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Comment by reason-mr | Hacker News Reader

If you repeatedly harvest crops from soil without working on building it, this is what happens. Each crop progressively removes some nutrients from the soil with the result that the soil nutrients, and nutrients in the derived food gradually decay. Most petroleum/chemically derived fertilizers do not replace such. It is a known phenomena organic farming circles. Organizations like Rodale institute are working to correct this my improving soil health - but in general we’re been on a long program of “withdrawing money from the bank account without paying in”.

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> If you repeatedly harvest crops from soil without working on building it, this is what happens.

Per the article, that doesn't appear to be a critical factor.

> The problem is that while dwarf varieties and increased CO₂ levels allowed wheat and rice to grow larger, the amount of nutrients they sucked up out of the soil stayed roughly the same.

Sounds like you can grow/gather the same size apple faster, leaving less time to soak nutrients.

This is not recent news to some of us.

The theoretical model put forth is this: the nutrition in fruits and seeds comes from the plant, not the ground. It’s substantially what’s been saved up all season. So when a smaller plant has bigger fruit, it doesn’t have the reserves you’d expect for such a volume of produce. Hence nutritionally anemic food.

Add to this fruits and veg selected for shipping stability. Longer times to rot, and thicker skins that don’t bruise when loaded into crates. That shitty bland tomato you bought probably wasn’t even ripe when it was picked. It ripened in transit, possibly by being exposed to chemicals that boost ripening. Underripe fruits were picked before they were ready.

> It ripened in transit,

Don't get me started on tomatoes. We have ourselves to blame for pivoting the supply to tomato varieties with no flavor. [0]

> But as growers bred tomatoes to meet those priorities, flavour gradually diminished. “Every time they bred it and tasted it, they thought, ‘that doesn’t taste so bad,'” says Tieman. “But after doing it over and over, the flavour has changed.”

[0]https://chatelaine.com/food/trends/tomatoes-taste-florida-re...

I/we use tomatoes because the sad fate of the tomato is the best rallying cry we have.

I don’t even like tomatoes, but they piss a lot of people off.

I heard an NPR interview a few years ago where a farmer was trying to do for peaches what we have done for apples - make a palette of flavors instead of the 2 we get. Those are selected for shipping as well. They are only really flavorful just before they spoil, or when baked.

Tomatoes are very easy to grow in a garden and besides are more like a herb because they have basically no nutritional value at 15 calories a piece.

The core problem seems like you can't see the nutritional value in the grocery store. So you can't prefer more nutritional produce so there is no incentive for the industry to cultivate more nutritional crops.

Imagine if every farm needed to test their produce for nutritional value and have nutrition labels at the store. I'm sure things would change.

It's probably both - right?

Because there's more CO₂ each individual plant will grow larger and draw up proportionally fewer nutrients. At the same time, we are also able to rotate crops more often, so whatever replenishes nutrients in soil is probably now "covering" a larger numbers of growth cycles.

This reminds me of the _Les Miserables_'s lengthy digression on sewers, which begins thusly:

Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water. And this without metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what object? With no object. With what intention? With no intention. Why? For no reason. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its intestine? The sewer.

Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure which the valuations of special science have set upon it.

Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure. The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. Not a Chinese peasant—it is Eckberg who says this,—goes to town without bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two full buckets of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung, the earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no guano comparable in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment of employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our manure, on the other hand, is gold.

What is done with this golden manure? It is swept into the abyss.

Of course industrial agriculture routinely applies micronutrients, so no, they are not withdrawing without paying in.

Odd that you would be well informed about organic farming circles but blissfully unaware of the routine practice used by the majority of the agricultural industry.

Industrial agriculture adding fertilizer to soil is simply feeding the plant. There is no attempt to actually recover a deficit taken from the soil directly. Instead the farmer calculates the seasonal fertilizer needs of growing their crop(s).

If the intention was long term sustainability, focus should be on feeding the soil, not the crop.

Over time, agricultural soil begins to resemble hydroponic growth medium. It’s not soil, it’s just something to hold roots and deliver water and fertizers.

Which means it definitely doesn’t have much nitrifying bacteria and absolutely doesn’t have any fungi transporting minerals from deeper underground or by organically weathering sand particles.

Yes.

I keep sharing Gabe Brown's three-part video series titled Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem, now and then, here on HN, whenever such threads come up.

Some really solid practical and pragmatic stuff there, on regenerative agriculture, which, as I understand it [1], goes beyond organic farming, and is related to many of the issues talked about in this thread.

[1] I had done organic gardening successfully, for a few years, some time earlier, so I have at least some practice and experience (and also a lot of reading and thinking about what I read) as the basis for my opinions of his work and those of others I mention, such as Elaine Ingham (a video by her is below too).

One of her most astonishing finds / claims is that (IIRC, I saw the video a few years ago), almost all soils anywhere on earth have more than enough nutrients for plants for many many years.

She said the real issue and limitation is the lack of soil organic content and soil structure and mycorrhiza ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza), without which even applying tons of nutrients is useless.

And, Gabe has a big farm, a few thousand acres (so not small scale) in North Dakota, USA, with field crops, green manure, livestock on pasture / prairie, etc. And is making profits from his farming operations, sustainably, even regeneratively, without government subsidies, and more than his conventionally-farming neighbors, some of whose soils are getting worse, while his get better over time, by objective measures (checked by external govt. agencies) that he mentions.

Here is Part 1.

Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem

https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A?si=bTLRoacXTGiAP-Qr

And here is the video by Elaine Ingham, The Roots of your Profits, in which she talks about the points I mentioned above, and some more relevant ones:

The Roots of your Profits

https://youtu.be/x2H60ritjag?si=MskMBEIgTUStrWsX

Here is an earlier comment subthread by me, on an earlier HN thread on the same general topic, as I said I've done, above. It mentions Gabe, Elaine, and a few others, including Geoff Lawton, permaculture pioneer, who are doing good work in this area, with a few more details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827234

Pretty simple:

Human waste never makes it back into the ecosystem

So we only extract minerals, consume them, then bury them (landfill) or put them into the ocean (wastewater)

Modern humans halt the natural cycle of life in every region we inhabit

Many treatment plants are producing a fertilizer product now.

Which is great and isn’t necessarily new but it’s too little too late

We have to actually restructure society to get to any kind of widespread health

I love change in general, but when I hear talk about architecting society I get mental images of mass graves. I just made a post advocating climate engineering in addition to net neutral carbon, but the potential unintended consequences of planet scale climate fiddling scare me far less than trying to plan societal changes that will counter human nature even just a bit.

True, but that doesn't get back the farms in the same quantity that nutrients left. some farms near the city get more than they need while others get very little. Most fruit in the stores (US at least) is grown in Chili - they have a great climate for this (there is lots of reason to debate this that would take books to get into, so for now lets accept this simplistic statement), but how much sewage from the US goes back to that area? Cattle produce a lot of manure, some farms sell that to local farms and it goes back to the soil (dairy farms typically do this - often they own the fields the cow feed comes from), but other cattle end up on giant feedlots where there are not enough farms around to take the generated manure and so the local fields end up over fertilized while more distance farms don't.

Note that this waste is a bio hazard. So the obvious, just send the waste back to the fields in the empty truck cannot work. Once a tank has been used for waste you cannot use it for food again. Thus you end up with twice the trucks gong back and forth if you try this - and this in turn presents more CO2.

Not being able to return sewage to where food is grown is a consequence of shipping food long distances. This also causes more CO2 emissions. I think we need to grow food more close to our population centres.

We can't while supporting the current population. Food takes a lot of land and effcient high production needs each region to specialize. Disasters like drought require long distance transport to handle

I think we could with solar panels, LEDs, hydroponics and sewage reclamation. It wouldn't take so much land if all this was in tall buildings or multiple levels underground. Any methane involved could be put into biofuels for vehicles or lighting/temperature control of the hydroponics.

what is nutritious to a human and to a plant is obviously fundamentally different

So drawing a straight line between soil nutrients and food nutrients is simplistic

No, that's understanding you don't replace a complex system with 1000 variables with a solution of 10 variables.

Soil are complete ecosystems. Plants are complex organisms.

You can dumb it down a lot and get very good result for some time, but eventually what made it anti-fragile, à la nassim taleb, will run out. And your alternative is not anti-fragile.

> 10 variables.

That’s generous. Someone’s in the holiday spirit.

I think the point is that nutrients like trace minerals have to come from somewhere. And if they are lacking in the soil, they will be lacking in the plant.

Molecules that would be synthesized by the plant from trace compounds or pathways that require trace compounds would be lacking in the plant if it's lacking in the soil.

So if the soil is lacking in those trace compounds, there will be a gap in the output nutrients when we consume the plant or vegetable as food. This goes up the chain and is a reason why grass fed livestock is higher in Omega 3 fatty acids due to the differences in the feedstock.

Same as how farmed salmon don't have orange flesh because they do not consume the same food sources as wild salmon. So their flesh lacks the molecular compounds that result in the natural pigmentation that results from consuming organisms that consume krill.

Commercial fertilizers replenish the compounds that are required for the rapid cellular growth of the plant, but do not sufficiently replenish the trace compounds that would be in the soil from natural cycles of growth, decay, and recovery. There is also the factor of biodiversity as different plants, animals, and fungi will enrich the soil composition in different ways through their natural lifecycle which does not occur in monoculture industrial farming.

(Not critiquing modern monoculture industrial farming as its efficiency has allowed for huge growth in the human population, but it's clear why it would result in less nutrients in the output over time as the soil itself becomes depleted)

Sure, lack of nutrients will stunt the plant in some way, and will reduce the production of some plant compounds. But the original comment's logic is just too simplistic. You can't then safely jump to the conclusion that the lack of nutritional value in plants is primarily due to the reduction in these plant compounds

The main drivers could very easily be due to a variety of other factors. Like the sibling comment says, it could for instance be changes in agricultural practices (like the plants growing faster) b/c farmers naturally optimize for volume and not nutritional value per-kg or per-calorie

There are just a million other variables at play - and the nutrients in the soil aren't intrinsically the limiting factor for the nutritional of plants - b/c what's nutritional is fundamentally different

> [I]n general we’re been on a long program of “withdrawing money from the bank account without paying in”.

Yes, in general indeed. Essentially every major sustainability problem on the planet is caused by people refusing to acknowledge that there are no free lunches, and no free loans either.

> Most petroleum/chemically derived fertilizers do not replace such

Those fertilizers are also responsible for saving the lives of millions of people.

Perhaps we should go back to nightsoil instead.

Two things can be true.

Ascientific Nonsense. Trace elements or the lack of them are detectable via drill core samples, drone footage and satellite footage. And in the harvest itself.

And they are routinely re-added while working on the fields. All it would have taken is a visit to a online fertilizer storefront for farmers.

The problem is the rising efficiency of photosynthesis with higher carbondioxid in the air. Means, faster growth, more sugar, less everything else.

In addition I want to express my deep disgust to the "blood and soil" nazi ideology most back to natural farming people push as soon as you drill down on the consequences.

Calm down

Why? It's like advocating for a society wide genocide with nice fluffy words. Isil propaganda starts like this too:"let's just go back to nature, let's just go back to the golden years, the good old days". This stuff has killed and kills every time it becomes policy. As we speak Sri Lanka starves,the ashes of the starved, they are on grand parents hands.

You're invoking Nazis and Isil in a discussion about farming. You've lost the plot.

Won't matter once the world gets warmer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem will get these frozen black soil zones. If Ukraine joins the EU the whole of Europe will lose their farming competition and nobody will be able to grow against Ukraine.

> Won't matter once the world gets warmer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem will get these frozen black soil zones. If Ukraine joins the EU the whole of Europe will lose their farming competition and nobody will be able to grow against Ukraine.

That's a strange argument to make. Once these fertile soils become usable it is preferrable to have these resources inside the EU, not outside of it. And if you're worried about competition in the agricultural sector inside the of EU, then you could as well be concerned about a few other countries in the EU right now.

For the sake of the EU yes. For the sake of farmers in the EU no. They're lobbying against it.

You mean the competition will finally be motivated to invest in research and improve what they have now

No, you can't beat Ukraine. It's impossible. Subsidies are the only competition they'll get and that costs the country more than it helps.

The map shows much of it is in Russia. Can't it produce more cheaply using the large surface available when the world gets warmer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem?useskin=vector#/medi...

(and wouldn't that be an incentive for Russia and Canada to have the world warm up?

Russia and Canada will gain more human habitable land from global warming.

So why did you say 'No, you can't beat Ukraine'?

When clearly at least one other country has even more black soil?

Which country? The depth of black soil in other places is incomparable with Ukraine's. It's like comparing the marianas trench to the Caribbean. The total landmass might be lower but the total volume in Ukraine is leagues larger.

>Chernozem layer thickness may vary widely, from several centimetres up to 1.5 metres (60 inches) in Ukraine

> The depth of black soil in other places is incomparable with Ukraine's.

How do you know it's incomparable?

That statement would still hold for other countries with layer thicknesses in the 1m to 1.5m range. Which seems entirely comparable considering the area covered is multiple times greater.

speculative question, how much weight do you think this carries in the EU zeal to get Ukraine in as a member

A lot.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/15/ukraine-memb... https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/ukraine-says-pol... It will probably destroy all non Ukrainian farms for grain and might even do it for specialty foods because it's hard to complete with (guessing) 40% black soil verus 1% or less. They can grow for a very long time with no need for crop rotation or fertilization.

Interesting, many thanks.

As a Hacker News thread goes longer, the probability of someone bringing up Ukraine approaches 1. Anyway, the map on Wikipedia seems to belie this notion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem#/media/File:Chernoze...

Ukraine is going to be a massive minefield for decades by the looks of it.

They're working hard on solutions. AI powered drone discovery is one such method. I'm sure you've seen the vids of Ukrainian farmers making their tractors remote control, to run rollers in front to find mines.

And then what? Let them go boom? I'd doubt that most of the released chemicals by modern mine explosions do any good for nutritional value, or soil chemistry in general. Rather the opposite. AFAIK there are no 'Eco-Blasts' on the 'market'.

Shit thats a good point. I guess the AT ones are easy enough to disable if you can find them via AI drone. The smaller nastier ones are harder to find but have less chemicals in them.

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