This is an economics problem not a knowledge problem.
Most small-scale regenerative ag farms are bringing in a lot of outside material to add those minerals back in.
My farmland hasn't been farmed for 50 years. If I clear an area and put a veggie bed in, I get 1 year of great yield, 1 year of "okay" yield, and then it becomes impossible to grow anything due to nutrient deficiencies.
Remember all those post WWII photos showing how fertilizing with phosphorous resulted in incredible crop yields?
Guess what element China (which has some of the world's largest reserves) has quit exporting?
I think selenium would run out long before phosphorus.
The crust contains selenium at 0.05-0.09 ppm, but most plants require around 0.1-1 ppm. It's also one of the hardest nutrients to remediate because you can't just dump a bunch of selenium on the surface when 5-10 ppm starts to become toxic to lots of other organisms.
Selenium, along with taurine, is one of the supplements which genuinely drove my physicians vehemently crazy, so I doubled up, and ensured that they were the focal point of my daily regimen.
Psychiatrist's parting shot was, "they're all bio-active!"
Micronutrients are no fad, because guess what, they used to come in our fruits, vegetables, and meats.
Selenium is commonly recommended by doctors in New Zealand.
Selenium is one chemical element that, like nickel and cobalt, has been needed by all living beings already some billions of years ago, but nowadays there are many living beings which have lost their dependency of selenium, which has been a beneficial trait for them, due to the scarcity of selenium.
The terrestrial plants, because of their environment which frequently lacks many minerals, have lost their dependencies of several chemical elements, e.g. of cobalt, of sodium, for most of them also of nickel, which is optional even in those which can use it, and apparently also of selenium.
If you have seen any source which says that it has been discovered that some plant needs selenium, please indicate it.
As I have said, many plants happen to contain selenium only because they are not selective enough in their sulfur intake, not because they need selenium for anything, unlike the animals, which would die without selenium.
One issue with phosphate ore is contamination with undesirable elements, like cadmium and also uranium and its decay products, like radium. The waste stream from sulfuric acid treatment of the ores is radon-emitting gypsum.
Sulfuric acid itself may become limiting once we're off fossil fuels, since almost all of it is currently produced by oxidation of sulfur extracted in the desulfurization of oil and gas.
Composting the food waste, and use composting toilets to create a "circular economy".
That is apparently how it was done in the old days...
See also, Paul Wheaton criticism of The Humanure Handbook ("No, do fear your poop! Fear it!!"). Timecode link, but I recommend the whole video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vZPTPIHO8w&t=4980s
It's about unknown unknowns, right? But we could map out where those may be.
I guess chemical toxicity, drugs with long half-lives that affect soil organisms, and antibiotics that promote resistance.
(yeah yeah they are all chemicals.)
For the chemical toxicity, it's chemicals that are harmful to plants but allowed for human consumption, or chemicals in sufficient quantity to disrupt soil balance. Doesn't seem like a real concern?
With metabolic disruption to soil organisms, yes, there may be real danger there. That smells like previous environmental mistakes.
Antibiotics, yeah, some danger. Livestock is exposed, and resistance-conferring genes might jump directly to human pathogens.
It's worth studying. There are requirements for both sewage processing and fertilising soil, so the value of a solution would be high.
Like many things, poop doesn't easily scale....
Modern agriculture uses fertilizer for extra nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K).
Plants also need a few trace minerals from soil but it’s a tiny fraction of their mass Iron, Calcium, etc and can also be added back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_flour
PS: There’s some really destructive agricultural like sod that’s literally shipping soil, but the premium pays to replace the soil.
i don't know how much iron crops need compared to what is in most soils. I know farmes are adding sulfar and other mineral.
I thought it was a huge issue because natural nitrogen fixation was slow and unreliable, and that's why Haber-Bosch was such a big deal.
If you look at a regenerative certification program like [1] you’ll see that you’re allowed to apply synthetic fertilizer but it has to be no more than the rate removed by harvested crops. This means, hopefully, that you aren’t losing much to erosion, runoff, or volatization, and that good soil structure is keeping them available.
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.regenified.com/wp-content/upl...
> Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants.
Industrial ag treats soil like it's a tank of fertility, and guess who sells the refills? Biologists know that healthy soil is a factory, making new fertility out of rock/air/rain/sun.
Direct from soil microbiologist Dr Elaine Ingham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
Regenerative practices would probably initially look like a reduced high side profit, and reduced land yield intensity but at significantly reduced input costs on chemicals and pesticides. The labour costs might be higher or lower depending. Then over time, yield to use would show for area in production actual profits were better but still to a lower high point. More certainty as long as e.g. massive disease or pest risk didn't strike.
And as long as organics have a higher premium price at lower yield, when the soil can pass the certification tests for residues there's a new profit highpoint.
That's my sense but perhaps there are better takes on it.
The profit per unit area can become very high.
Not in my experience.
The promises of many permaculture proponents, are close to a scam.
Basically, the claim is establish a working ecological system - and then it runs by itself, while producing lots of yield. Permanent Culture.
But in reality, wild nature takes over quite quickly, if you don't do anything. A fruit tree does usually not have benefits by making big red apples for example. Small ones are good enough for wild reproduction. But we want as many apples as possible, which means pruning, etc.
And a vegetable garden ... they like care, but if you don't tend to them, they will remain tiny and soon displaced by weeds.
So what I have seen in my experiments in my garden and on other permaculture farms - is that the result looks nice, but it is a lot of work and low yield. Some ideas like fruit forests are a nice additionm but all in all I doubt permaculture can feed the world. (I have not seen one permaculture farm, that could feed itself)
This is something I have to regularly say to colleagues and contemporaries in the software and electronics space.
I am sure it comes up in many fields. So many things are done inefficiently and with disregard to the future for the sake of short term profitability.
In this case though it may doom us all rather than just create more work for someone a few years later.
We need to talk more about the need for the consumption habits to change if we want regenerative ag to take over. We won't be able to farm the amount of corn and soybean we farm today, but that would mean consumers will have to consume less stuff that is a corn derivative, or even better, consume less. There's no reason we should be selling a single bag of Doritos across the country, let alone for $2.
Most of that is markup. The raw materials are on the order of cents.
Look at CPUs, for a fabricator the cost of the silicon alone is a constant cost which is dwarfed by capital investment and yield cost.
Then there are other costs like labour, administration and shipping.
I definitely appreciate having corn tortillas and corn chips and cornbread to diversify what is almost entirely otherwise wheat and potatoes and rice, in terms of my starches.
I need to get my calories somewhere. Don't really see what's wrong with some corn chips when I need a quick snack on the go because my last meal was five hours ago.
And heck, plenty (most?) of the fresh food I eat comes from across the country, if not from other countries entirely. But corn chips, having most of their water removed, are far more environmentally friendly to transport due to being so lightweight.
it sucks as a cereal, nutritionally speaking, iirc, based on what I've read earlier. i could be wrong, but don't have time to check it now.
may check out millets and other alternative cereals instead of, or in addition to corn, wheat and rice.
some of them are nutritionally or agriculturally superior.
In many parts of the Earth, e.g. in Europe, maize a.k.a. corn and wheat are much cheaper energy sources than anything else and wheat and corn are about as cheap.
Wheat may be preferable to corn only because it has a double amount of proteins, so it can also be used to provide a big part of the daily intake in proteins, if it is supplemented with at least another source of proteins that is rich in lysine. However, wheat is more suspicious from the point of view of its health effects, so when the absolute minimum cost for the daily food is not the target, corn might be the best energy source in food.
The bulk of the food that is needed daily is required for providing energy and corn can do that at a minimal cost and it can be cooked into tasty food.
The rest of the food must provide proteins, essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, but much less amounts are needed for that.
So corn is perfect nutritionally for its right purpose. Obviously it cannot be the only kind of food that is eaten.
Except for energy (i.e. starch), most cereals do not contain anything in sufficient amounts to be an adequate source of it. Wheat is an exception by having a useful amount of protein, which is however harder to digest than most other proteins and the undigested fragments may have undesirable effects. Only oats has a higher protein content than wheat, but oats is much more expensive, so it is not really competitive from this point of view.
Therefore it makes no sense to claim that corn is worse nutritionally than other cereals, because it is better than most (except possibly rice, which cannot be cultivated in the places where corn is grown) at the only thing for which cereals are really good: providing energy.
did you see what I did there? :)
Vague ad hominem accusations are useless.
The only factual error is what you have written "it sucks as a cereal, nutritionally speaking".
Anyway, I did that (replied) already, once.
See my other reply to you, here:
Whether you pasted LLM content or your own, so much is wrong about what you said (in such a confident tone), including logical, English usage, and scientific / factual errors, that I do not want to argue more, except to leave you with this link to peruse, and another sentence or two below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41957679
That link was of a reply by me to another comment(er) in this same overall thread.
Make sure to see my own reply to my own comment, at the link below the link given, and in particular, the Wikipedia links given there, about the nutritional value of various food items discussed here.
Now, that sentence or two that I mentioned above:
Factual error: near the top of your comment, you say that wheat has about twice the protein of corn (maize).
Wheat actually has more than three times the protein of maize - as a ratio. It also has a lot of other nutritional value.
See the relevant Wikipedia articles that I linked.
And in an absolute sense, it makes even more of a difference, because maize is below 3.5 grams, and wheat is above 12.5 grams in protein. So wheat has 9 grams more protein per 100 grams, than corn / maize. That makes a hell of a lot of difference to poor people, or others, who cannot afford or do not want to eat meat, for religious, cultural, ethical or other reasons.
And there are an increasing number of people in the west or in "developed" countries who are becoming vegetarian for ethical or climate reasons.
The founder of Y Combinator, and of this site, Hacker News, Paul Graham, also became vegetarian some time ago.
When asked why, by someone, he replied, "I was grossed out by factory farming".
See his reply here, 17 years ago, via this search:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58051
"It wasn't a deliberate choice. I just got grossed out by factory farming."
Factual error, or almost: in your last paragraph, you say that corn is an excellent source of energy.
Much less than wheat:
Corn / maize: less than 17 grams carbs per 100 grams.
Wheat: more than 71 grams carbs per 100 grams.
Again, see the same relevant, linked, Wikipedia articles about maize and wheat for proof.
My calculator tells me that 71/17 is over 4x.
Fat content in both is so low as to not matter.
And carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram, while fats have 9 calories per gram.
So should we all just eat fats only, for energy?
Of course not. There is much more to nutrition than just energy or protein or fat or whatever.
No factual error here. The wheat flour from which I make bread has 13% proteins, while the cornflour that I use has 6.4% proteins.
It is likely that unlike me, you do not cook your own food, which is why you are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
The protein content in other parts of plants does not matter. Only the content in the products that you can buy and use for cooking matters. The 6.4% protein content for cornflour is pretty much the same in all brands of cornflour that I have seen in Europe. The wheat flour that I use is the one with the highest protein content. Most other brands have a lower protein content, down to 10% of protein.
> Corn / maize: less than 17 grams carbs per 100 grams
This must be a hallucination. Cornflour almost always has around 75 grams of starch per 100 grams. Wheat flour has a slightly lower starch content, the value written by you, 71 g per 100 g is indeed correct and typical.
The energy content of the cornflour I use is 3410 kcal/100 g and of the wheat flour is 3530 kcal/100 g. Nevertheless, the slightly higher value for wheat flour is misleading, because the gluten is never digested completely and even for the part of the gluten that is digested, the body spends more energy for amino-acid processing than for starch processing, so the net energy intake is actually slightly lower for wheat flour.
It is possible to eat only fat for energy. It is also possible to eat only carbohydrates for energy. This does not mean that the extremes are the best choices.
So you should better check your facts, because the values are so far from correct as to qualify for "hallucinations" (i.e. "more than three times" vs. 13/6.4 and 17 g vs. 75 g).
>It is likely that unlike me, you do not cook your own food, which is why you are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
Such a pompous, uninformed, creepy, incredibly illogical and retarded statement you made, to say that, because a person does not cook their own food, they are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
Going that same "logic" implies that many people in your friends circle, your relatives, your village or city, your country, and the whole world, are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients. Because a lot of people worldwide, do not cook, you know. Maybe due to being too busy, having others who can do it for them, being partially disabled, or being enough well-off that they do not need to cook, sometimes, or ever. But they have the ability to read ingredient information on packages.
Is that not blindingly of obvious to you?
And further, I do know how to cook, and do cook my own food - sometimes, not always, because I am in that well-off category above. So I don't need to cook all the time.
And I enjoy doing it.
>Going that same "logic"
Going by that same "logic"
>your friends circle
your friends' circle
>Is that not blindingly of obvious to you?
Is that not blindingly obvious to you?
Please, if all you've got is a vague recollection of stuff you read ages ago just don't comment at all. You're just adding noise
>if all you've got is a vague recollection of stuff you read ages ago
I didnt say "vague", you added that. Kindly don't.
And I said "earlier", not "ages ago". That "earlier" could span a wide range of times ago. How did you manage to make the jump from my "earlier" to your wrong interpretation, "ages ago? That is sloppy / inaccurate thinking / writing.
In fact, it sounds more like misrepresentation than misinformation, which is even worse. Don't do it.
(Howdja like my wordplay up there? ;)
Dude (as in dude on a dude ranch, meaning a rank newbie), take a piece of advice: don't try to punch above your level, or, in other words, don't bring a knife to a gun fight.
Your arguments are pathetic and fake.
And, as a knockout blow: I noticed that you avoided replying to my above point about my use of "earlier" vs. your absurdly wrong (or intentionally fake) interpretation of it as "ages ago". That was either stupid or cowardly of you.
End of this subthread for me. I don't waste my time arguing with fakes and cowards. Rant on, if you like, into /dev/null.
You are wrong. Sorry. I can't even imagine where you could have read that.
I would rebut you with actual facts, but since you haven't given any information to rebut, there's nothing for me to say except that you've been misinformed.
Do you really need information from me to rebut, when you can so easily look up relevant words like corn (maize), wheat, rice, millets, and balanced diet, to name just a few of the words / terms I talked about, in Google or other search engines, and particularly in Wikipedia?
The Wikipedia articles for many such common human food items often includes a table of nutrient names and corresponding percentages for that food item, such as for the percentage of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals, by needed daily value (DV), with a citation to the USDA article on the same subject.
Those are hard facts, not my opinions.
Check them out, then come back and talk.
That is the one of the most important points in my argument above, about why corn sucks nutritionally.
Of course, I did not mean that it is totally useless. Obviously it has some nutrients, just like any other food item has. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier, in my first comment in this subthread.
I did not mention balanced diet, because I kind of thought that all educated people would know what that means and what it's constituents are - such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals,
Just compare the nutrition from corn (maize) with the nutrition from some of the other food items I mentioned, in said Wikipedia articles.
Here you go, I'm pasting some relevant links below:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorghum
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_millet
And there are some more millets. Google them.
Also, for vegetarians (who don't eat meat in any form, land or sea based), which is hundreds of millions of people in the world, due to culture or religion or lower income), legumes are equally important, along with cereals, to give the proper balance of essential amino acids needed to make the needed protein for our bodies.
Google "essential amino acids" and "complete protein" topics.
And I have only scratched the surface of the subject of nutrition. I am by no means an expert. I am just a beginner, who has an interest in the subject, for my own personal use, and to share any info I pick up, with friends.
You're welcome :) ;).
It’s not weird to say we should grow less commodity corn because it is resource intensive and broadly subsidized.