This weeks excuse for the billionaires to increase their take.
It's no joke: conventional Ag is extremely tough on soils, and depletes soil organic matter, and reduces topsoil thickness though ploughing. Add on top of that contamination from various sources (not just Ag) and the picture is bleak.
conventional ag
Industrial farming is incredibly harmful to the soil. There are other methods that are far less harmful and can actually be beneficial to soil health, the problem is they don't scale well.
There is a great YouTube channel called No-Till Growers that really goes into some cool farming methods that are much less destructive
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hNyu4_RWGZo
Edit: this is probably a better video and I think it's in a playlist about soil health. But honestly all of his videos are great
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4aZhevnaLWw&list=PLGMgkMLKOtWv0efQXhQtuu01WfWL5yBDf&index=1&pp=iAQB
Conventional Ag is a method, distinguishing it from regenerative Ag etc.
Right?? My first thought was, another excuse to raise prices and shrinkflate even more. Because that’s the solution! 🤬
I'm gonna fucking uninstall this app I'm having a nervous breakdown fuck off i just want some memes not existential fucking dread GAAAAHHHH
tell me about it, dude.
We're on the precipice of total collapse. Farmlands failing, Ocean Currents are collapsing, Climate change is accelerating, Intellectuals are being demonized in favor of ignorance and fascism... The possibility of WW3 hanging over us thanks to all of the previous.
the next 20 years are going to be the cursed time that "may you live in interesting times" was talking about.
How nice of you to conveniently list out all the current events worth having an existential crisis over, in a reply to a person having an existential crisis
I exist to serve.
"Why is WW3 and world-ending climate change so stressful? Can't you just post memes about Mondays and lasagna?"
"Here's how the millennials' love of vegetables is destroying the planet"
“Fewer Millennials are farming, and that’s bad for everyone.”
"Here's why feudalism is the remedy for selfish, lazy millennials."
This is gonna happen, I guarantee it 😂.
This damn country.
Ahh yes. Our weekly once in a life time crisis. Right on cue.
Reduced tillage is a big one. There’s a massive misconception out there that the best thing you can do for your soil is go dig it up and turn it over. Soil is alive, and tilling disrupts microbial and fungal action that contribute to its health - by physical rupture of fungal colonies but also by exposing underground life to more sunlight and oxygen. As you kill the top several inches by physical disruption, it becomes dust much more easily washed away by wind and rain: erosion.
We do it to remove weeds before planting, and loosen soil to ease germination. Planting mixed crops or cooperative cover crops are good alternatives for weeds which are massively underused. And overall we may just need to accept some immediate productivity loss in order to ensure long term survival. Farmers are smart, but not smart enough. Too much emphasis on operating tools and fertilizers to optimize yield like land is a machine you can tune, and not enough focus on reducing the need for all this with a more subtle approach with increasing long term yield but perhaps lower yield next year. With farmers always one season away from bankruptcy, you can see why they make the wrong trade offs.
Soil depletion is at the bottom of a lot of civilization collapses in event history. The whole reason the Egyptians lasted as long as they did is that the annual Nile flooding replenished their soil with minerals brought down from higher ground by the flow of water. It wasn’t just the water itself.
And overall we may just need to accept some immediate productivity loss in order to ensure long term survival.
I see a massive issue in this plan.
No till or low toll is pretty much the default on most soil types now, at least on North America and Europe. There some areas where its not the case but I wouldn't judge anyone unless I had many years of experience in their particular environment. Sometimes what looks dumb from outside isn't possible or feasible when you're in the middle of it.
One problem we've found with no till after 20 years is stratification compaction just from rainfall and equipment, even with tramlining. Its starting to seem like it needs a working up every few years, or planting down to forage and more active livestock action. The advantage with that would be better carbon sequestration but its not really profitable if land prices/rent are high in that area.
And yes, in a profession with millions of dollars on the line every season, its really hard to make changes if you're just getting by.
The best thing for the environment and soil health is to not farm it. There is no such thing as environmentally friendly agriculture. It is always destructive.
We farm the land we do because it's profitable.
Irrigated acres make up less than 7% of the land area used for agriculture but produce 65% of the total yield.
Protected culture (greenhouses, high tunnels, etc) produce 10x to 20x more per acre than open field production.
Increasing our water storage and transport infrastructure on a massive scale, combined with expansion of protected culture could reduce our agricultural land requirements by as much as 80%. All wiithout changing our diets.
Imagine 80% of the farmland rewilded? Massive stretches of native ecosystems rebounding without fertilizer or sprays.
There are ways to create sustainable farms. It’s about diversity of crops and cycling what crops are grown each year.
https://www.edibleforestgardens.com/
There is no environmentally friendly factory farming. There is no healthy market-conscious farming. There are absolutely ways to be kind to the earth and grow food for a small community.
We need food for billions not a small community.
Food forest = lower environmental impact per acre but a higher environmental cost per kg of production. It's also highly environmentally irresponsible to add in invasive species, disease, and pests into and established ecosystem. These are all spread by seed, soil, and plant tissue of the crops we grow.
But…billions make up many small communities. That’s my point. Self-reliance, mutual aid. That’s the answer. Not globalized solutions.
But..... we don't have unlimited hectares of suitable land for people to fuck up. That's the point.... A food forest concept would require every last bit of ariable land on the planet and still not provide enough food for everyone.
The entire idea shows a complete lack of understanding what it takes to feed people at the scale of billions.
[Existential crisis threatening all human life] Oh no, the economy!
Dustbowl part Deux: Electric Boogaloo
staples like bread, vegetables, and meat.
One of these is vastly different from the others in terms of planetary destruction.
I know! Bread, right? It's bread. right?
Of course it's bread. Just think about the energy required to bake them!
Just use the animal agriculture land instead.
Expected to rise? Check your receipts; they’ve been rising.
Yes, we know. Everyone knows. But if you think this is bad, you have no idea how much worse it can get.
There’s also simply way too many people on earth as it is. My country - one of the smallest on earth- had 15 million people back in 1995. Right now, 30 years later, we’re at 18 million. And in 2037, they’re expecting 19 million.
Small numbers on a global scale, but definitely a lot of growth that’s causing issues. There’s a housing shortage, rising prices, healthcare and pensions are under threat, etc etc.
And there’s places that are much, much worse. For example, even India is encouraging population growth. When the country is still very poor. That’s going to help their economy in the short run, but it’s going to be a much larger problem down the line.
We need a controlled population decline, sooner rather than later.
Either we reduce our population in a controlled way, or nature is going to do it in a brutal one through famine, drought, and disease.
We’re going to top out around 12 billion according to demographers. And this is not some theory. Most developed countries are already seeing slowing birth rates and in cases like Japan it’s quite far along.
Given how inefficient and self-destructive most of our farming is, I’m quite optimistic that it’s possible to support 12 billion sustainably. I don’t like this talk of “too many people” because it leads us to generally devalue people. If we’re not actively planning for who to remove first then we’re at least shrugging when thousands die in a disaster.
We don’t have to cheapen ourselves this way. We just have to live and work smarter.
Perfect reason to hand out more BCs. Need to keep the pop for only wanted children. More human than tons of starving unwanted kids.
Well hopefully the world will figure this out, or population On a small scale it's so obvious that soil needs to be managed for a healthy garden or small farm. Big farms just throw down fertilizer (which was a world changing improvement to agriculture) and don't do enough to keep the soil alive and healthy. The headline "poor soil forces fertilizer use" is sort of backwards as it's the industrial farming that's sucked the life out of the soil.
The world will figure it out via mass migrations and war, unfortunately.
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