I have done a little quick and dirty looking around, trying to get an idea of how much damage was done in the Dust Bowl and what the long term consequence were (as a point of comparison/trying to find a thing that might help mentally model where this is going). Here are a couple of links:
I run r/UrbanForestry and have recently posted some soil-related pieces there and I'm trying to get a handle on a complex topic without having to get a PhD in it. If anyone can suggest some good sources for me, I would appreciate it.
YouTube soil health videos has all you need. Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta presentations are easy to consume. Dr. Elaine Ingham focuses more on the soil life in greater detail than most care about but she does provide some important to understand details on rhizosphere interactions. Living Web Farms has quite a lot of lectures about regenerative practices. There are also a myriad of academic papers on soil health as well.
If you dont want to consume hours of information here is the gist. The soil is alive. Plants use microbes and fungus as an external stomach. Direct sun and disruption/tilling kill the soil life. Without life in the soil you eventually have a desert as the organics are sifted out of the sand by weathering.
Agriculture also reduces the root depth as crops are harvested fast and regular iterations. This was a large cause of the Dust Bowl issue. There was a great post on this on reddit that has photo for reference. [1][2][3]
Cover crops help this now to prevent Dust Bowl like conditions and bad soil where possible [4].
Side note: Most carbon capture also happens in the root of wild grasses and plants. It isn't just agriculture but all our landscaping types that prevent root depth. We need more trees, and more wild growing but we cull it all back for the Stepford style perfect landscaping. HOAs in Arizona for instance hate wild grass and wild flowers, but they capture more carbon and can look amazing. Planting trees and plants that are more natural with deeper roots can help climate change and help the Gray-Green divide that highlights inequality on the amount of green in urban areas [5].
It would probably be worth contacting someone at the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which is part of the USDA. It was literally created as a response to the soil lost during the dustbowl and was originally called the "Soil Conservation Service". They may already have studies that cover exactly what you are asking about:
Thanks for your efforts. Here’s a podcast[1] episode about regenerative farming, with an anecdote from a farming couple in MN who note lower cost per bushel of corn and soybeans over the past seven years after transitioning to no-till. They also observe more birds on their farm, presumably eating more insects, eating more-numerous smaller life forms supported by the soil which is up from 1-2% organic material to 5% (previous prairie, under management by pre-colonial humans, had about 12%)[1]. One of the podcast hosts is Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, editor of a recent book[2] about actions we can take as the climate changes.
[1] How to Save a Planet, episode 2021-01-07 titled “Soil: The Dirty Climate Solution”
[2] Johnson and Wilkinson, editors (2020); All We Can Save: truth, courage, and solutions for the climate crisis; ISBN 978-0-593-23706-9
Yes. But most of the crop grown in that 'corn belt' is not for human consumption, it's for feeding livestock. We're destroying farmland to feed our need for meat. The rest of the crop in the Corn Belt--soybeans--is mostly exported abroad.
Or ethanol. Same happens in part of Europe where I live. But in this case there is subsides rapseed being grown for additions to fosil fuel. Not forgeting to mention, that its being fertilized with petrochemical based fertilizers
I was watching a video about regenerative agriculture the other day (I can't remember which one) and one of its claims was that food isn't as nutritious as it used to be because of current farming practices.
The theory was that when farmers fertilize crops the fertilizer only has common nutrients like nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, but like us plants need a wide variety of nutrients, and those don't exist in the soil anymore.
Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? (i.e. links to papers)
Modern farming is not the bucolic system drawn on the food packages in the supermarket.
It's an extractive industry little different from mining or oil drilling. In fact industrial food is largely eating oil, both in energy intensity itself and the use of oil as feedstock for fertilizers and food additives.
I come from a long line of farmers. My father was the last of our family to try to hold onto the farming tradition. He grew up on a farm, along with all my aunts and uncles. His generation was the first go to college. He chose business. He made a ton of money, and hated it. After leaving the business world in the mid 1980s to return to farming, it was not the same, and he soon returned to what was effectively day trading in the early to mid 1990s.
The transformation of farming is a direct result of corporatization and globalization, like almost every other sector of the economy. It's just more of the machine eating the world. Small, family farms, the kind that my ancestors toiled on, since unrecorded history, literally centuries, back to central Europe, were chewed up and spit out by the machine. The forests, the land, the local wildlife, now, too, the soil, all chewed up and digested in the pursuit of the one thing that the machine really craves: money.
It's the legacy of our entire economic focus on profit, growth, scale. No big conspiracy, no evil bad actors you can hate forever, just the summation of our value system expressed in the invisible hand of the market, jostled or cajoled here and there by policy, or retarded briefly by it, but always pointing in the same direction, eventually to consume all the natural resources, dipping over the threshold of sustainability to the reservoir of resources behind it, extracting and emptying it, until eventually there is nothing left.
I worked on a farm in my teens in 90s upstate ny that was like the last dying breath of the traditional family farm. It was a property that was intact since a land grant from a Dutch patroon and continuously farmed until around 2000. Today the family still owns it, and boards a few horses to pay the taxes.
The farmer was an old-school conservative farmer. He was a local Republican Party leader for awhile, a conservationist and just overall hardworking guy. The modern farm is more like an oil company. I think that 75 years from now, when we lament the fate of the impoverished Midwest Desert and will see the 1970s/1980s as a watershed moment where we flipped our entire governance philosophy to short term P&L, despite then obvious and already learned lessons of the past.
I'm not worried about the soil, I'm worried about the water. The Ogallala Aquifer is shrinking. The more it shrinks, the more there will be compaction preventing it from refilling to previous states. We can always grow food in water but getting clean water will be an increasingly difficult task. Look how bad it already is in CA.
There's nothing bucolic about farming -- ever. Both my wife and I come from farming families. I lost a great grandfather who effectively worked himself to death in his early 30s and my wife had a great grandfather who died from being attacked by a bull. Farming has always been very hard work. I have friends in tech who grew up in farming families and they are the few people in tech who can easily get up early in the morning because that's also a part of farming life -- get up before the sun is even up.
I don't know where the romanticized idea of farming life came from because it was never that great. Historically, it was just a way to provide food for your family and maybe make a profit on the side if you're lucky.
Most important is nitrogen-based fertilizer, that can easily be produced from any kind of electricity. Most of the other stuff are minerals that are cheaply mined anywhere and won't run out for the next few thousand years.
The most important oil consumption is for driving farm implements, but that can easily be changed to rapeseed oil in the short term and other green energy in the long term.
It's a shame we don't have satellite imagery dating back to when Europeans first arrived on the continent. I suspect the whole western US was once far more lush and green than it is today. The central valley in California, for example, used to have several natural lakes. Who knows how much impact the damming the Colorado river has on the ecology of the southwestern deserts. I can't imagine that concentrating water into man-made reservoirs combined with intensive agriculture has done much to help the drought conditions we see today across the US.
Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil. Don't know if it's true but someone once told me nothing will grow in a corn field for 5 years afterwards unless it is roundup ready.
There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster.
The recommendation is to wait one to three days after applying glyphosate to plant grass, herbs, or fruit. It mostly depends on what else is in the herbicide.
You might wait a week for the previous plants to really die before cutting them off.
When replacing areas of random noxious weeds with grain I wait three days after the glyphosate and have no problems with my regular old, low tech oats or barley.
(I do grain because it gets tall kind of fast and helps choke out the next batch of weed seeds waiting to sprout, the birds like it, and it’s pretty when it gets dry and wavy.)
Three centimeters in a thousand years is without any management. All soil is built through the process of succession. We can drastically speed up that process with regenerative ag practices.
I believe it takes 4 years after the end of applications before it can be certified organic. Stuff will grow the following year or so. I think the half life is 90 days. Plus farmers have to pay for the chemicals they spray and try to apply the right amount since over application would cost more. So it should resolve itself fairly fast.
On the plus side, your rover is going to work better with contour planting, which is part of the solution to our problems.
The downside is that most of the post-modern agricultural variants embrace observation as being critical, and we of all people should know that statistics and graphs are not a substitute for actually looking at things. Having a robot phone home is not the same as knowing what's going on.
As an aside, I think you're going to need chonkier wheels on that thing, and better resistance to mud (what are those boxes right above the wheels?) Also you should research fork rake, and how it relates to the tendency of a wheeled vehicle to maintain or change direction. There may be a wheel design that affords you more cycles for other activities besides keeping the vehicle tracking straight.
That thing is worse for the soil than a big tractor. It has to make more tire tracks to cover the field, and soil compaction is sub liner with weight so overall it is doing more damage. Sure where the tractor tires are it is worse, but the tractor tires skip a lot of space those harm.
Right now there is no financial incentive to preserve topsoil. In the future there will be.
So why artificially create incentive to pay the higher cost now when we can punt to the future where technology will be so much better and the cost will probably be lower?
Here in SW Ohio I’m not sure there ever was an abundance of rich topsoil. I have 5 acres which has never been farmed and the native soil is dense, sticky clay. It is hard to get anything other than weeds to grow in it. Yet the corn farms around here always seem to produce.
>Settlers began systemically clearing the Great Plains prairie in the early 1800s as the John Deere plow became a staple of conventional tilling, which is the practice of digging up the topsoil to plant seeds. Later, gas-powered tractors made ripping up fields even easier.
Here's how this would read without the emotionally manipulative language:
> The Great Plains prairie was first tilled by European settlers from the United States in the early 1800s with animal-drawn cast iron ploughs like the ones designed by John Deer. In the 20th century, tractors replaced horses and oxen for pulling ploughs.
I'm not sure what purpose demonizing farmers is serving here but I don't like it.
I think everyone needs to learn from the ancient wisdom on the Punjab province in India and Pakistan.
Open Google earth and zoom into Punjab. It is the greenest agriculture zone in the entire world. Just look at it yourself.
Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive for the world.
And one more thing. The GMO crops being introduced I that region needs to STOP. It will kill the best farming land we have and then there will be no ability to rewind time.
Read about the recent farmers protests there to also know more about the problems the farmers are facing.
Tangentially related, I want a dataset of all cultivated lands and what crops they are growing? Is there a dataset for it? I mean, I give GPS coordinates and I get back crops growing there.
General data is in government reports. The farmer who owns that GPS coordinate has it, but considers it sensitive data and won't tell you. There are big databases, but they respect the farmers not wanting to share and won't talk. The admins of those database are registered with the SEC as having inside information and so they cannot trade in relavent markets.
Us gardeners topdress our soil with organic matter to prevent topsoil loss and erosion. Personally, I often use unfinished compost because my compost is usually not done yet.
this is a terrible title. what the article says is, a third of the corn belt has lost all of its topsoil. the rest of it has lost a large percentage of it (some of which may just have migrated). so the situation is actually quite a bit worse than the top line. of course the good thing is all of that is repairable, the bad thing is it will take centuries to fully restore the grassland if you leave it alone - which of course can't happen!
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl#Long-term_economic_i...
https://www.softschools.com/facts/us_history/dust_bowl_facts...
I run r/UrbanForestry and have recently posted some soil-related pieces there and I'm trying to get a handle on a complex topic without having to get a PhD in it. If anyone can suggest some good sources for me, I would appreciate it.
[+] [-] tastyfreeze|5 years ago|reply
This video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A , by Gabe Brown set me on the regenerative path.
If you dont want to consume hours of information here is the gist. The soil is alive. Plants use microbes and fungus as an external stomach. Direct sun and disruption/tilling kill the soil life. Without life in the soil you eventually have a desert as the organics are sifted out of the sand by weathering.
[+] [-] drawkbox|5 years ago|reply
Cover crops help this now to prevent Dust Bowl like conditions and bad soil where possible [4].
Side note: Most carbon capture also happens in the root of wild grasses and plants. It isn't just agriculture but all our landscaping types that prevent root depth. We need more trees, and more wild growing but we cull it all back for the Stepford style perfect landscaping. HOAs in Arizona for instance hate wild grass and wild flowers, but they capture more carbon and can look amazing. Planting trees and plants that are more natural with deeper roots can help climate change and help the Gray-Green divide that highlights inequality on the amount of green in urban areas [5].
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/mdocyn/c...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/microgrowery/comments/mdyb3h/compar...
[3] https://preview.redd.it/sp1n9tf6hdp61.jpg?width=509&auto=web...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/business/cover-crops-a-fa...
[5] https://www.geographyrealm.com/gray-green-urban-divide-wealt...
[+] [-] fiftyfifty|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/abou...
[+] [-] meristohm|5 years ago|reply
[1] How to Save a Planet, episode 2021-01-07 titled “Soil: The Dirty Climate Solution”
[2] Johnson and Wilkinson, editors (2020); All We Can Save: truth, courage, and solutions for the climate crisis; ISBN 978-0-593-23706-9
[+] [-] stakkur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virtuallynathan|5 years ago|reply
Lot of corn and soybean oil produced, animals get whats left, generally.
[+] [-] orlovs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fukmbas|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fy20|5 years ago|reply
The theory was that when farmers fertilize crops the fertilizer only has common nutrients like nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, but like us plants need a wide variety of nutrients, and those don't exist in the soil anymore.
Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? (i.e. links to papers)
[+] [-] tastyfreeze|5 years ago|reply
https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/blog/nutrie...
[+] [-] carapace|5 years ago|reply
E.g. "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
Regenerative agriculture is profitable (Brown makes money) and build soil volume and fertility year on year.
[+] [-] tern|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|5 years ago|reply
It's an extractive industry little different from mining or oil drilling. In fact industrial food is largely eating oil, both in energy intensity itself and the use of oil as feedstock for fertilizers and food additives.
[+] [-] titzer|5 years ago|reply
The transformation of farming is a direct result of corporatization and globalization, like almost every other sector of the economy. It's just more of the machine eating the world. Small, family farms, the kind that my ancestors toiled on, since unrecorded history, literally centuries, back to central Europe, were chewed up and spit out by the machine. The forests, the land, the local wildlife, now, too, the soil, all chewed up and digested in the pursuit of the one thing that the machine really craves: money.
It's the legacy of our entire economic focus on profit, growth, scale. No big conspiracy, no evil bad actors you can hate forever, just the summation of our value system expressed in the invisible hand of the market, jostled or cajoled here and there by policy, or retarded briefly by it, but always pointing in the same direction, eventually to consume all the natural resources, dipping over the threshold of sustainability to the reservoir of resources behind it, extracting and emptying it, until eventually there is nothing left.
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
I worked on a farm in my teens in 90s upstate ny that was like the last dying breath of the traditional family farm. It was a property that was intact since a land grant from a Dutch patroon and continuously farmed until around 2000. Today the family still owns it, and boards a few horses to pay the taxes.
The farmer was an old-school conservative farmer. He was a local Republican Party leader for awhile, a conservationist and just overall hardworking guy. The modern farm is more like an oil company. I think that 75 years from now, when we lament the fate of the impoverished Midwest Desert and will see the 1970s/1980s as a watershed moment where we flipped our entire governance philosophy to short term P&L, despite then obvious and already learned lessons of the past.
[+] [-] snarf21|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nuisance-bear|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hangonhn|5 years ago|reply
I don't know where the romanticized idea of farming life came from because it was never that great. Historically, it was just a way to provide food for your family and maybe make a profit on the side if you're lucky.
[+] [-] corty|5 years ago|reply
The most important oil consumption is for driving farm implements, but that can easily be changed to rapeseed oil in the short term and other green energy in the long term.
So no cause for panic.
[+] [-] selimthegrim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briga|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hourislate|5 years ago|reply
There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
*Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years*
We are f...ed the way things are going. Might have to start gardening locally (back yard) or hope Indoor vertical farming takes off.
[+] [-] bluGill|5 years ago|reply
Glyphosate binds strongly to soil, so even when there is glyphosate in the soil it doesn't affect seeds in the ground but not growing yet.
[+] [-] jws|5 years ago|reply
You might wait a week for the previous plants to really die before cutting them off.
When replacing areas of random noxious weeds with grain I wait three days after the glyphosate and have no problems with my regular old, low tech oats or barley.
(I do grain because it gets tall kind of fast and helps choke out the next batch of weed seeds waiting to sprout, the birds like it, and it’s pretty when it gets dry and wavy.)
[+] [-] tastyfreeze|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
Found this:
> A typical field half-life of 47 days has been suggested.
> Glyphosate adsorbs tightly to soil. Glyphosate and its residues are expected to be immobile in soil.
> The median half-life of glyphosate in water varies from a few days to 91 days.
http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/glyphotech.html#env
5 years should be more like 2 years, but its direct impact on the soil is relatively short. We're not talking DDT or Agent Orange, here.
[+] [-] Scoundreller|5 years ago|reply
No reason not to start now depending on where you are. I grow for flavour and value not calories.
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|5 years ago|reply
My hope is that we can build robotic tools that work the land more like human hands do instead of the big tools and poisons we use today.
If you like that kind of thing please take a look:
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
The downside is that most of the post-modern agricultural variants embrace observation as being critical, and we of all people should know that statistics and graphs are not a substitute for actually looking at things. Having a robot phone home is not the same as knowing what's going on.
As an aside, I think you're going to need chonkier wheels on that thing, and better resistance to mud (what are those boxes right above the wheels?) Also you should research fork rake, and how it relates to the tendency of a wheeled vehicle to maintain or change direction. There may be a wheel design that affords you more cycles for other activities besides keeping the vehicle tracking straight.
[+] [-] bluGill|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 99_00|5 years ago|reply
So why artificially create incentive to pay the higher cost now when we can punt to the future where technology will be so much better and the cost will probably be lower?
[+] [-] okareaman|5 years ago|reply
"Artificial soil: quick and dirty"
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526161-700-artifici...
[+] [-] mberning|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makerofspoons|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pepperonipizza|5 years ago|reply
https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans#:~:text=But%20the%....
[+] [-] FredPret|5 years ago|reply
If we’re not all uploaded to a server embedded in the planet’s core or orbiting the sun.
[+] [-] markdown|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sthnblllII|5 years ago|reply
Here's how this would read without the emotionally manipulative language:
> The Great Plains prairie was first tilled by European settlers from the United States in the early 1800s with animal-drawn cast iron ploughs like the ones designed by John Deer. In the 20th century, tractors replaced horses and oxen for pulling ploughs.
I'm not sure what purpose demonizing farmers is serving here but I don't like it.
[+] [-] nobrains|5 years ago|reply
Open Google earth and zoom into Punjab. It is the greenest agriculture zone in the entire world. Just look at it yourself.
Now I don't know the specifics, but it is a starting point. If we are able to get the knowledge from the locals there on their ancient farming techniques, that knowledge will be net positive for the world.
And one more thing. The GMO crops being introduced I that region needs to STOP. It will kill the best farming land we have and then there will be no ability to rewind time.
Read about the recent farmers protests there to also know more about the problems the farmers are facing.
[+] [-] Borrible|4 years ago|reply
Just exchange it with micro plastics
https://soil.copernicus.org/articles/6/649/2020/
In case that is not enough, there still is Soylent Green.
Did you know, before the introduction of artifial fertilizers, they used the human bones from Napoleonic battlefields?
https://medium.com/study-of-history/the-bones-of-waterloo-a3...
...
Dust in the Wind.
Dirt in the Ground.
The Earth dies screaming.
I will survive.
[+] [-] throwaway210401|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jointpdf|5 years ago|reply
- https://nassgeodata.gmu.edu/CropScape/
- https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Cropland/Rele...
- https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/...
[+] [-] bluGill|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thorwasdfasdf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciconia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terramars|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sabujp|5 years ago|reply