in the UK to make the food quality higher whilst increasing biodiversity with smaller fields.
The days of stack it high sell cheap are coming to an end, partly because the pollutions levels are so high, and the poor quality food is shortening people's lifespans which is now only just showing up in data, despite retirement ages being raised.
>They eat, poop, stomp and move on. That adds an incredible amount of fertility into the ground without needing fertilizer.
The bacteria levels need to rot the poop down, so you are better off muck spreading with from old piles of poop, just like any compost, than you are from fresh. One of the other things I've seen farmers doing here in the UK, is spreading seaweed on fields to increase certain minerals.
The size of your equipment does not dictate the depth you have your drill or planter set to.
> When horses pulled ploughs,they didnt cut too deep into the soil
Yes they did. Plowing completely turns over the top soil.
There are other things at play too like row spacing. We used to plant at 36", eventually we went down to 30", some of our neighbors even went down to 20" or so.
You cant deep plough (>50cm) with horses they dont have the strength as this YT vid shows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7F4X3idewA
>Yes they did. Plowing completely turns over the top soil.
Once metal ploughs were introduced they could start to cut deeper into the soil, but the earliest horse drawn ploughs could not cut deep because they were wood as seen in some parts of the world today with oxen pulling wooden ploughs.
https://howardsuer.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/how-the-chinese-... The "mold" of moldboard is old German for soil but it was the Chinese who introduced the modern day moldboard plough most people are familiar with.
However is ploughing even needed today? This practice was started after Brexit, and its reduced fuel costs on the farm because now there is no need for ploughing and the dustbowl situations are extremely unlikely to occur.
The bacteria levels need to rot the poop down, so you are better off muck spreading with from old piles of poop, just like any compost, than you are from fresh
That would mean not letting them graze on the fields either. So you're back to a barn. With associated problems.
That can also be labor intensive. Now you have to actually muck the barn and compost it all, then spread the compost on the fields.
Or you just let the cows graze, poop and stomp and you do nothing (except move them around from field to field).
I know what I'd do if I had to do all that work.
Animals will seek shelter if its available, but fields are a man made thing, much of the planet used to be covered in trees but the agrarian society started off this planets deforestation, which is being repeated in parts of the world today like the Amazon.
Not only that but that shed poop besides being compostable also served as a source of fire fuel which is still used today in parts of Africa.
Ideally we would have plenty of pasture for animals to graze on, because even dairy herds will go and get milked when they want and not when the farmer schedules. This is a behaviour that's been seen in some dairy factory farms with automated milkers, the elephant in the room is we dont have enough planet earths in which to feed todays human and pet population unless we go all vegetarian or ramp up the production of lab grown meat.
In 2008 a US lifestyle needed 4 or 5 planet earths, today some suggestions put that as high as 8 planet earths, where as UK and Europe have remained mainly the same, ie a UK lifestyle needs 2.5 planet Earths and a European lifestyle needs 2 planet Earths.
That's the elephant in the room!
I like decomposing things. Not in the poop rotting sense but in the divide and conquer sense.
1. Wet pasture with too many animals can destroy the pasture.
2. Shelter
3. Poop as fuel
4. Not enough earths
Basically many of these parts of Africa that can't feed themselves were able to do so just fine before the westeners arrived and removed all the trees and made fields out of everything. Now it's barren earth. There was that one guy who - over lots of years and twists and turns I don't remember exactly any more - who figured out that the trees they bulldozed are not actually gone. The root system is still there. Below the surface and if you protect the tiny branches that appear from time to time from animals these grow back into beautiful trees that create shade for people, animals and further growth. He basically went around the villages, talking to elders that still remember the old times, making them his allies to teach children and younger adults to care for the tiny trees and to nurture them back to full growth / life. That was quite a while ago and it works. Many many villages can now feed themselves again.
All that to say: they basically went from a situation where even 10 "earths" worth of the situation they had would not have sufficed, a single earth worth of properly managed trees and ecosystem is perfectly capable of feeding them.
Fish stocks are already not as abundant and the temperate shifts seen in the oceans is affecting fish stock in territorial waters. During the mini ice age which ended in 1857(^), the colder water saw cod stock which is highly temperature sensitive (likes 7DegC water) move down towards the UK. (^)This is why the media show global warming starting from this point in time.
Stealth means, GM crops like soy beans which have reduced omega3 content to reduce the soy beans going rancid as quickly, mean the neutrophil immune system in humans and lifestock feeding on this will be rendered less effective due to less omega3 intake. Ergo more drugs needed, great for chemical companies, and makes me wonder why govt's even bother!?!
>Yes, if we use the US farming practices it's probably true.
Global Warming. Despite the fact that CO2 levels mean more for vegetation and less need for fertilisers, because the co2 level on this planet have been way way higher, I think over double what they are today, the difference with the past, is humans need more space so that homeostasis with co2 levels and vegetation is broken.
Personally, I dont know why more isnt spent pumping desalinated water into the deserts especially considering the solar cells that could provide shelter for deserts, around the Sahara or the middle east. Would the reflection of solar cells affect the upper atmosphere much? I dont know, but cant be any more disruptive than ionosphere heaters pushing the ionosphere out into space causing leo satellites to crash to earth when they encounter atmosphere in their path.
>a single earth worth of properly managed trees and ecosystem is perfectly capable of feeding them.
Provided the human population is managed. Its only exploded in line with the discovery of oil, before then the human population was either under a billion or arond a billion or two.
So how do feed the Human population?
Stealth means ... great for chemical companies
I dont know why more isnt spent pumping desalinated water into the deserts
Old style moldboard plows drawn by horses or oxen cut about 4-6 inches deep. A modern cultivator is usually set to a depth of about 0.5 - 2 inches.
I've seen another step described where you bring in a mobile chicken coop a few days after the cows have departed to eat the insects that arrived to eat the poop.
Also keeping the cows a little while means they eat up all the "weed" plants and not just the tastier stuff —"eat your vegetables" type of thing—while if they free graze they only take the best tasting grasses and move on.
How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change | Allan Savory (TED talk) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
According to the USDA 2017 Census of Agriculture no-till acreage increased from 96.5 million in 2012 to 104.5 million in 2017. Reduced-tillage increased from 76.6 million to 97.8 million. Intensive tillage decreased from 105.7 million to 80.0 million.
So 202.3 million acres are now no- or reduced-tillage and 97.8 million acres are intensive-tillage.
The 2022 Census of Agriculture is being drafted and I imagine the intensive-tillage numbers will decrease even more.
Overall, tillage conservation practices have increased by 2-3% every year since the 1970s.
"Eat mor Chiken" as the chic-fil'a cows say?
That would be a start. Farming practices that have been known for centuries to maintain field fertility have been discarded because it reduces average annual yield (and thus, profits). It's been artificially propped up by the use of nitrogen rich fertilizer, but that's a dwindling supply.
> "Eat mor Chiken" as the chic-fil'a cows say?
Eating less meat and eating more crops directly would improve our odds.
We know what causes soul loss. The primary factor is tillage.
And if you want to grow food on land without tillage the best way is to use more herbicide and more fertilizer, or to turn it into pasture and raise animals on the land.
the modern understanding of organic farming is not related to whatever you are trying to imply and impugn. It is a lazy use of language with an obvious fallacy. One liners like that are common in politics aimed at the under-educated; wrong audience here.
The best thing society could do for itself is stop obsessing over growth-seeking and find a way to live sustainably again.
From the perspective of the soil, "industrial agriculture" means the plough and monoculture, both of which have been around for over 5000 years.
Any replacement for industrial agriculture has to feed 7 billion people without raising prices significantly. Good luck with that.
> Any replacement for industrial agriculture has to feed 7 billion people without raising prices significantly. Good luck with that.
It's 8 billion now. The single most important thing that can be done in that arena is curtail meat consumption. Calories-per-acre are several times higher when the crops are used to feed humans directly rather than the inefficient roundabout of feeding animals then feeding the animals to humans. We will both increase our total food supply and reduce the need for tilling and artificial soil fertilization without having to add a single acre of cropfield.
Crops also require much fewer resources (water, electricity, human labor, land area, etc.) to produce and manage than livestock, and do not emit methane.
Crop yields have increased substantially in the past century. Established farming practices did not suddenly stop working in the past century.
2. Use more sustainable, ground cover crops like hemp.
This isn't about marijuana. Marijuana should and will eventually be legal.
This is about the cargo cult that has surrounded hemp.
Hemp is in the C3 photosynthesis category, as are million of other plants.
Generally speaking, switchgrass or any other C4 grass will produce more biomass in identical conditions, than hemp.
If your goal is biomass, switchgrass also has the benefit of not being an invasive, non-native, species in North America.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/30/its-got-...
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/01/12/solar_en...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-expansion-stalled-...
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1154867064/solar-power-misinf...
https://www.eenews.net/articles/meet-the-nimby-people-trying...
We've known for a very long time that large parts of the western US were at severe risk of desertification and that combined with increasing temperatures there could come a time when they may not be fit to sustain large populations. I'm surprised to see projections that it'll be so bad in the midwest as well. It's sort of telling that they've been preparing for likely civil unrest as a result of drought (https://drought.unl.edu/Publications/News.aspx?id=388)
There's no one solution to the problem, but the good news is that this isn't a problem limited to the US. Governments around the world have been working on finding solutions for decades. (https://www.dw.com/en/holding-back-the-growing-desert/a-1862...) so I'm still hopeful that however broken our political system is or becomes, it won't prevent the exploration of new restoration techniques.