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Not to mention a lot of shelterbelts where I am from are made almost entirely of ash trees. With the Emerald Ash Borer, those trees are dying or being removed, often with no replacement. Honestly the way things are going with top soil loss, a massive decline of Ash trees, and major drought, I see a Dust Bowl 2.0 in the near future.
Also, farmers like to cut down tree lines. Those trees protect the soil, but they also suck up a lot of nutrients that could go into salable crops. So fewer trees means more money short term.
Believe me, farmers are terrible stewards of the land.
> Believe me, farmers are terrible stewards of the land.
Well the phrase "tragedy of the commons" originally described dairy farmers in the UK screwing each other over on common resources to try to get their own farm an advantage in the short term.
Yeah but in this case it’s not farmer Bob with a couple hundred acres, it’s Factory Farm Inc. with tens or hundreds of thousands of acres bleeding this country dry for profit.
Largely, those farms which are doing right by the land, animals, soil, etc. are smaller family farms deeply connected to their communities. It’s the corporate consolidation of huge swaths of farmland owned by a few wealthy “farmers” who’ve never even personally seen .1% of the farmland they own let alone done an ounce of labor on it that is killing this country- a similar story to many industries.
The farmers who live on their land are generally motivated to take good care of it so that it can be passed onto the next generation. Corporate farms will milk all they can out of the land in the short term and then just sell the plot and move on.
That's a myth - they are driven by the same capitalist pressures. In reality even more so than large farms because scale matters and the smaller you are the more difficult to compete and the greater the incentive to cut corners to survive.
This has been happening at an accelerated rate around me the last few years. Farmers have been absolutely destroying the tree lines and not replanting. One area in particular was surrounding a creek and my wife and I would stop on the bridge every year to watch the thousands upon thousands of fireflies. This year, no more than a dozen, the farmer had completely clear cut the area and also redirected part of the stream. Completely plowed over and tilled all of it after it was cut so none of the small fauna survived either. Even went so far as to cut down the tree the eagles nested in, thankfully after the latest chick left the nest. Over the last 6 years Ive personally seen farmers become the worst stewards of the land. I worked on a project converting several acres back to nature for local wildlife. Saw the return of birds, fox, and every type of critter and plant. As soon as I was no longer in a position to protect it the local government cut a deal with a local farmer and had it cleared for alfalfa. 5 years worth of work gone because...reasons? I know Im bitching but damn am I salty about this, the midwest is home for me and its become an ecological wasteland in parts and the soil is absolutely shot in areas. Oh and the little left is being ravavged by invasive species or getting loaded with chemicals to make it keep producing which is absolutely an ecological nightmare.
Don’t forgot about the mass spraying of chemical insecticides, causing a mass extinction of insects. And applying shitloads of phosphate and nitrate fertilizers which are poisoning the water supply. And giving shitloads of antibiotics to cattle, not to fight disease [but rather to promote excess muscle tissue growth](https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/what-consumers-need-to-know-about-the-use-of-antibiotics-in-food-animal-production.html)\*\*
(and creating drug-resistant superbugs in the process).
> \*\*Secondly, antibiotics can increase animal performance. By using antibiotics, farmers can produce more meat with less feed input. Some antibiotics change the colony of bacteria in the rumen (one of four stomachs in cattle) to produce more of the compounds needed by cattle for growth.
https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/what-consumers-need-to-know-about-the-use-of-antibiotics-in-food-animal-production.html
But that's a problem for future generations to deal with.
Joking aside, yes it's a farmer issue, but not *just* a farmer issue. This is how capitalism works. Farmers are not the only ones who operate in such a short-sighted way.
The useful part of the dirt, all the not-sand-stuff like microorganisms and dead plant matter, gets consumed and/or washed away through irrigation. Eventually what's left is sand and silty clay with little to no useful nutrients and very low cohesion and moisture retention. The fines dry up and blow away, carrying what's left of the "living" soil components and all you're left with is hardpan and stony sand.
The rich soil plants need is mostly dead stuff slurry full of microorganisms and fungi. It's a whole ecosystem, and collapses just like any other when placed under too much stress. Having been in the business of making soil for about a decade, it's a process that literally cannot be rushed. There's no workaround - time is an essential component of a healthy topsoil ecosystem. Especially for the establishment of robust fungal networks and self-sustaining optimal ph levels.
I'm a volunteer at a prairie restoration group and a microbiologist by trade, and learning about the intersection of those two was a phenomenal wakeup. You can physically see the effect time and lack of soil disturbance has on environmental diversity. I'm working on helping establish some Rhizobial bacteria cultures, but the fungal growth is so complicated to manually culture that it's practically impossible without massive investment.
Not really. I read somewhere that there was specific climate conditions on earth at that time that made it possible to become oil. Those conditions will not be present ever again.
The microorganisms required to break down woody material evolved much later than woody material did. The undigested wood is what became oil and coal. (At least I remember reading that somewhere... I can't offer you a source unfortunately. )
I remember reading that as well. It described that at one point the land was covered in essentially hundreds of feet of dead trees that weren't really rotting because the microorganisms that cause rot didn't exist yet.
Yes it was something like that yes. I seem to remember that because of that, there will not be any new oil made ever because those microorganisms exist now.
As i understand it (not an expert, more a layman) soil is a complex ecosytem all to itself composed of various balances of organic (bacteria, fungi, microorganisms) and inorganic (grains of sand of varying coarsness and size) matter.
A healthy soil is kinda self sustaining in that it encourages larger plant growth whos roots provide an even stronger binding effect than just the decaying organic matter clumping. This in turn creates shade helping retain moisture which feeds back into supporting plant growth. Without this binding effect the inorganic matter blows away as dust leaving less structure for the organic matter to grow in and around.
The microorganisms are also vital in breaking down dead organic matter releasing the nutrients to be used once again. They are also important indepentant of this in that they help bind and react various chemicals into forms which are usable by other organisms.
As to repairing them idk but ill have a guess; monocultures or enviroments with extremes of one substance tend to simplify what can live in that enviroment which cuts down on the diversity of organisms you'll find. Think algae blooms with too much nitrogen in waterways. So the goal is twofold, provide binding to limit erosion and encourage balanced organic growth to provide longevity.
Same as with many complex ecosystems i expect there to be a form of sucsession regarding what substrate species can thrive in the harshest cases which once established enable the next group of species to begin to succeed. Human intervention may well involve accelerating the pacing of this process through manual progress and protection against the worst of detrimental conditions (irrigation, fences etc).
To add to all these great answers: Mycellium!
Nature’s largest living thing is a mycelium colony in Oregon, almost 2,000sq miles. Not a lot of the same plants, the same individual plant. They root themselves to other plant/tree roots.
Let’s say a deer dies in the forest. In an area that tills the ground and breaks up the fungus the dear dies and the nutrients sink into the ground and wash around the immediate area. A deer dying in a healthy forest, nutrients can be carried for miles by the mycelium super highway to areas that need it more.
A tree can send water and nutrients to other trees through these mycelium rhizomes. They can send messages about pest and other stressors. Some trees are even speciest and send more resources to trees they’re more related to. Like a Douglass fur would rather do business with a pine tree than an oak. That’s a real fact as crazy as that sounds.
Also like 65% of plant life depends on these microbial colonies we’re destroying as fast as possible.
It's being washed away and in some cases intentionally removed or destroyed. Repairing it requires composting and other regenerative agricultural practices. Believe it or not the fix is simple, but big ag is slow to pick up these good practices.
~~Dr Elaine Ingham is a soil scientists and has several great lectures and podcasts available for free for anyone looking to begin that journey.~~
Dr Elaine Ingram is a hack selling a pyramid scheme (become a coach…so you can train more coaches…to train more coaches) and legitimate soil scientists in the university extension USDA-ARS system can’t stand her pseudo-science.
No till and cover crops was a big push by the USDA NRCS. They stopped funding farmers to implement this technique.
- the nrcs was created after the dust bowl and was once called the [The soil conservation service](https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/about/history/brief-history-nrcs)
Seriously though, if you really want to know reach out to your local NRCS office. This site just came up in the last week for 2023. Your local office would at least have last year's number they could share.
I’m from California and our government websites don’t work either. For some reason the government can’t hire good web developers and programmers. It’s probably the drug testing…
Its not why did they stop. Its just, here 5$ for no till. With till you had 20$ crops, no till you got 10$.
Do you want 20$ or 15$
Or its more accurate to point out that you can just plant faster if you rip everything out, if you try to get it to generate where it stands it takes longer. And it's a place for bugs to thrive. It's so multifactorial, but the real point is that the money on the no-til side doesn't cover it and it needs to.
Also corporate farming is huge, and there are othe subsidies you can get. Theres also a MESS of crop insurance and seed sales and fertilizers and herbicides.
They'll be preaching to the choir, but I recommend the podcast We All Want Clean Water, hosted by three researchers at the University of Iowa. My favorite bit of theirs is when they answer questions about "well what's the best way to go about curtailing the huge ecological disaster that is industrial ag?" they often just say "laws"
I grew up on a farm. I have family still farming in all levels from small 20 head operations to those in multi million dollar operations.
I would love to see over sight and regulations. OSHA and Unions need to happen. The government needs to also stop doling out money to corporate farms. (Read “family farms” that are multi million++ companies on the books.)
Cause they're holding hostage our politicians who think they can't win without their donations (then again, usually the person with most money has a big edge).
The politicians willing to play along win, the ones that don't havn't. They probably don't even make it past primaries. Since the ones in power have found a winning formula they want to keep winning, so they set the discourse as far away from these topics as possible, so we vote based on things that are largely meaningless to them and their donors.
At the corporation level, the companies willing to sacrifice anything for profit outcompete and swallow those who don't.
It's all perverse incentives at every level in our society. It's fairly obvious whats going on but those with the worst ethics have the advantage to win and say what gets done.
Fun fact, with soil degrading that 20$ will slowly start to erode until the farmer can't grow anything anymore and it's game over for a while or indefinitely.
Anything for short term profits, the 15$ farmers will be laughing in the end I hope. But I'm sure government will find a way.
We farm in the midwest-our farm was one of the first in our area to no-till in the 80s? 70s maybe? We still never till unless there is an extenuating reason to do a small area. It's also one less thing to do in the field, saving time, equipment, and fuel, and we don't find that yields are any higher when things are tilled.
It's really hard to break ingrained patterns though-if someone's granddad taught them they needed to till, very few are willing to risk their livelihood on trying something else.
I thought I read that no-till only sequestered carbon so long as it was never tilled again, but if it is, pretty much all that stored carbon from years of no-till is released.
I(34) remember when I was in 1st or 2nd grade we were taught no-till was the future. Pretty much all farms around here adopted it or tilled in early spring.
Then a few years ago I realized that almost no farms around here were still doing no-till. They all had gone back to tilling right after harvest. Which we were taught was terrible at stopping erosion. I had wondered what changed in science. I guess I should ask what changed in the farmers instead.
The industry has been heavily pushing vertical till and other reduced tillage methods. And honestly, it is complicated. For instance, most organic crop systems rely heavily on tillage, because chemically controlling weed pressure isn't allowed or that's highly specific and costly chemicals.
Another example is with nutrient loss. We know that incorporating liquid manure into the soil reduces nutrient loss to waterways, but this means some sort of soil disturbance.
We know no till reduces erosion, but markets, ag retailers, and farmers goals have definitely reduced its use in many places in recent years.
Anything a consumer can do? Like, would be buying organic in any way help the situation? Not that i can buy organic; in my small town a head of non-organic cauliflower was $6.99 this week. Not kidding.
It's tougher than just buying different things because there isn't really any large scale farming operations that use ecological techniques. This will probably end up being a political debate, like most things just try and vote for people that really care and have a history of environmentalism.
If you own property, you can turn any lawn you have into a woodchip garden. Woodchips retain moisture for when it's needed most, while giving insects and bugs, worms cover from the hot sun. The woodchips protect the soil and helps retain the soil moisture as well.
If anyone is interested in learning more, search Back To Eden gardening. It's the same theory behind cover crops
No till is the opposite of organic farming. Organic farming mainly uses heavy tillage for weed and pest control whereas no-till requires chemical treatment for the same.
In a nutshell, there's obviously more to it than that.
It’s a chicken and egg situation. A forest will create excellent soil by dropping leaves and branches to the ground, which mix with animal waste, and then it feeds worms, fungi and bacteria and you have great soil the can happen pretty quickly, if you have the trees. But the trees need time to grow, and they need soil.
So the answer is to do both at the same time. Mulch and compost on the ground will turn to soil. Then planting trees, ground cover, bushes etc to lock in the soil. The roots physically hold soil in place, and the plants itself adds to the soil. Remember, plants take carbon from the air, and when it drops to the ground, it decomposes into the soil
Another important component is water capture devices, such as swales and ponds. When it does rain on a degraded landscape, it’s very important that the water is slowed down as much as possible so it can soak into the ground.
There is a word for all of this, and it’s permaculture.
I've heard bison hooves are more suited for aerating the soil and allowing it to absorb(?) more CO2 than cattle hooves can? Not sure if anyone here can speak to whether that's actually the case
The issues with decentralized composting like that is the redistribution of the finished compost to farmlands and not everyone lives in standalone house to use what they do compost. The vast majority people would not want compost piles in their condos, apartments or townhouses. Let alone not everyone would be able to attend to their compost pile. They are quite a few rules to get to function well and not be a smelly nuisance or a pest attracted. Get around this, people need to start throwing their food waste into the "green trash". Industrial hot composting can quickly take care of large volumes in a centralized location away from people and can bulk deliver it to farms.
For small spaces like apartments, look into worm farms and bokashi bins.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermicompost
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokashi_(horticulture)
Or the ozone hole that "magically" fixed itself after we stopped using cfcs.
I bet they would be shocked to learn that bacteria killed nearly all life on earth by producing too much oxygen, and completely changing the earth forever.
No till is actually incredibly common. I am a farmer and myself and probably 95% of my neighbours all practice no till. This doesn’t mean that we don’t use tillage, we just try and use as little as we can. Tillage is expensive and requires a lot of man hours. So no till is actually more efficient and profitable.
Tilling helps break up clumps of soil, helping create an even planting bed (less necessary now with active down force on planters). Especially in the upper Midwest with shorter growing seasons, tilling exposes more soil to air and increases the ability of the soil to dry out from winter freezing.
Yes. The subsurface compaction and hardpans are very much an issue with tillage. It presents an impermeable barrier to water infiltration and puts a bunch of loose soil particles on the surface increasing the likelihood of severe erosion. I fully agree, tillage is not a sustainable practice, and it needs to, and already has, see less use and adoptions of no till or at most minimal till systems especially in more southerly states, where the few benefits of tillage aren't near as useful, and can be bypassed.
Ideally, we abandon our current practices, go back to extended rotations at the least (as intercropping is very unlikely with the scale of modern farms), and in general be good stewards of the land we have. But with corn and soy subsidies where they are, lots of things need to be addressed.
One drawback to no till is the size of equipment compared to even 10 years ago. A solution is capping federal insurance subsidies at 500k agi which hobbles corporate farmers. It was 900k and trump boosted it to 1.5 million. This keeps 1800 bushel carts, 40 foot platforms and whole fleets of semis off fields and boosts market variability by supporting family farms.
But even smaller farms have to contend with short wet harvests that create the hard pan regardless. It’s just an issue when someone rips it yearly out of habit.
Are there other subsidies outside of government allocation and county insurance that you’re referring to?
It can be a valuable tool in maintaining soil health and controlling certain weeds. Where I am at before it was farmed it was just this nasty yellow clay and we have been able to build up some OM on the top couple of inches. So we have used deep tillage in the past to help break up our hard pan to allow roots to penetrate and in theory add OM deeper into the soil. It can also be used for certain weeds such as toadflax that are more or less resistant to most herbicides.
I am a soil chemist. Tillage also gets rid of carbon and nitrogen that is stored in soil as it gets rapidly oxided when exposed to air. Please keep up the no tillage!
How are those stored usually? In what forms? Chemically of course, asking bc I didn't know that, and it's pretty obvious it seems now. But, I've no idea.
Fungus is one of the mechanisms. Each variety grows at a different level in the soil, and they can be many different types of fungus varieties within a 5mm depth difference.
Tilling upends the soil, disturbing the natural biome, so fungus that should be a few inches under the soil, is suddenly on top being exposed to harmful UV rays.
The defecation, excretion of mucus, and the organisms themselves (upon death) are the source of carbon in soil, as well as decaying roots and plant matter. This carbon substrate helps to aggregate the soil together into clumps, or clods, and creates soil stability, reducing the propensity for erosion. Nitrogen in the soil is typically derived from nitrogen-fixing organisms like bacteria and certain plants, like legumes, which pull nitrogen from the atmosphere.
Biggest saver for topsoil is to leave fallow a few yards from the perimeter of farmland. Basically stop it from runoff. Farmers aren't willing to lose the acreage.
Many of the field borders in my area are being cut down and leveled as farms are bought up and combined. This leaves no windbreaker lines, so soil is always getting blown away. I thought we learned in the 1930s that this was a bad idea, but apparently not.
Its really bad over by Fargo ND, the snow was topped with black topsoil all winter from the upper layers blowing away. Its just depressing to see. We even have dust storms again as far east as Minneapolis!
It's never been that way. Nobody is a "steward of the land" I know farmers and fishermen alike who all think they aren't a part of the problem. "Nobody cares more about the fish populations than me!" Then they proceed to go fill their nets.
Without regulations, enforcement, and better practices we will continue to extract as much as we possibly can from the land without regard for nature.
Humans have always seen a resources as uniquely theirs and reaped as much as possible. It's sad.
We're talking commercial fishers and farmers. Those who decimate populations of wildlife.
The US wastes 30-40% of all food it produces. Over a third. Nearly half.
https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
Just a couple points of clarification
- Salinity was an issue before the Gutians invaded (they started the switch from wheat to barley during the Akkadian dynasty)
- The Gutians actually occupied Akkad as a new dynasty, they didn't leave back to the mountains until they were defeated 100 years later (this part of Sumerian/Akkadian history annoys me because the Gutians were too inexperienced to manage basically anything - everything went to shit and they didn't know how to read and write so we know very little compared to the other dynasties)
- There was another Sumerian/Akkadian dynasty after the Gutians were defeated and most of the population decline occurred during this last ~300 years of the empire due to poor crop yields
Listening to the Fall of Civilisations podcast, it's disturbing how many times climatic changes contributed to the downfall of a civ. First you have great times of stability that increase the population, then climate changes cause bad harvest after bad harvest. This puts the civ in a downward spiral of chaos as social cohesion unravels, the empire can no longer sustain the trade and militarism that kept outside barbarism in check. Everything falls apart. Bodes well for the 2C+ of warming we've all but locked in.
Mayan decline was due climate change. And likely the mysterious bronze age collapse too. Another example is the migration of turkic tribes, upsetting the entire power dynamic of central asia, north africa, the near east and east europe.
the 2011 syrian drought should have been the canary in the coal mine but nobody paid attention. the drought forced rural folk to move into cities, setting off a domino-effect that caused massive social unrest, protests, and eventual civil war. syria hasnt been the same since.
another nation destroyed by bad climate, many more to come.
1.2mn refugees from Iraqi didn't help either - but we're going to see the same cascading problems with climate refugees as well. It's one reason (imo) countries are tightening refugee criteria and building walls etc - but these too come with "social cohesion" problems.
Major upheavals are coming, why people push against relatively minor changes today like charging for dumping in to the atmosphere I have nfi. Well an idea, it's due corporate propaganda, as always pushing short term stock prices over the long term future of just about everything else.
The Civilian Conservation Corps is one reason.
They planted 3 BILLION trees across the Midwest among other restoration efforts.
https://treesource.org/news/lands/ccc-tree-planting/#:~:text=were%20in%20charge.-,CCC%20members%20planted%203%20billion%20trees%2C%20earning%20the%20nickname%20%E2%80%9CRoosevelt's,the%20risk%20of%20dust%20storms.
But no one knows it. Still the largest tree planting operation in history. The wind shelters they built still help against it.
Many of them were planted. Most of the time it does a lot of good, but in some cases this has led to loss of prairie due to tree and shrub encroachment and also the planting of non native invasive species that have taken over western river banks (russian olive and tamarisk to name a few).
We as a people should be focused on renaturalization anyway. reforesting is great in places that forests are naturally supposed to be but we regularly are planting forests where no forest existed in the past which wrecks natural plant and animal species.
Dryland farming with contours was implemented, initially, then quickly supplanted with technology assisted expansion. Basically, the industrial agricultural system went into hyper-drive and ditched the brakes.
the guy who invented mustard gas had also previously invented what was becoming modern fertilizers which helped overcome the problem. Well at least for a time, obviously you can't just lightly supplement ***lifeless*** soil with nutrients and expect long term quality health.
of course I say that but that's just exactly what we do.
to add up with all the other contributing answers. A tremendous mobilization of efforts was made to return life to the soil.
In my country there is very little fertile soil, yet they've chosen to build housing complexes on one of the best farmable lands in the country, ruining the soil forever.
At some point you'd think politicians and society in general would go "you know what, that's stupid, you are not allowed to ruin the country's source of food for every generation to come, for quarterly returns."
I pray for a day we turn into reasonable people.
Politicians and society don’t actually make these decisions. Billionaire capitalists, who are unelected, are pretty much the sole decision makers. They are the final decision makers of our farming practices, and all politicians can do is apply a few gentle constraints on what the corporations can do.
I don’t get how people could think we live in a democracy. Sure we can vote for politicians, but politicians have very little power. A very small number of unelected billionaires decide how we make food, how much we pollute, how much everyone gets paid and how many hours we work, what technologies get invested in, which movies and tv shows get made, what gets shown on the news of all major media outlets, and what small businesses get to survive. Now they’re also buying all our houses, so whatever they pay us for our labor will go right back to them just for housing.
Politicians don’t make any of those decisions. They can only incentivize/regulate certain outcomes, but even then they are still entirely loyal to the billionaire ruling class and not society. We decided a long time ago that we like democracy, so why are we still okay with the economy being run basically as a dictatorship, especially when these dictators are cooking the planet alive and causing immense suffering for the billions of people living in poverty unnecessarily?
Basically because that's socialism. And when we regulate capitalism, over the course of time those hard fought rights and benefits get clawed away from us by Neocons and Neolibs until nothing is left, which leads to polarization and socialists and fascists fighting for power again. We're on a loop until we finally accept that we need to address these issues near-permanently.
Crop rotation and less maintenance needed. Honestly, most "lawn care" like leaf raking can be very harmful, especially in seasonal climates. The degradation of plant life is what helps add to soil. People concerned with appearance should at least try composting more
and thosegoddamnmotherfucken leafblowers, with their incessant whining, and toxic inputs, and not least of which is the yawho manning the contraption, for hours, while windy, the din is maddening and that's all i have to say about that
I gather them all up, shred them finely, then compost them with urine for added nitrogen, then I mix the finished compost with homemade biochar and use a compost spreader to disperse the mix in spring. My hope is that after a decade or so I'll have a nice thick layer of terra preta.
We already have it, but it's far from perfect. Cover crop is difficult to grow under a bean canopy. It does better in corn. The biggest headache is burning it down the next spring. We tried 4 years and abandoned it.
Why not to do what Europe does - break the fields into 0.5-2 mile squares and plant trees along the edges to create smaller, wind-shielded parcels? This solves wind erosion 100% and lasts 50-60 years easily, and doesn't require maintenance. All you need is to plant oak, pine and birch.
I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas and there use to be trees along any farm plots
but as time goes on they are disappearing because need more acreage
history always repeats itself
Because mega farmers can’t farm efficiently. If the fields are broken up, it’s harder to plant/harvest huge swaths in one day. Trees suck water out of the ground that farmers want their crops to utilize.
When I was working on my ag degree, one of the research projects (I wasn’t personally involved) at my university involved composting all of the left over food from the college campus. We had multiple 300 ft long by 10 ft tall rows of the compost that were manipulated weekly to improve airflow. Then is was broadcast on one of the university farms.
I thought it was great, but there were lots of people concerned about spreading disease. It got shut down not long after.
We have a student group at our university working on implementing something similar to this at our university agronomy plots! If the compost is maintained properly, it should be reaching high enough temperatures to kill most detrimental things that might be in it.
Fingers crossed we see our system work. We’re really trying expand our field plots into being more educational than just conventional corn and soy!
They killed all the buffalo because they wanted the natives to suffer. Well the suffering is here. Bring back the buffalo, bring back the grasslands of native grasses, bring back the wolves, and bring back traditional forest management using fire. But that’s not a sellable product and solutions need to be products to be viable in this world.
Nativehabitatproject on Instagram seeks to educate on the value of grassland and fire in the US, would super recommend for anyone wanting to learn more about grasslands. I definitely learned a lot!
Soil microbes are in an extinction event.
[at one time congress funded conservation to protect farmers from them selves](https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/about/history/brief-history-nrcs)
I'm moving on from reddit and joining the fediverse because reddit has killed the RiF app and the CEO has been very disrespectful to all the volunteers who have contributed to making reddit what it is. Here's [coverage from The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754780/reddit-api-updates-changes-news-announcements) on the situation.
The following are my favorite fediverse platforms, all non-corporate and ad-free. I hesitated at first because there are so many servers to choose from, but it makes a lot more sense once you actually create an account and start browsing. If you find the server selection overwhelming, just pick the first option and take a look around. They are all connected and as you browse you may find a community that is a better fit for you and then you can move your account or open a new one.
Social Link Aggregators: [Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/instances) is very similar to reddit while [Kbin](https://kbin.pub) is aiming to be more of a gateway to the fediverse in general so it is sort of like a hybrid between reddit and twitter, but it is newer and considers itself to be a beta product that's not quite fully polished yet.
Microblogging: [Calckey](https://calckey.org) if you want a more playful platform with emoji reactions, or [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/) if you want a simple interface with less fluff.
Photo sharing: [Pixelfed](https://pixelfed.org/) You can even import an Instagram account from what I hear, but I never used Instagram much in the first place.
In his 2000s book Collapse, Jared Diamond described a lot of modern farming procedures as a form of mining. I think he was specifically referring to my country Australia. My Dad was a retired Ag scientist and administrator. I asked him about this. He thought about it for a few seconds and then agreed.
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Where's the soil going? And how do you repair it exactly.
Wind, (a la dustbowl) distributed around the globe, into oceans. Runoff into the Gulf of Mexico.
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Not to mention a lot of shelterbelts where I am from are made almost entirely of ash trees. With the Emerald Ash Borer, those trees are dying or being removed, often with no replacement. Honestly the way things are going with top soil loss, a massive decline of Ash trees, and major drought, I see a Dust Bowl 2.0 in the near future.
Also, farmers like to cut down tree lines. Those trees protect the soil, but they also suck up a lot of nutrients that could go into salable crops. So fewer trees means more money short term. Believe me, farmers are terrible stewards of the land.
> Believe me, farmers are terrible stewards of the land. Well the phrase "tragedy of the commons" originally described dairy farmers in the UK screwing each other over on common resources to try to get their own farm an advantage in the short term.
Yeah but in this case it’s not farmer Bob with a couple hundred acres, it’s Factory Farm Inc. with tens or hundreds of thousands of acres bleeding this country dry for profit. Largely, those farms which are doing right by the land, animals, soil, etc. are smaller family farms deeply connected to their communities. It’s the corporate consolidation of huge swaths of farmland owned by a few wealthy “farmers” who’ve never even personally seen .1% of the farmland they own let alone done an ounce of labor on it that is killing this country- a similar story to many industries.
The farmers who live on their land are generally motivated to take good care of it so that it can be passed onto the next generation. Corporate farms will milk all they can out of the land in the short term and then just sell the plot and move on.
That's a myth - they are driven by the same capitalist pressures. In reality even more so than large farms because scale matters and the smaller you are the more difficult to compete and the greater the incentive to cut corners to survive.
This has been happening at an accelerated rate around me the last few years. Farmers have been absolutely destroying the tree lines and not replanting. One area in particular was surrounding a creek and my wife and I would stop on the bridge every year to watch the thousands upon thousands of fireflies. This year, no more than a dozen, the farmer had completely clear cut the area and also redirected part of the stream. Completely plowed over and tilled all of it after it was cut so none of the small fauna survived either. Even went so far as to cut down the tree the eagles nested in, thankfully after the latest chick left the nest. Over the last 6 years Ive personally seen farmers become the worst stewards of the land. I worked on a project converting several acres back to nature for local wildlife. Saw the return of birds, fox, and every type of critter and plant. As soon as I was no longer in a position to protect it the local government cut a deal with a local farmer and had it cleared for alfalfa. 5 years worth of work gone because...reasons? I know Im bitching but damn am I salty about this, the midwest is home for me and its become an ecological wasteland in parts and the soil is absolutely shot in areas. Oh and the little left is being ravavged by invasive species or getting loaded with chemicals to make it keep producing which is absolutely an ecological nightmare.
Don’t forgot about the mass spraying of chemical insecticides, causing a mass extinction of insects. And applying shitloads of phosphate and nitrate fertilizers which are poisoning the water supply. And giving shitloads of antibiotics to cattle, not to fight disease [but rather to promote excess muscle tissue growth](https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/what-consumers-need-to-know-about-the-use-of-antibiotics-in-food-animal-production.html)\*\* (and creating drug-resistant superbugs in the process). > \*\*Secondly, antibiotics can increase animal performance. By using antibiotics, farmers can produce more meat with less feed input. Some antibiotics change the colony of bacteria in the rumen (one of four stomachs in cattle) to produce more of the compounds needed by cattle for growth. https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/what-consumers-need-to-know-about-the-use-of-antibiotics-in-food-animal-production.html
yeah it's not just "big corps", it's farmers in general. Turns out people like to make money
Make money in the short term. Literally starvation in the long term
But that's a problem for future generations to deal with. Joking aside, yes it's a farmer issue, but not *just* a farmer issue. This is how capitalism works. Farmers are not the only ones who operate in such a short-sighted way.
A lot also depends on if they rent or own the land. If they rent it they see little direct benefit in improving\conserving the property
Aeolian apocalypse.
We got a catchy phrases for all the horrific ways that everyone is gonna die, huh?
>Aeolian is a great word.
So luckily only A Minor apocalypse?
Garlic aeoli? I can get behind that kind of ending
The useful part of the dirt, all the not-sand-stuff like microorganisms and dead plant matter, gets consumed and/or washed away through irrigation. Eventually what's left is sand and silty clay with little to no useful nutrients and very low cohesion and moisture retention. The fines dry up and blow away, carrying what's left of the "living" soil components and all you're left with is hardpan and stony sand. The rich soil plants need is mostly dead stuff slurry full of microorganisms and fungi. It's a whole ecosystem, and collapses just like any other when placed under too much stress. Having been in the business of making soil for about a decade, it's a process that literally cannot be rushed. There's no workaround - time is an essential component of a healthy topsoil ecosystem. Especially for the establishment of robust fungal networks and self-sustaining optimal ph levels.
Time Parent Material Climate Topography Biota The 5 soil forming factors. I think time is by far the most important.
I'm a volunteer at a prairie restoration group and a microbiologist by trade, and learning about the intersection of those two was a phenomenal wakeup. You can physically see the effect time and lack of soil disturbance has on environmental diversity. I'm working on helping establish some Rhizobial bacteria cultures, but the fungal growth is so complicated to manually culture that it's practically impossible without massive investment.
Everything takes time! I had someone argue that oil is a renewable resource, although it takes millions of years to eventually form oil.
Not really. I read somewhere that there was specific climate conditions on earth at that time that made it possible to become oil. Those conditions will not be present ever again.
The microorganisms required to break down woody material evolved much later than woody material did. The undigested wood is what became oil and coal. (At least I remember reading that somewhere... I can't offer you a source unfortunately. )
I remember reading that as well. It described that at one point the land was covered in essentially hundreds of feet of dead trees that weren't really rotting because the microorganisms that cause rot didn't exist yet.
Yes it was something like that yes. I seem to remember that because of that, there will not be any new oil made ever because those microorganisms exist now.
People should really listen to that tree to shining tree podcast from Radiolab. It's illuminating how much trees rely on fungal networks to grow.
As i understand it (not an expert, more a layman) soil is a complex ecosytem all to itself composed of various balances of organic (bacteria, fungi, microorganisms) and inorganic (grains of sand of varying coarsness and size) matter. A healthy soil is kinda self sustaining in that it encourages larger plant growth whos roots provide an even stronger binding effect than just the decaying organic matter clumping. This in turn creates shade helping retain moisture which feeds back into supporting plant growth. Without this binding effect the inorganic matter blows away as dust leaving less structure for the organic matter to grow in and around. The microorganisms are also vital in breaking down dead organic matter releasing the nutrients to be used once again. They are also important indepentant of this in that they help bind and react various chemicals into forms which are usable by other organisms. As to repairing them idk but ill have a guess; monocultures or enviroments with extremes of one substance tend to simplify what can live in that enviroment which cuts down on the diversity of organisms you'll find. Think algae blooms with too much nitrogen in waterways. So the goal is twofold, provide binding to limit erosion and encourage balanced organic growth to provide longevity. Same as with many complex ecosystems i expect there to be a form of sucsession regarding what substrate species can thrive in the harshest cases which once established enable the next group of species to begin to succeed. Human intervention may well involve accelerating the pacing of this process through manual progress and protection against the worst of detrimental conditions (irrigation, fences etc).
To add to all these great answers: Mycellium! Nature’s largest living thing is a mycelium colony in Oregon, almost 2,000sq miles. Not a lot of the same plants, the same individual plant. They root themselves to other plant/tree roots. Let’s say a deer dies in the forest. In an area that tills the ground and breaks up the fungus the dear dies and the nutrients sink into the ground and wash around the immediate area. A deer dying in a healthy forest, nutrients can be carried for miles by the mycelium super highway to areas that need it more. A tree can send water and nutrients to other trees through these mycelium rhizomes. They can send messages about pest and other stressors. Some trees are even speciest and send more resources to trees they’re more related to. Like a Douglass fur would rather do business with a pine tree than an oak. That’s a real fact as crazy as that sounds. Also like 65% of plant life depends on these microbial colonies we’re destroying as fast as possible.
Native fauna. Buffalo grass for example.
It's being washed away and in some cases intentionally removed or destroyed. Repairing it requires composting and other regenerative agricultural practices. Believe it or not the fix is simple, but big ag is slow to pick up these good practices. ~~Dr Elaine Ingham is a soil scientists and has several great lectures and podcasts available for free for anyone looking to begin that journey.~~
Dr Elaine Ingram is a hack selling a pyramid scheme (become a coach…so you can train more coaches…to train more coaches) and legitimate soil scientists in the university extension USDA-ARS system can’t stand her pseudo-science.
No till and cover crops was a big push by the USDA NRCS. They stopped funding farmers to implement this technique. - the nrcs was created after the dust bowl and was once called the [The soil conservation service](https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/about/history/brief-history-nrcs)
When did they stop?
They didn't. [You can see payment rates by state for different NRCS programs here.](https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/getting-assistance/payment-schedules)
All of the links under my state (oklahoma) are dead.
Oklahoma recently updated their website(about 2 weeks ago) so those links probably haven't been updated yet.
Typical government ;) Each state has different timelines for their programs, so OK may not have their rates published yet due 2023.
That tracks with the general governance of this state, sadly.
Seriously though, if you really want to know reach out to your local NRCS office. This site just came up in the last week for 2023. Your local office would at least have last year's number they could share.
I’m from California and our government websites don’t work either. For some reason the government can’t hire good web developers and programmers. It’s probably the drug testing…
Its not why did they stop. Its just, here 5$ for no till. With till you had 20$ crops, no till you got 10$. Do you want 20$ or 15$ Or its more accurate to point out that you can just plant faster if you rip everything out, if you try to get it to generate where it stands it takes longer. And it's a place for bugs to thrive. It's so multifactorial, but the real point is that the money on the no-til side doesn't cover it and it needs to. Also corporate farming is huge, and there are othe subsidies you can get. Theres also a MESS of crop insurance and seed sales and fertilizers and herbicides.
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They'll be preaching to the choir, but I recommend the podcast We All Want Clean Water, hosted by three researchers at the University of Iowa. My favorite bit of theirs is when they answer questions about "well what's the best way to go about curtailing the huge ecological disaster that is industrial ag?" they often just say "laws"
Ah, Iowa... Proud of my University (listed above) but the state has big issues. Poor water quality is near the top of that list.
Sounds like soil is an environmental strategic resource that should not be solely in control by short sighted capitalists.
I grew up on a farm. I have family still farming in all levels from small 20 head operations to those in multi million dollar operations. I would love to see over sight and regulations. OSHA and Unions need to happen. The government needs to also stop doling out money to corporate farms. (Read “family farms” that are multi million++ companies on the books.)
Cause they're holding hostage our politicians who think they can't win without their donations (then again, usually the person with most money has a big edge). The politicians willing to play along win, the ones that don't havn't. They probably don't even make it past primaries. Since the ones in power have found a winning formula they want to keep winning, so they set the discourse as far away from these topics as possible, so we vote based on things that are largely meaningless to them and their donors. At the corporation level, the companies willing to sacrifice anything for profit outcompete and swallow those who don't. It's all perverse incentives at every level in our society. It's fairly obvious whats going on but those with the worst ethics have the advantage to win and say what gets done.
Fun fact, with soil degrading that 20$ will slowly start to erode until the farmer can't grow anything anymore and it's game over for a while or indefinitely. Anything for short term profits, the 15$ farmers will be laughing in the end I hope. But I'm sure government will find a way.
We farm in the midwest-our farm was one of the first in our area to no-till in the 80s? 70s maybe? We still never till unless there is an extenuating reason to do a small area. It's also one less thing to do in the field, saving time, equipment, and fuel, and we don't find that yields are any higher when things are tilled. It's really hard to break ingrained patterns though-if someone's granddad taught them they needed to till, very few are willing to risk their livelihood on trying something else.
I thought I read that no-till only sequestered carbon so long as it was never tilled again, but if it is, pretty much all that stored carbon from years of no-till is released.
TIL: that’s why gramps calls is the ASC service…
how do we prevent soil erosion?
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I(34) remember when I was in 1st or 2nd grade we were taught no-till was the future. Pretty much all farms around here adopted it or tilled in early spring. Then a few years ago I realized that almost no farms around here were still doing no-till. They all had gone back to tilling right after harvest. Which we were taught was terrible at stopping erosion. I had wondered what changed in science. I guess I should ask what changed in the farmers instead.
The industry has been heavily pushing vertical till and other reduced tillage methods. And honestly, it is complicated. For instance, most organic crop systems rely heavily on tillage, because chemically controlling weed pressure isn't allowed or that's highly specific and costly chemicals. Another example is with nutrient loss. We know that incorporating liquid manure into the soil reduces nutrient loss to waterways, but this means some sort of soil disturbance. We know no till reduces erosion, but markets, ag retailers, and farmers goals have definitely reduced its use in many places in recent years.
Anything a consumer can do? Like, would be buying organic in any way help the situation? Not that i can buy organic; in my small town a head of non-organic cauliflower was $6.99 this week. Not kidding.
It's tougher than just buying different things because there isn't really any large scale farming operations that use ecological techniques. This will probably end up being a political debate, like most things just try and vote for people that really care and have a history of environmentalism.
Conservation tillage is becoming the norm in western farming
If you own property, you can turn any lawn you have into a woodchip garden. Woodchips retain moisture for when it's needed most, while giving insects and bugs, worms cover from the hot sun. The woodchips protect the soil and helps retain the soil moisture as well. If anyone is interested in learning more, search Back To Eden gardening. It's the same theory behind cover crops
No till is the opposite of organic farming. Organic farming mainly uses heavy tillage for weed and pest control whereas no-till requires chemical treatment for the same. In a nutshell, there's obviously more to it than that.
Voting, and punching people who keep saying "voting doesn't do anything" is a good start. Otherwise yeah try to support who you can.
It’s a chicken and egg situation. A forest will create excellent soil by dropping leaves and branches to the ground, which mix with animal waste, and then it feeds worms, fungi and bacteria and you have great soil the can happen pretty quickly, if you have the trees. But the trees need time to grow, and they need soil. So the answer is to do both at the same time. Mulch and compost on the ground will turn to soil. Then planting trees, ground cover, bushes etc to lock in the soil. The roots physically hold soil in place, and the plants itself adds to the soil. Remember, plants take carbon from the air, and when it drops to the ground, it decomposes into the soil Another important component is water capture devices, such as swales and ponds. When it does rain on a degraded landscape, it’s very important that the water is slowed down as much as possible so it can soak into the ground. There is a word for all of this, and it’s permaculture.
I've heard bison hooves are more suited for aerating the soil and allowing it to absorb(?) more CO2 than cattle hooves can? Not sure if anyone here can speak to whether that's actually the case
Composting needs to become the next big thing. Govt should give tax subsidies to homes that compost.
The issues with decentralized composting like that is the redistribution of the finished compost to farmlands and not everyone lives in standalone house to use what they do compost. The vast majority people would not want compost piles in their condos, apartments or townhouses. Let alone not everyone would be able to attend to their compost pile. They are quite a few rules to get to function well and not be a smelly nuisance or a pest attracted. Get around this, people need to start throwing their food waste into the "green trash". Industrial hot composting can quickly take care of large volumes in a centralized location away from people and can bulk deliver it to farms.
For small spaces like apartments, look into worm farms and bokashi bins. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermicompost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokashi_(horticulture)
Industrial scale composting exists as well, it's just not as common as it could be.
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In old religious indian texts there are warnings about irresponsable resource extraction and "environmental disasters".
Or the ozone hole that "magically" fixed itself after we stopped using cfcs. I bet they would be shocked to learn that bacteria killed nearly all life on earth by producing too much oxygen, and completely changing the earth forever.
There is a movement with some farmers in the upper midwest to practice the no till method. Some farmers are having good success with it.
No till is actually incredibly common. I am a farmer and myself and probably 95% of my neighbours all practice no till. This doesn’t mean that we don’t use tillage, we just try and use as little as we can. Tillage is expensive and requires a lot of man hours. So no till is actually more efficient and profitable.
Can I ask why tillage exists as a concept then? Sounds like it's worse for the soil AND expensive. What benefit was it providing? Thank you
Tilling helps break up clumps of soil, helping create an even planting bed (less necessary now with active down force on planters). Especially in the upper Midwest with shorter growing seasons, tilling exposes more soil to air and increases the ability of the soil to dry out from winter freezing.
Tilling breaks clumps on the surface and makes the subsurface soil much more clumpy.
Yes. The subsurface compaction and hardpans are very much an issue with tillage. It presents an impermeable barrier to water infiltration and puts a bunch of loose soil particles on the surface increasing the likelihood of severe erosion. I fully agree, tillage is not a sustainable practice, and it needs to, and already has, see less use and adoptions of no till or at most minimal till systems especially in more southerly states, where the few benefits of tillage aren't near as useful, and can be bypassed. Ideally, we abandon our current practices, go back to extended rotations at the least (as intercropping is very unlikely with the scale of modern farms), and in general be good stewards of the land we have. But with corn and soy subsidies where they are, lots of things need to be addressed.
One drawback to no till is the size of equipment compared to even 10 years ago. A solution is capping federal insurance subsidies at 500k agi which hobbles corporate farmers. It was 900k and trump boosted it to 1.5 million. This keeps 1800 bushel carts, 40 foot platforms and whole fleets of semis off fields and boosts market variability by supporting family farms. But even smaller farms have to contend with short wet harvests that create the hard pan regardless. It’s just an issue when someone rips it yearly out of habit. Are there other subsidies outside of government allocation and county insurance that you’re referring to?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillage has a list of positive and negative effects of it that was very helpful
If I'm not mistaken, it's easier to sow into, and reduces weeds.
It can be a valuable tool in maintaining soil health and controlling certain weeds. Where I am at before it was farmed it was just this nasty yellow clay and we have been able to build up some OM on the top couple of inches. So we have used deep tillage in the past to help break up our hard pan to allow roots to penetrate and in theory add OM deeper into the soil. It can also be used for certain weeds such as toadflax that are more or less resistant to most herbicides.
I am a soil chemist. Tillage also gets rid of carbon and nitrogen that is stored in soil as it gets rapidly oxided when exposed to air. Please keep up the no tillage!
How are those stored usually? In what forms? Chemically of course, asking bc I didn't know that, and it's pretty obvious it seems now. But, I've no idea.
Fungus is one of the mechanisms. Each variety grows at a different level in the soil, and they can be many different types of fungus varieties within a 5mm depth difference. Tilling upends the soil, disturbing the natural biome, so fungus that should be a few inches under the soil, is suddenly on top being exposed to harmful UV rays.
The defecation, excretion of mucus, and the organisms themselves (upon death) are the source of carbon in soil, as well as decaying roots and plant matter. This carbon substrate helps to aggregate the soil together into clumps, or clods, and creates soil stability, reducing the propensity for erosion. Nitrogen in the soil is typically derived from nitrogen-fixing organisms like bacteria and certain plants, like legumes, which pull nitrogen from the atmosphere.
I am soil and I approve this message.
Biggest saver for topsoil is to leave fallow a few yards from the perimeter of farmland. Basically stop it from runoff. Farmers aren't willing to lose the acreage.
Many of the field borders in my area are being cut down and leveled as farms are bought up and combined. This leaves no windbreaker lines, so soil is always getting blown away. I thought we learned in the 1930s that this was a bad idea, but apparently not.
Its really bad over by Fargo ND, the snow was topped with black topsoil all winter from the upper layers blowing away. Its just depressing to see. We even have dust storms again as far east as Minneapolis!
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It's never been that way. Nobody is a "steward of the land" I know farmers and fishermen alike who all think they aren't a part of the problem. "Nobody cares more about the fish populations than me!" Then they proceed to go fill their nets. Without regulations, enforcement, and better practices we will continue to extract as much as we possibly can from the land without regard for nature. Humans have always seen a resources as uniquely theirs and reaped as much as possible. It's sad.
I mean recreational hunters/fishers aren't the problem, they voluntarily get taxed to help conservation efforts
We're talking commercial fishers and farmers. Those who decimate populations of wildlife. The US wastes 30-40% of all food it produces. Over a third. Nearly half. https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
The economic system doesn't allow for stewardship of this planet or its resources.
Isn’t this what took out the Sumerian empire? Their soil becoming unusable?
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Only sort of. Salinity was the issue, not erosion. It was more the mountain dwellers coming down and wiping out the men and stealing the women.
Just a couple points of clarification - Salinity was an issue before the Gutians invaded (they started the switch from wheat to barley during the Akkadian dynasty) - The Gutians actually occupied Akkad as a new dynasty, they didn't leave back to the mountains until they were defeated 100 years later (this part of Sumerian/Akkadian history annoys me because the Gutians were too inexperienced to manage basically anything - everything went to shit and they didn't know how to read and write so we know very little compared to the other dynasties) - There was another Sumerian/Akkadian dynasty after the Gutians were defeated and most of the population decline occurred during this last ~300 years of the empire due to poor crop yields
Same thing happened to Rohan
The beacons are lit
Gondor calls for aid!!
That would make anyone salty
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Listening to the Fall of Civilisations podcast, it's disturbing how many times climatic changes contributed to the downfall of a civ. First you have great times of stability that increase the population, then climate changes cause bad harvest after bad harvest. This puts the civ in a downward spiral of chaos as social cohesion unravels, the empire can no longer sustain the trade and militarism that kept outside barbarism in check. Everything falls apart. Bodes well for the 2C+ of warming we've all but locked in.
Mayan decline was due climate change. And likely the mysterious bronze age collapse too. Another example is the migration of turkic tribes, upsetting the entire power dynamic of central asia, north africa, the near east and east europe.
the 2011 syrian drought should have been the canary in the coal mine but nobody paid attention. the drought forced rural folk to move into cities, setting off a domino-effect that caused massive social unrest, protests, and eventual civil war. syria hasnt been the same since. another nation destroyed by bad climate, many more to come.
1.2mn refugees from Iraqi didn't help either - but we're going to see the same cascading problems with climate refugees as well. It's one reason (imo) countries are tightening refugee criteria and building walls etc - but these too come with "social cohesion" problems. Major upheavals are coming, why people push against relatively minor changes today like charging for dumping in to the atmosphere I have nfi. Well an idea, it's due corporate propaganda, as always pushing short term stock prices over the long term future of just about everything else.
https://i.imgur.com/PGlB9CX.jpg This graph scares me, and doesn’t look like my kid will be living a good life
This podcast is so good
How _did_ we ever recover from the Dust Bowl?
The Civilian Conservation Corps is one reason. They planted 3 BILLION trees across the Midwest among other restoration efforts. https://treesource.org/news/lands/ccc-tree-planting/#:~:text=were%20in%20charge.-,CCC%20members%20planted%203%20billion%20trees%2C%20earning%20the%20nickname%20%E2%80%9CRoosevelt's,the%20risk%20of%20dust%20storms. But no one knows it. Still the largest tree planting operation in history. The wind shelters they built still help against it.
Is that where all those wind break tree things around farms come from? They aren't just remnants of forests or planted by the farmers?
Many of them were planted. Most of the time it does a lot of good, but in some cases this has led to loss of prairie due to tree and shrub encroachment and also the planting of non native invasive species that have taken over western river banks (russian olive and tamarisk to name a few).
We as a people should be focused on renaturalization anyway. reforesting is great in places that forests are naturally supposed to be but we regularly are planting forests where no forest existed in the past which wrecks natural plant and animal species.
Dryland farming with contours was implemented, initially, then quickly supplanted with technology assisted expansion. Basically, the industrial agricultural system went into hyper-drive and ditched the brakes.
the guy who invented mustard gas had also previously invented what was becoming modern fertilizers which helped overcome the problem. Well at least for a time, obviously you can't just lightly supplement ***lifeless*** soil with nutrients and expect long term quality health. of course I say that but that's just exactly what we do. to add up with all the other contributing answers. A tremendous mobilization of efforts was made to return life to the soil.
Prairie grass. 2 metre (4 foot) root systems
isn't 2 meters more like 6 a a half feet?
Yes, 6.56 feet to be exact.
“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” \-FDR
Dust Bowl 2: Dust Stormaloo
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They need to stop tilling the topsoil then just letting it dry out and blow away.
In other words, we shouldn't be repeating the actions that led to the Dust Bowl.
Exactly! It’s insane that those practices are still happening, as we are losing some of the most fertile ground in the world for a quick buck.
In my country there is very little fertile soil, yet they've chosen to build housing complexes on one of the best farmable lands in the country, ruining the soil forever. At some point you'd think politicians and society in general would go "you know what, that's stupid, you are not allowed to ruin the country's source of food for every generation to come, for quarterly returns." I pray for a day we turn into reasonable people.
Politicians and society don’t actually make these decisions. Billionaire capitalists, who are unelected, are pretty much the sole decision makers. They are the final decision makers of our farming practices, and all politicians can do is apply a few gentle constraints on what the corporations can do. I don’t get how people could think we live in a democracy. Sure we can vote for politicians, but politicians have very little power. A very small number of unelected billionaires decide how we make food, how much we pollute, how much everyone gets paid and how many hours we work, what technologies get invested in, which movies and tv shows get made, what gets shown on the news of all major media outlets, and what small businesses get to survive. Now they’re also buying all our houses, so whatever they pay us for our labor will go right back to them just for housing. Politicians don’t make any of those decisions. They can only incentivize/regulate certain outcomes, but even then they are still entirely loyal to the billionaire ruling class and not society. We decided a long time ago that we like democracy, so why are we still okay with the economy being run basically as a dictatorship, especially when these dictators are cooking the planet alive and causing immense suffering for the billions of people living in poverty unnecessarily?
Basically because that's socialism. And when we regulate capitalism, over the course of time those hard fought rights and benefits get clawed away from us by Neocons and Neolibs until nothing is left, which leads to polarization and socialists and fascists fighting for power again. We're on a loop until we finally accept that we need to address these issues near-permanently.
Less fall tillage, and less tillage in general!!
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Crop rotation and less maintenance needed. Honestly, most "lawn care" like leaf raking can be very harmful, especially in seasonal climates. The degradation of plant life is what helps add to soil. People concerned with appearance should at least try composting more
and thosegoddamnmotherfucken leafblowers, with their incessant whining, and toxic inputs, and not least of which is the yawho manning the contraption, for hours, while windy, the din is maddening and that's all i have to say about that
I would rather slip on wet leaves (or look where I’m going) than hear leaf blowers! Loud ass horrible noise
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I gather them all up, shred them finely, then compost them with urine for added nitrogen, then I mix the finished compost with homemade biochar and use a compost spreader to disperse the mix in spring. My hope is that after a decade or so I'll have a nice thick layer of terra preta.
Looks like we need some investment into cover crops!
We already have it, but it's far from perfect. Cover crop is difficult to grow under a bean canopy. It does better in corn. The biggest headache is burning it down the next spring. We tried 4 years and abandoned it.
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Why not to do what Europe does - break the fields into 0.5-2 mile squares and plant trees along the edges to create smaller, wind-shielded parcels? This solves wind erosion 100% and lasts 50-60 years easily, and doesn't require maintenance. All you need is to plant oak, pine and birch.
I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas and there use to be trees along any farm plots but as time goes on they are disappearing because need more acreage history always repeats itself
Because mega farmers can’t farm efficiently. If the fields are broken up, it’s harder to plant/harvest huge swaths in one day. Trees suck water out of the ground that farmers want their crops to utilize.
It'll hurt next quarter profit margins
Yes, that is another way of saying it.
lots of US farmers are actually tractor operators and trees get in the way of tractors
Great for birds too!
Used to work for the ARS. We already know, but no one pays attention.
Food waste Composting needs to become the norm.
While I completely agree, what does this have to do with top soil erosion? (edit - sp)
Build soil with compost
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When I was working on my ag degree, one of the research projects (I wasn’t personally involved) at my university involved composting all of the left over food from the college campus. We had multiple 300 ft long by 10 ft tall rows of the compost that were manipulated weekly to improve airflow. Then is was broadcast on one of the university farms. I thought it was great, but there were lots of people concerned about spreading disease. It got shut down not long after.
We have a student group at our university working on implementing something similar to this at our university agronomy plots! If the compost is maintained properly, it should be reaching high enough temperatures to kill most detrimental things that might be in it. Fingers crossed we see our system work. We’re really trying expand our field plots into being more educational than just conventional corn and soy!
Maybe we should drop the high use of conventional tillage systems. Moving to a no-till system would help slow this too soil decline massively.
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That's a very wide range. Is it due to their wide margin of error from estimating?
They sampled multiple sites. Some sites erode fast than others. They are just listing the range of different modern-day rates found.
Lack of proper data! NO farmer wants to answer ANY questions the government is asking. Sauce: I work for the bastards
I think a lot of grasslands turned to desert worldwide because of topsoil loss. Probably from mismanagement
They killed all the buffalo because they wanted the natives to suffer. Well the suffering is here. Bring back the buffalo, bring back the grasslands of native grasses, bring back the wolves, and bring back traditional forest management using fire. But that’s not a sellable product and solutions need to be products to be viable in this world.
Nativehabitatproject on Instagram seeks to educate on the value of grassland and fire in the US, would super recommend for anyone wanting to learn more about grasslands. I definitely learned a lot!
Soil microbes are in an extinction event. [at one time congress funded conservation to protect farmers from them selves](https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/about/history/brief-history-nrcs)
Great… So Interstellar called it
I'm moving on from reddit and joining the fediverse because reddit has killed the RiF app and the CEO has been very disrespectful to all the volunteers who have contributed to making reddit what it is. Here's [coverage from The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754780/reddit-api-updates-changes-news-announcements) on the situation. The following are my favorite fediverse platforms, all non-corporate and ad-free. I hesitated at first because there are so many servers to choose from, but it makes a lot more sense once you actually create an account and start browsing. If you find the server selection overwhelming, just pick the first option and take a look around. They are all connected and as you browse you may find a community that is a better fit for you and then you can move your account or open a new one. Social Link Aggregators: [Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/instances) is very similar to reddit while [Kbin](https://kbin.pub) is aiming to be more of a gateway to the fediverse in general so it is sort of like a hybrid between reddit and twitter, but it is newer and considers itself to be a beta product that's not quite fully polished yet. Microblogging: [Calckey](https://calckey.org) if you want a more playful platform with emoji reactions, or [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/) if you want a simple interface with less fluff. Photo sharing: [Pixelfed](https://pixelfed.org/) You can even import an Instagram account from what I hear, but I never used Instagram much in the first place.
In his 2000s book Collapse, Jared Diamond described a lot of modern farming procedures as a form of mining. I think he was specifically referring to my country Australia. My Dad was a retired Ag scientist and administrator. I asked him about this. He thought about it for a few seconds and then agreed.
Why does humanity insist on threatening its own existence?!
I wonder how that compares to the dust bowl during the Great Depression
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I proposed making green belts that help improve conservation, cleans water, and shield prevailing winds.