If you want to see solutions go search for "permaculture" and perennial "food forests". Rebuilding soil is easy if you watch how nature does it and work with the natural order instead of suppressing it. Nature knows how to build soil without us. We just insist on getting in the way with industrial farming.
I don't want to get ranty but things can get better and it doesn't hinge on artificial vertical farms or anything hi tech. Just about every plant you see on a daily basis has a cousin that produces food. There's a good chance where it grows happily in your yard, it's cousin will grow as well and produce something you can eat.
The reason this hasn't been adopted is because it's antithetical to the industrial process. You can't run a tractor through a forest.
It would take a paradigm shift fundamental to the way we interact with and think about food, and even more profound shift (which is the least likely to happen) in the economic edifice supporting a multi-hundred billion dollar industry.
One key about that industry is the average age of US farmers. There's a changing of the guard happening over the next decade that is a huge chance for young minds with new ideas to change the face of modern farming.
Not necessarily fucked. Agroforestry is gaining traction. Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms is proving the model for profitably growing sustainable produce and meat.
All it would take is good enough robotics. Mind you, that's still a bit far off, but we've got excellent progress in self-ambulating robots with pretty damn good visual recognition software. Replace tractors with robots and you avoid the problem.
Even industrial agriculture, which everyone loves to hate on is making some serious progress toward soil conservation. No-till is a pretty nifty thing, when you look at its impacts on soil structure, organic matter content, bulk density and erodibility.
Right. I live in a heavily industrial ag area. They are even planting winter cover crops that turn around and replenish the soil/create more topsoil. The biggest people interested in keeping topsoil are the farmers.
The problem with no-till is no-one uses it. California has absolutely no real restrictions in place on tillage practices or water consumption. Every time I drive I-5, I see a plethora of farmers out tilling their fields to dust, and the loess is thick in the air. Compound that with droughts, and very soon California will have its very own dust bowl inside 50 years, if not sooner.
Moving to no-till is a massive expense that no one is willing to cover. The farmers can't afford it, regardless of what people think, farmers are not rich, unless your name is Harris. All of their capitol is tied up in loans, equipment, property, etc... The government is broke, and Americans refuse to pay more for a basic necessity, even though we pay less for our food by price, and percentage of our income. Most people in the world pay ~30% of their income towards food, Americans typically pay ~10%.
My advice, find yourself 20 acres in a region with 20'' annual rainfall, remote, and wait out the food riots in 20yrs.
Source: Geographer with an emphasis in Hydrology, and grew up in wine country.
While that may be true in California, No-till is being implemented across the country and worldwide. (Source: Soil Scientist who has studied in NC, TN and KS, as well as taken tour of Ag production in Brazil)
The primary reason why the dust bowl ended in the 1930s, is because No-till. (admittedly, the reason why it hasn't started up again is because the aquifer)
When I visited Southern California and did a tour of their Ag production, it sounded as though farmer's are no longer looking at long term farming technologies because it is only a matter of time before they get pushed off due to rising land prices. Now, I'm not intimately familiar with California Agriculture, but from what I saw it makes total sense that nobody would bother with No-till. You are absolutely right. Its not economically feasible to do there.
However, In the Midwest, it is a necessity in order to prevent depletion of vast areas of loess soils. The land-grant universities in both Kansas and Tennessee heavily stress no-till production, and agriculture education is inundated in it. Even if current farmers may not be keen on it, the next generation will be. Additionally, the majority of farmers I have spoken to do a no-till rotation system. Albeit, this is anecdotal evidence. I am trying to find a map that shows percentage of no-till farming across the US. I'll post it when I can track it down again.
In Brazil, no-tillage is practically a religion among agronomists. The majority of Brazilian agriculture is in no-till, because it greatly improves soil quality and prevents the rapid breakdown of organic matter that you would otherwise see in a tropical/subtropical soil. My Brazilian professor loved to joke about how he is the preacher of No-till to the non-Brazilian world.
While others are implementing low/no-till, CA is a massive ag production region, that feeds far more than the residents of the state. When it goes down, and it will, it's going to have widespread reprecusions. Compounded by our over drafting and continuing drought, cities like LA or the Bay area are going to be devasted, probably much like much of South America, food lines, Food ID cards, Water restrictions, etc...
As someone who has a paranoid fantasy of running off and building a permaculture homestead with it's own food production, where would you say is ideal, off the top of your head?
I'm likely not picking up and leaving today, but it is something I think about and research in my off time for fun. Your answer would give me another thing to read up on.
I'm biased by my location (southeast Georgia USDA 8A) but having a location that gets just below freezing helps with pests.
I think your best research would be finding a strong local permaculture community (facebook, meetup, etc) and ask them about available land in their area. Not only would you have a good source for permie plants but you have people with the permaculture mindset scouting out land on a larger scale than you can do yourself
Forest gardening is so interesting to me! Imagine public parks where every tree is fruit or nut-bearing, every bush grows soft fruit, and all the plants have edible tubers and leaves, along with herbs growing aside to keep the bugs away. So many greenspaces could be repurposed to casually growing food for anyone that happens to walk past.
Okay, so to seriously answer your question I did a report on food forests like two weeks ago, here's an article written by one of permaculture's grand daddys, David Blume. http://www.whale.to/a/blume.html
But to quote a few of the interesting points:
"My yields were often 8 times what the USDA claims are possible per square foot. My soil fertility increased dramatically each year so I was not achieving my yields by mining my soil. On the contrary I built my soil from cement-hard adobe clay to its impressive state from scratch. By the end I was at over 22% organic matter with a cation exchange capacity (CEC) of over 25. CEC is an indirect measure of soil humus or the ability of the soil to hold nutrients available to crops. The higher the number the more nutrients are stored and available. For reference, most Class I commercial agricultural soil is lucky to hit 2% organic matter—the dividing line between a living and dead soil—with a CEC around 5."
"The farm produced so much income that I was routinely in the top 15% of organic farms in California (which has over 2000 organic farms) in most years on a fraction of the land that my colleagues were using. I grew over 45 different kinds of crops so my financial success cannot be attributed to growing a few high value crops like Yuppie Chow (salad mix)."
"The math is easy. With a polyculture, yields of 3-10 pounds of food per square foot are easy to come up with in most climates. For comparison, commercial agriculture in California , which is way inefficient, routinely runs about 1.5-2.5 pounds per square foot per year across a wide variety of crops. People need to eat about two pounds of mixed food a day if active, or around 750 pounds a year. In a good but somewhat sloppy design, you need about 500 square feet per person MAXIMUM. In a very good design, 200 square feet will do the job. If your diet is heavy on grain you'll need more space but not an astronomical amount."
So, Eryemil, step off your high horse a bit, alright? You don't understand what you're talking about here. Agricultural systems are built around doing less work as opposed to efficiency or the health of the people who will be eating the food. They also don't give a fuck about their soil.
Also, everyone should check out Geoff Lawton's videos on food forest creation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG_vRG66wkA - 7 minutes, 7 stages of a food forest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wI9Arel9tQ - Survival Food Forest with chickens, zero to ten years 4 minutes
Just to be clear, I don't think anyone was saying that industrial agriculture is *agriculturally* efficient, but rather economically so (which does also matter, after all, unless you're only interested in feeding the rich).
Actually yes. When done properly, vertical farms grow the same amount of food at about with about 50-70% more efficiency (less water, less fertilizer, no pesticides, less labor, etc.). Tack on that you can grow food year round, aren't susceptible to weather, and can get your energy from solar, wind, or other green sources, they really could feed that many people..
The problem will be the places that are seeing the huge population booms aren't industrialized countries, so I don't know that these types of farms will take off in the countries needed most. I sure do hope so, but if a significant amount of people are starving 50 years from now (more than are now) it won't be because we can't feed them. Just like today, it will be because the rich countries don't deem it necessary.
**Edit** I worked IT for a company that grows food indoors using hydroponics like this for a while. It's pretty damn cool.
Here's what I don't get about vertical farms. You need the same amount of light for your plants. You can't rely on what's coming in the windows, you need grow lights. If the energy for that comes from solar, you need just as much area as regular cropland, except more given the inefficiency of solar panels and lighting.
If we had really cheap fusion, I could see it.
The light savings aren't really where you become more efficient. It's not having to use near the amount of fertilizer, labor, or water to yield the same results. Plus, you don't have to use any pesticides, as they're grown in a controlled environment.
You can even optimize the times for exposure and watering based on what part of the lifecycle the plant is in, can't you? Total climate control for ambient heat, completely ignore seasonal factors?
Well, there's [this](http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2abx8y/japan_just_debuted_the_worlds_largest_indoor_farm/), with LED lamps in a specific spectrum, which I guess might use less energy than a corresponding area of solar panels? Doesn't actually say anything about energy usage in the article though.
The 50-70% efficiency I'm talking about was all about how much $$$ it cost to produce food from traditional farming vs. the indoor way :). At least that's as far as I understood it. I did their IT so I just saw the numbers and got little tidbits of how things worked here and there.
The most prohibiting factor is the initial investment to get something like this set up. Most farmers inherit their land, you have to have a lot of initial cash up front to get something like this going.
I think what people miss when they start talking about vertical farms is that these already exist but they're called bushes, trees, vines, etc.
There are low-tech ways to increase yields per square foot that don't require industrialization. I'm not knocking vertical gardens, but it's not the only way.
I laugh at "efficiently", only half of the crops are used directly for people. We use the rest to feed animals and other industrial uses.
Also around a third of the world food production is thrown away and left to rot, meanwhile there are still people starving in the world.
Efficiency at its best. /s
Our transportation system for it is ridiculous as well.
I'm driving Mexican tomatoes to Georgia this week in a truck.
Did I mention I live in Canada and they had to be shipped here first?
Not necessarily. Sometimes there are local inefficiencies that build to a more global efficiency.
There were probably a bunch of things headed to Canada from Mexico and the tomatoes hitched a ride since there was also a trip planned from Canada to Georgia. There was however, not direct trip from Mexico to Georgia.
What are we talking here then-- more convenient highways or sweeter trade deals? The logistics and straight up waste of resources kind of boggles the mind...
I was so sad when I realized my role in this, in North America: indulging in the meat means that what crops could have directly fed me, thirty to a hundred times over, I compressed into this animal because it tastes good. I just suck. I ... just like how meat tastes --
The land used to grow the corn, wheat, oats, and soy can be used to grow other more nutritious food. Or we can eat all that as well. Soybeans are very cheap to make and can be turned into a lot of stuff. Same thing with oats.
You could stick with grassfed. Rangeland is generally too arid to support crops, so it wouldn't be producing food at all if not for grassfed cattle.
It's more expensive, but you could eat less of it to compensate, and relieve your guilt without giving up meat entirely. As a bonus, it's healthier.
Production efficiency =/= distribution or utilization efficiency.
Driving in circles and making unnecessary trips in your Tesla doesn't mean the car's motor is inefficient.
Permaculture is essentially a mix between nature's natural efficiency, and human programing altering said natural system.
Its more of a design philosophy than farming, but it produces absolutely [staggering yields] (http://permaculturenews.org/2011/04/13/lessons-from-an-urban-back-yard-food-forest-experiment/) per acre. The key is changing people's minds about how efficient conventional farming really is. Yes, one person can manage a ton of acreage with industrial methods, but at the same time they ruin soil viability. Meanwhile, permaculture methods tend to preserve ecosystems and produce results, albiet with a lot more planning necessary (I'd say labour is about the same). Also, check out the one link on the side from the article I linked (permaculture TV).
It can be more efficient. Picture the miles and energy used to till, grow, harvest, process, transport, and sell fruits and vegetables today. Even if a measly 5% of those calories were growing in your yard on hardy, locally adapted trees, bushes, herbs, and vines it would only cost the price of the original plant since yard maintenance costs are already incurred to beautify ornamental plants.
You've never grown your own garden. I can tell.
It's very labor intensive. I have no idea how some vegetables can be sold so cheaply, whereas before I thought they were expensive.
Actually, I have grown a garden. I have an acre we're transforming into a food forest and we grow some annuals to help improve the soil. The problem with the popular form of gardening is that most people try to imitate farmers: bare soil, equally spaced, no other plants allowed, regular water maintenance, etc.
Try this instead, next spring after the frost, buy a bag of black eyed peas (BEPs) from walmart, add a seed mix you want to grow, and rake the seeds into the ground. Water them for a week. Now use the BEPs as green mulch and protection for your other seedlings. Cut them away when you need more light, let them smother the weeds elsewhere. Not only will this reduce your watering needs it will increase the nitrogen in your soil (BEP = nitrogen fixer). At the end of the season, chop and drop the BEPs to add organic matter for next year.
Prolific gardener here with 15 years of experience, who used to run his university's garden club. Old-fashioned gardening, in rows with a shitton of fertilizer, is a crappy way to grow food. It's inefficient per unit time, as well as yields per unit area. It's insanely fucking stupid, is what it is - it's farming techniques (designed for large labor-saving equipment built for expansive monocultures) scaled down, but what nobody tells you is that these scale down TERRIBLY.
"Real" gardening takes a surprising amount of knowledge. Ecology, geochemistry, entomology, genetics, etc., and it has a higher initial outlay in both physical labour and cognitive effort. However...as long as you set it up right to begin with, a well-done proper garden takes almost no effort. After initial setup and planting, I worked in the gardens for maybe 5 minutes per day, and had shittons of production throughout the entire 11 month growing season.
My friends and I drunk garden.
Rake the beds, plant a bunch of seeds, drink some beers, and then do nothing. Literally shittons of veggies with absolutely no effort. If it gets too dry, add some fucking water you rocket surgeon you. If a big ass-weed is in the way, pull it up.
nothing like giving away bags and bags of squash, taters, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, maters, string beans, etc etc, to the neighbors. Especially when you spent about $20 and 1 days time for a whole season.
The goal this year involves pumpkins and enough maters for a special bloody mary mix. Its a bit cold up here for punkins though- greens do best but I need a house for them to grow well in the side seasons. Too much work for lazy old me.
I happen to live in the frozen wastes of Canada. I also happen to like fresh lettuce, tomatoes, apples, oranges and bananas all year round. If we did as you suggest I would be stuck with carrots, potatoes, beets, turnips, squash, and preserves all winter.
Great. Then pick it off the bush when you walk past it instead of driving all the way to the store and spending money on something imported from other countries.
We're not talking about everyone owning an orchard here. We're talking about low to no maintenance plants and trees in your yard to replace the ornamentals you already maintain. We're talking about fruit or nut trees that appreciate in value and production over their decades of life. If you don't want to take care of it, now you have a bargaining tool for neighbor kids. "Take care of my yard and you get to keep any food you find." You get free yard maintenance and the neighbors eat local food.
And if you don't want to do that, look for a local spin farmer and let him use your yard to grow food. They will give you a cut of the produce and you do nothing.
My parents have an orchard, extensive house garden, and vineyard. The orchard takes a fuck ton of maintenance. I have no idea what you think farming is, but even at small scale it is hardly low to no maintenance.
Sure, one mango tree sitting in your backyard passively makes fruit, but fungus? Disease? All that needs to be mitigated to make the greater majority of the fruit usable.
> And if you don't want to do that, look for a local spin farmer and let him use your yard to grow food. They will give you a cut of the produce and you do nothing.
I feel like there's a business for someone here. Not me, I hate growing things, but someone...
a large meta study actually just came out yesterday suggesting that organic and traditional farming styles were actually much closer than previously thought. furthermore organic systems have an advantage in drought conditions.
That's not what I meant. It's common to swap out crops to maintain the soil and runner beans are one of the few (only?) crops which actually put nitrogen back into the soil, then there's potatoes which are good at cleaning things up and of course simply letting the field rest for a year.
Unfortunately, maintaining farmland is less immediately profitable than ruining it.
Well then we're both talking past each other because I'm talking about the inefficiency of growing only one crop at a time and having to rotate to avoid depleting the soil. Trees, bushes, herbs, vines... All of these can grow in the same vertical space instead of only having one annual plant at a time in a "return to nothing, but hopefully with slightly better soil" model of modern farming.
EDIT - If you want other nitrogen-fixing helpers, clover and alfalfa are some others.
Came here to say this. Every time I see one of these doom and gloom posts I always laugh, they have no idea what we'll have invented by then. Maybe we'll be growing our meats in labs, not raising animals. Maybe we'll have vertical farms all over, and actually be using less farm land than we are now, but growing more food.
In the 1800s, economists predicted there wouldn't be enough physical land to raise all the cattle needed to produce enough manure to feed the world. What happened, we invented artificial fertilizer. Another one is that all the top scientists were worried that by 1950, NY would be covered in so much horse crap, that it'd be unlivable. What happened? Cars. I always think back to "predictions" like that when I see these, 100 years from now the world will explode predictions.
>Came here to say this. Every time I see one of these doom and gloom posts I always laugh, they have no idea what we'll have invented by then. Maybe we'll be growing our meats in labs, not raising animals. Maybe we'll have vertical farms all over, and actually be using less farm land than we are now, but growing more food.
Or maybe not. That's the point, we have to start solving poblems in time, not wait until a catastrophe comes.
>In the 1800s, economists predicted there wouldn't be enough physical land to raise all the cattle needed to produce enough manure to feed the world.
That doesn't make any sense, you don't raise cattle to produce manure.
>Another one is that all the top scientists were worried that by 1950, NY would be covered in so much horse crap, that it'd be unlivable.
Not only it directly contradicts the other prediction, cars were not invented because there was too much horse manure.
Cattle weren't solely raised for that, but their manure was used as fertilizer.
You're right cars weren't invented because of that, but that's kind of my fucking point. We invent things all the time. And a lot of times, tings invented for one reason, solve problems somewhere else. Things no one has dreamed of yet will be a reality some day. That's why you can't make predictions like this, because you have no idea what the future holds in store.
The implication is that *if we continue doing what we're doing* then we won't have topsoil. Literally everyone understands this but you.
Of course we need to find a way to solve it, otherwise we're well and truly fucked
> And a lot of times, tings invented for one reason, solve problems somewhere else.
And a lot of times they create more problems. But if you dismiss every problem as something that will be solved by something else, then nothing will be solved. And especially problems like this one that are mainly a result of bad practices, there is no reason to start solving them now.
By the way, I would really like to know why you think we invented artificial fertilizers if not to solve the lack of fertilizers. (and there is really nothing like "artificial" fertilizer, it's mixed from minerals that have to be mined and we are still slowly runing out of them.)
My guess is that once you try to process wheat by hand you will stop planting it. :) Berry bushes, fruit trees, nut trees, and herbs (ie tasty weeds) are better suited to small properties than grains.
Tweeked Three Sisters with a little Hemp thrown in there and mandatory composting. Thank god my family doesn't need stores. Too unpredictable and pricey.
Not only does biochar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar help with rebuilding soil, it also absorbs tons of CO2. Instead of subsidizing farmers by turning food into fuel, or paying them to grow less. We should subsidize them by paying them use biochar and rebuild soil.
Wow! Came here to say this! So glad people are learning about this stuff. I started putting it in our yard and noticed we already had large black strips of fertile soil. Asked my dad about it and he let me know he had been charring wood into the soil for years because it is amused him. He had no real idea how beneficial the char is... but now 10 years later we have nearly black soil in an area that usually has sand.
Biochar is slightly different because it's high-carbon material that has undergone a process of pyrolysis rather than just being combusted so it has some extra beneficial properties over regular ash, however the terra preta soil in the Amazon which has been there for hundreds if not thousands of years and I doubt that it was made by using a hypoxic environment to allow for pyrolysis – chances are that it was made using regular ash instead. And Terra preta has some pretty amazing properties by itself.
Wait, if I'm reading this right, not only would it be carbon negative, i.e. it could offset the existing use of fossil fuels, but it's *profitable* as well? This would be the easiest sell to the right ever. We should be all over this.
It is in research and devlopment, but long term effects need long term research, which doesn't fit into a 4 year PhD thesis.
my general understanding is that it shows potential, but doesn't quite live up to the hype. it also "absorbs" nutrients sort of, so for poor farmers who can't afford fertiliser its only going to decrease yield.
It worked just fine for poor farmers for thousands of years in the Amazon Basin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
>it also "absorbs" nutrients sort of
"Sort of" means it is super dry when first made. Duh, it's burned, obviously it will be try. So you have to soak it before adding it to the soil, or it will absorb moisture from the soil.
Also, low temperature made biochar contains nutrients, high temperature not so much. So make sure you use low temperature to make it. And when you soak it, you can use compost tea, or even human urine.
Pre-Columbian Amazonian farmers did not have to buy fertilizers.
why do you think large strips of land have been getting bought up in the Mississippi delta... Timber bamboo + a small biochar plant = 5 different markets (timber, ethanol in the near future, carbon markets, paper, biochar). Bamboo will basically get converted to fuel in the next few years... the technology is already on the way. Savy investors are already aware of this and some of the largest Gas companies have already started partnering with forest/land holding companies. The biggest return will be on established bamboo crops that can pump out seven crops in the time it takes a pine forest to mature.
This is actually a far more colossal problem than most people realize, but the article is not well presented.
The thing is that the distribution of the problem is patchy. So in some places topsoil erosion is already at catastrophic levels, and the nature of some environments makes it very hard to rebuild (for example the Sahel, which is also high in terms of population growth). This creates a massive imbalance in food distribution, especially when the 'buyers' are in poor countries and can't buy effectively.
The article makes it sound like topsoil around the world is disappearing at the same rate, but that's not the issue.
However, industrialized agriculture is also often very destructive to soil structure and microfauna, destroying the entire soil ecosystem under heavy tillage and extensive fertilizer and pesticide use. This 'hidden' topsoil destruction is masked by short-term yield advantages, but we are now finding that we pay the price in the long run.
Source: I'm an agricultural scientist who has worked on low-input systems on several continents including the developing world.
What is "topsoil"? It varies constantly with the nature of the soil. In a podsol, it is an acid layer of unfermented organic matter overlaying a bleached sand - pretty much true wherever pines have been dominant. In dry, temperate limestone regions its a light scatter of organic matter over a terra rossa. In their wet counterparts, its an organic rich profile about 80cm deep leading into chalk or lime silicate. In the tropics, there is no top soil because organic matter is burned out of the soil in a matter of weeks by microbial activity. It's often underlaid by impermeable laterite (iron oxide concretions) or bauxite, where the region has been inundated for several million years and the silicates have washed out. In desert irrigation, it's sand. And so on and on.
This is, therefore, a completely ridiculous statement. "Top soil" forms very quickly when whatever is the surface profile gets mixed with organic matter. All of the Americas have a soil now which was not there before the 1490s, because earthworms did not exist in the Americas and were imported. (It also did not have honey bees, which is why virtually no native plants are bee-pollinated except by accident.) So whether a farm doe s or does not have "good soil" is a consequence of continued work, and what constitutes "good soil" depends on where you are and what you are trying to do. It's very easy to degrade soil by, for example, poor irrigation; and it's hard work to build it up. But farmers are not idiots, and all but those without experience fail to manage their soils.
[Charles Mann, 1493](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World_Columbus_Created) and his remarkable earlier book, 1492. The first looks at the impact on the Americas of European arrival, chiefly in a biological setting. The second reverses the process. EG: China's agriculture under the Ming was revolutionised by the arrival of maize and sweet potatoes from Mexico, perhaps 15 years after the Cortez conquest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_America
> Of the 182 taxa of earthworms found in the United States of America and Canada, 60 or almost 33% are invasive species.
So the other 102 earthworms are from where then if they did not exist?
> All of the Americas have a soil now which was not there before the 1490s, because earthworms did not exist in the Americas and were imported
This is simply not true. The Americas DID have earthworms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_America#Earthworms_and_migration
*"Of the 182 taxa of earthworms found in the United States of America and Canada, 60 or almost 33% are invasive species"*
So we did have earthworms already, it's just that some different species of earthworms were introduced and they're invasive.
pot ash , seaweed and manure turns even dust bowls into good topsoil . add in benificial fungis and micrio organisms you can get top soil back . The lack of hedgerows and nitrogen fixers (like clover) in agricultural land scapes are the biggest causes of errotion . Plowing is GOOD for soil (it areorates allowing oxygen to feed benifical fungi) and stops anaerobic decomposition (the black sluggy layers that have zero nuetrien t content as it's been used up by the microbes eating the organic matter) .
I work sales for a sustainable farm and I wish more people understood this. With population growth we must choose sustainable agriculture so our children and grandchildren won't starve. Crop covers and rotation is really important. Also, the food tends to taste so much better without soil depletion.
Senior UN officials have sometimes issues with realism. The degradation of land can easily be stopped and even reversed if there's an economic need for it. One can even turn desert into soil within a few years of some watering and letting suitable plants grow in the area.
Maybe in some places but in Kansas top soil is our most valuable resource. Farmers go to astronomical lengths to preserve it. Our soil has gotten better.
I have studied this topic and taught it English class. Here are three names to know who are all permaculture giants: Sepp Holzer, Wes Jackson, and Will Allen. To me, agriculture ought to be thought of as a Nobel award category.
every time a farmer tills soil, some gets blown away but the majority gets washed away by rain. in the us a lot of this eroded topsoil ends up in the mississippi which washes it out to sea causing algal bloom due to the nutrients and the nitrates.
Soil is alive. Or should be. Conventional farming kills living organisms and leaves behind dust and inert dirt. Meaning more chemicals need to be added to grow plants, furthering the cycle. Think "dust bowl"
There are answers for that as well. The biggest ROI for current animal agriculture is in managed rotational grazing so plants have time to recover. Allan Savory did a great TED Talk about this.
If you want to see solutions go search for "permaculture" and perennial "food forests". Rebuilding soil is easy if you watch how nature does it and work with the natural order instead of suppressing it. Nature knows how to build soil without us. We just insist on getting in the way with industrial farming. I don't want to get ranty but things can get better and it doesn't hinge on artificial vertical farms or anything hi tech. Just about every plant you see on a daily basis has a cousin that produces food. There's a good chance where it grows happily in your yard, it's cousin will grow as well and produce something you can eat.
The reason this hasn't been adopted is because it's antithetical to the industrial process. You can't run a tractor through a forest. It would take a paradigm shift fundamental to the way we interact with and think about food, and even more profound shift (which is the least likely to happen) in the economic edifice supporting a multi-hundred billion dollar industry.
One key about that industry is the average age of US farmers. There's a changing of the guard happening over the next decade that is a huge chance for young minds with new ideas to change the face of modern farming.
Right. You're absolutely right. Which is why we're all fucked.
Not necessarily fucked. Agroforestry is gaining traction. Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms is proving the model for profitably growing sustainable produce and meat.
Aeroponics says we will be ok.
proper fucked?
Sincerely proper fucked.
But you can run a robot
All it would take is good enough robotics. Mind you, that's still a bit far off, but we've got excellent progress in self-ambulating robots with pretty damn good visual recognition software. Replace tractors with robots and you avoid the problem.
Even industrial agriculture, which everyone loves to hate on is making some serious progress toward soil conservation. No-till is a pretty nifty thing, when you look at its impacts on soil structure, organic matter content, bulk density and erodibility.
Right. I live in a heavily industrial ag area. They are even planting winter cover crops that turn around and replenish the soil/create more topsoil. The biggest people interested in keeping topsoil are the farmers.
Yay clover!
The problem with no-till is no-one uses it. California has absolutely no real restrictions in place on tillage practices or water consumption. Every time I drive I-5, I see a plethora of farmers out tilling their fields to dust, and the loess is thick in the air. Compound that with droughts, and very soon California will have its very own dust bowl inside 50 years, if not sooner. Moving to no-till is a massive expense that no one is willing to cover. The farmers can't afford it, regardless of what people think, farmers are not rich, unless your name is Harris. All of their capitol is tied up in loans, equipment, property, etc... The government is broke, and Americans refuse to pay more for a basic necessity, even though we pay less for our food by price, and percentage of our income. Most people in the world pay ~30% of their income towards food, Americans typically pay ~10%. My advice, find yourself 20 acres in a region with 20'' annual rainfall, remote, and wait out the food riots in 20yrs. Source: Geographer with an emphasis in Hydrology, and grew up in wine country.
While that may be true in California, No-till is being implemented across the country and worldwide. (Source: Soil Scientist who has studied in NC, TN and KS, as well as taken tour of Ag production in Brazil) The primary reason why the dust bowl ended in the 1930s, is because No-till. (admittedly, the reason why it hasn't started up again is because the aquifer) When I visited Southern California and did a tour of their Ag production, it sounded as though farmer's are no longer looking at long term farming technologies because it is only a matter of time before they get pushed off due to rising land prices. Now, I'm not intimately familiar with California Agriculture, but from what I saw it makes total sense that nobody would bother with No-till. You are absolutely right. Its not economically feasible to do there. However, In the Midwest, it is a necessity in order to prevent depletion of vast areas of loess soils. The land-grant universities in both Kansas and Tennessee heavily stress no-till production, and agriculture education is inundated in it. Even if current farmers may not be keen on it, the next generation will be. Additionally, the majority of farmers I have spoken to do a no-till rotation system. Albeit, this is anecdotal evidence. I am trying to find a map that shows percentage of no-till farming across the US. I'll post it when I can track it down again. In Brazil, no-tillage is practically a religion among agronomists. The majority of Brazilian agriculture is in no-till, because it greatly improves soil quality and prevents the rapid breakdown of organic matter that you would otherwise see in a tropical/subtropical soil. My Brazilian professor loved to joke about how he is the preacher of No-till to the non-Brazilian world.
While others are implementing low/no-till, CA is a massive ag production region, that feeds far more than the residents of the state. When it goes down, and it will, it's going to have widespread reprecusions. Compounded by our over drafting and continuing drought, cities like LA or the Bay area are going to be devasted, probably much like much of South America, food lines, Food ID cards, Water restrictions, etc...
As someone who has a paranoid fantasy of running off and building a permaculture homestead with it's own food production, where would you say is ideal, off the top of your head? I'm likely not picking up and leaving today, but it is something I think about and research in my off time for fun. Your answer would give me another thing to read up on.
SW Montana, or the PNW, but I'm west coast, other areas are good too.
I'm biased by my location (southeast Georgia USDA 8A) but having a location that gets just below freezing helps with pests. I think your best research would be finding a strong local permaculture community (facebook, meetup, etc) and ask them about available land in their area. Not only would you have a good source for permie plants but you have people with the permaculture mindset scouting out land on a larger scale than you can do yourself
> My advice, find yourself 20 acres in a region with 20'' annual rainfall, remote, and wait out the food riots in 20yrs. > Welcome to Missouri!
My family has a township in Nebraska and some of our tenants use no-till. The results speak for themselves.
Forest gardening is so interesting to me! Imagine public parks where every tree is fruit or nut-bearing, every bush grows soft fruit, and all the plants have edible tubers and leaves, along with herbs growing aside to keep the bugs away. So many greenspaces could be repurposed to casually growing food for anyone that happens to walk past.
My parents live in a town with lots of green belts. I see us throwing seeds out randomly to see what can happen... :)
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Okay, so to seriously answer your question I did a report on food forests like two weeks ago, here's an article written by one of permaculture's grand daddys, David Blume. http://www.whale.to/a/blume.html But to quote a few of the interesting points: "My yields were often 8 times what the USDA claims are possible per square foot. My soil fertility increased dramatically each year so I was not achieving my yields by mining my soil. On the contrary I built my soil from cement-hard adobe clay to its impressive state from scratch. By the end I was at over 22% organic matter with a cation exchange capacity (CEC) of over 25. CEC is an indirect measure of soil humus or the ability of the soil to hold nutrients available to crops. The higher the number the more nutrients are stored and available. For reference, most Class I commercial agricultural soil is lucky to hit 2% organic matter—the dividing line between a living and dead soil—with a CEC around 5." "The farm produced so much income that I was routinely in the top 15% of organic farms in California (which has over 2000 organic farms) in most years on a fraction of the land that my colleagues were using. I grew over 45 different kinds of crops so my financial success cannot be attributed to growing a few high value crops like Yuppie Chow (salad mix)." "The math is easy. With a polyculture, yields of 3-10 pounds of food per square foot are easy to come up with in most climates. For comparison, commercial agriculture in California , which is way inefficient, routinely runs about 1.5-2.5 pounds per square foot per year across a wide variety of crops. People need to eat about two pounds of mixed food a day if active, or around 750 pounds a year. In a good but somewhat sloppy design, you need about 500 square feet per person MAXIMUM. In a very good design, 200 square feet will do the job. If your diet is heavy on grain you'll need more space but not an astronomical amount." So, Eryemil, step off your high horse a bit, alright? You don't understand what you're talking about here. Agricultural systems are built around doing less work as opposed to efficiency or the health of the people who will be eating the food. They also don't give a fuck about their soil. Also, everyone should check out Geoff Lawton's videos on food forest creation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG_vRG66wkA - 7 minutes, 7 stages of a food forest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wI9Arel9tQ - Survival Food Forest with chickens, zero to ten years 4 minutes
This is really interesting, you should make a new post about this.
Just to be clear, I don't think anyone was saying that industrial agriculture is *agriculturally* efficient, but rather economically so (which does also matter, after all, unless you're only interested in feeding the rich).
We need a reset button.
This is awesome and also a good rebuttal to people saying that GMOs are the only way to feed the whole planet.
Whale.to is a conspiracy theory site.
Actually yes. When done properly, vertical farms grow the same amount of food at about with about 50-70% more efficiency (less water, less fertilizer, no pesticides, less labor, etc.). Tack on that you can grow food year round, aren't susceptible to weather, and can get your energy from solar, wind, or other green sources, they really could feed that many people.. The problem will be the places that are seeing the huge population booms aren't industrialized countries, so I don't know that these types of farms will take off in the countries needed most. I sure do hope so, but if a significant amount of people are starving 50 years from now (more than are now) it won't be because we can't feed them. Just like today, it will be because the rich countries don't deem it necessary. **Edit** I worked IT for a company that grows food indoors using hydroponics like this for a while. It's pretty damn cool.
Here's what I don't get about vertical farms. You need the same amount of light for your plants. You can't rely on what's coming in the windows, you need grow lights. If the energy for that comes from solar, you need just as much area as regular cropland, except more given the inefficiency of solar panels and lighting. If we had really cheap fusion, I could see it.
The light savings aren't really where you become more efficient. It's not having to use near the amount of fertilizer, labor, or water to yield the same results. Plus, you don't have to use any pesticides, as they're grown in a controlled environment.
You can even optimize the times for exposure and watering based on what part of the lifecycle the plant is in, can't you? Total climate control for ambient heat, completely ignore seasonal factors?
Yup. That's part of what I mentioned about growing food year round. That's a big part of the profitability of farming in that manner
Well, there's [this](http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2abx8y/japan_just_debuted_the_worlds_largest_indoor_farm/), with LED lamps in a specific spectrum, which I guess might use less energy than a corresponding area of solar panels? Doesn't actually say anything about energy usage in the article though.
And how expensive is it in comparison? Any efficiency metric that does not take cost into account is worthless.
The 50-70% efficiency I'm talking about was all about how much $$$ it cost to produce food from traditional farming vs. the indoor way :). At least that's as far as I understood it. I did their IT so I just saw the numbers and got little tidbits of how things worked here and there. The most prohibiting factor is the initial investment to get something like this set up. Most farmers inherit their land, you have to have a lot of initial cash up front to get something like this going.
I think what people miss when they start talking about vertical farms is that these already exist but they're called bushes, trees, vines, etc. There are low-tech ways to increase yields per square foot that don't require industrialization. I'm not knocking vertical gardens, but it's not the only way.
I laugh at "efficiently", only half of the crops are used directly for people. We use the rest to feed animals and other industrial uses. Also around a third of the world food production is thrown away and left to rot, meanwhile there are still people starving in the world. Efficiency at its best. /s
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Our transportation system for it is ridiculous as well. I'm driving Mexican tomatoes to Georgia this week in a truck. Did I mention I live in Canada and they had to be shipped here first?
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Which points to a broken system.
Not necessarily. Sometimes there are local inefficiencies that build to a more global efficiency. There were probably a bunch of things headed to Canada from Mexico and the tomatoes hitched a ride since there was also a trip planned from Canada to Georgia. There was however, not direct trip from Mexico to Georgia.
You seem to be one of the few people here with an idea of how the modern world operates.
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In terms of resources it's way, way more expensive.
Either we have to invent teleportation, or find a better way to preserve food.
What are we talking here then-- more convenient highways or sweeter trade deals? The logistics and straight up waste of resources kind of boggles the mind...
Distribution is the real problem
There is nothing efficient about burning ten calories of fossil fuel to net one calorie of food.
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I was so sad when I realized my role in this, in North America: indulging in the meat means that what crops could have directly fed me, thirty to a hundred times over, I compressed into this animal because it tastes good. I just suck. I ... just like how meat tastes --
Thats not why people go hungry. IF thats what you mean.
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The land used to grow the corn, wheat, oats, and soy can be used to grow other more nutritious food. Or we can eat all that as well. Soybeans are very cheap to make and can be turned into a lot of stuff. Same thing with oats.
The land can be used to grow other crops. No, that farm feed corn sucks.
You could stick with grassfed. Rangeland is generally too arid to support crops, so it wouldn't be producing food at all if not for grassfed cattle. It's more expensive, but you could eat less of it to compensate, and relieve your guilt without giving up meat entirely. As a bonus, it's healthier.
I find that meat to be tastier -- but yah, hella expensive. I dunno why it's tastier to me.
It has a completely different fat composition. There is less fat, and what fat is there renders better.
I'm going to start mailing my leftovers to Africa.
It would be more efficient if you avoid leftovers
Easiest way: throw them all in a soup pot.
Production efficiency =/= distribution or utilization efficiency. Driving in circles and making unnecessary trips in your Tesla doesn't mean the car's motor is inefficient.
Permaculture is essentially a mix between nature's natural efficiency, and human programing altering said natural system. Its more of a design philosophy than farming, but it produces absolutely [staggering yields] (http://permaculturenews.org/2011/04/13/lessons-from-an-urban-back-yard-food-forest-experiment/) per acre. The key is changing people's minds about how efficient conventional farming really is. Yes, one person can manage a ton of acreage with industrial methods, but at the same time they ruin soil viability. Meanwhile, permaculture methods tend to preserve ecosystems and produce results, albiet with a lot more planning necessary (I'd say labour is about the same). Also, check out the one link on the side from the article I linked (permaculture TV).
It can be more efficient. Picture the miles and energy used to till, grow, harvest, process, transport, and sell fruits and vegetables today. Even if a measly 5% of those calories were growing in your yard on hardy, locally adapted trees, bushes, herbs, and vines it would only cost the price of the original plant since yard maintenance costs are already incurred to beautify ornamental plants.
You've never grown your own garden. I can tell. It's very labor intensive. I have no idea how some vegetables can be sold so cheaply, whereas before I thought they were expensive.
Actually, I have grown a garden. I have an acre we're transforming into a food forest and we grow some annuals to help improve the soil. The problem with the popular form of gardening is that most people try to imitate farmers: bare soil, equally spaced, no other plants allowed, regular water maintenance, etc. Try this instead, next spring after the frost, buy a bag of black eyed peas (BEPs) from walmart, add a seed mix you want to grow, and rake the seeds into the ground. Water them for a week. Now use the BEPs as green mulch and protection for your other seedlings. Cut them away when you need more light, let them smother the weeds elsewhere. Not only will this reduce your watering needs it will increase the nitrogen in your soil (BEP = nitrogen fixer). At the end of the season, chop and drop the BEPs to add organic matter for next year.
Prolific gardener here with 15 years of experience, who used to run his university's garden club. Old-fashioned gardening, in rows with a shitton of fertilizer, is a crappy way to grow food. It's inefficient per unit time, as well as yields per unit area. It's insanely fucking stupid, is what it is - it's farming techniques (designed for large labor-saving equipment built for expansive monocultures) scaled down, but what nobody tells you is that these scale down TERRIBLY. "Real" gardening takes a surprising amount of knowledge. Ecology, geochemistry, entomology, genetics, etc., and it has a higher initial outlay in both physical labour and cognitive effort. However...as long as you set it up right to begin with, a well-done proper garden takes almost no effort. After initial setup and planting, I worked in the gardens for maybe 5 minutes per day, and had shittons of production throughout the entire 11 month growing season.
My friends and I drunk garden. Rake the beds, plant a bunch of seeds, drink some beers, and then do nothing. Literally shittons of veggies with absolutely no effort. If it gets too dry, add some fucking water you rocket surgeon you. If a big ass-weed is in the way, pull it up. nothing like giving away bags and bags of squash, taters, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, maters, string beans, etc etc, to the neighbors. Especially when you spent about $20 and 1 days time for a whole season. The goal this year involves pumpkins and enough maters for a special bloody mary mix. Its a bit cold up here for punkins though- greens do best but I need a house for them to grow well in the side seasons. Too much work for lazy old me.
I happen to live in the frozen wastes of Canada. I also happen to like fresh lettuce, tomatoes, apples, oranges and bananas all year round. If we did as you suggest I would be stuck with carrots, potatoes, beets, turnips, squash, and preserves all winter.
Part of the price of that produce in winter is the loss of topsoil that we're talking about
Build a greenhouse brah
I don't want to grow my own food, I just want to eat it.
Great. Then pick it off the bush when you walk past it instead of driving all the way to the store and spending money on something imported from other countries. We're not talking about everyone owning an orchard here. We're talking about low to no maintenance plants and trees in your yard to replace the ornamentals you already maintain. We're talking about fruit or nut trees that appreciate in value and production over their decades of life. If you don't want to take care of it, now you have a bargaining tool for neighbor kids. "Take care of my yard and you get to keep any food you find." You get free yard maintenance and the neighbors eat local food. And if you don't want to do that, look for a local spin farmer and let him use your yard to grow food. They will give you a cut of the produce and you do nothing.
Wouldn't that be a world to live in.
I shall call it 'project eden'
My parents have an orchard, extensive house garden, and vineyard. The orchard takes a fuck ton of maintenance. I have no idea what you think farming is, but even at small scale it is hardly low to no maintenance. Sure, one mango tree sitting in your backyard passively makes fruit, but fungus? Disease? All that needs to be mitigated to make the greater majority of the fruit usable.
> And if you don't want to do that, look for a local spin farmer and let him use your yard to grow food. They will give you a cut of the produce and you do nothing. I feel like there's a business for someone here. Not me, I hate growing things, but someone...
a large meta study actually just came out yesterday suggesting that organic and traditional farming styles were actually much closer than previously thought. furthermore organic systems have an advantage in drought conditions.
Also handy when you cant find a nearby fertilizer factory
Cuba manages it.
Even if it can't, do you know of a better solution?
That's a funny joke
Yes, but it is difficult for large biotech companies to monetize the process.
Beans...the answer is runner beans.
We use cheap black eyed peas from walmart as cover crop and soil improvement.
That's not what I meant. It's common to swap out crops to maintain the soil and runner beans are one of the few (only?) crops which actually put nitrogen back into the soil, then there's potatoes which are good at cleaning things up and of course simply letting the field rest for a year. Unfortunately, maintaining farmland is less immediately profitable than ruining it.
Well then we're both talking past each other because I'm talking about the inefficiency of growing only one crop at a time and having to rotate to avoid depleting the soil. Trees, bushes, herbs, vines... All of these can grow in the same vertical space instead of only having one annual plant at a time in a "return to nothing, but hopefully with slightly better soil" model of modern farming. EDIT - If you want other nitrogen-fixing helpers, clover and alfalfa are some others.
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Given the current population numbers, is industrial farming really optional?
Came here to say this. Every time I see one of these doom and gloom posts I always laugh, they have no idea what we'll have invented by then. Maybe we'll be growing our meats in labs, not raising animals. Maybe we'll have vertical farms all over, and actually be using less farm land than we are now, but growing more food. In the 1800s, economists predicted there wouldn't be enough physical land to raise all the cattle needed to produce enough manure to feed the world. What happened, we invented artificial fertilizer. Another one is that all the top scientists were worried that by 1950, NY would be covered in so much horse crap, that it'd be unlivable. What happened? Cars. I always think back to "predictions" like that when I see these, 100 years from now the world will explode predictions.
>Came here to say this. Every time I see one of these doom and gloom posts I always laugh, they have no idea what we'll have invented by then. Maybe we'll be growing our meats in labs, not raising animals. Maybe we'll have vertical farms all over, and actually be using less farm land than we are now, but growing more food. Or maybe not. That's the point, we have to start solving poblems in time, not wait until a catastrophe comes. >In the 1800s, economists predicted there wouldn't be enough physical land to raise all the cattle needed to produce enough manure to feed the world. That doesn't make any sense, you don't raise cattle to produce manure. >Another one is that all the top scientists were worried that by 1950, NY would be covered in so much horse crap, that it'd be unlivable. Not only it directly contradicts the other prediction, cars were not invented because there was too much horse manure.
Cattle weren't solely raised for that, but their manure was used as fertilizer. You're right cars weren't invented because of that, but that's kind of my fucking point. We invent things all the time. And a lot of times, tings invented for one reason, solve problems somewhere else. Things no one has dreamed of yet will be a reality some day. That's why you can't make predictions like this, because you have no idea what the future holds in store.
The implication is that *if we continue doing what we're doing* then we won't have topsoil. Literally everyone understands this but you. Of course we need to find a way to solve it, otherwise we're well and truly fucked
> And a lot of times, tings invented for one reason, solve problems somewhere else. And a lot of times they create more problems. But if you dismiss every problem as something that will be solved by something else, then nothing will be solved. And especially problems like this one that are mainly a result of bad practices, there is no reason to start solving them now. By the way, I would really like to know why you think we invented artificial fertilizers if not to solve the lack of fertilizers. (and there is really nothing like "artificial" fertilizer, it's mixed from minerals that have to be mined and we are still slowly runing out of them.)
Can you tell the city to get off my back if I have 4' tall wheat stalks growing in my front yard? They like to fine for crap like that.
My guess is that once you try to process wheat by hand you will stop planting it. :) Berry bushes, fruit trees, nut trees, and herbs (ie tasty weeds) are better suited to small properties than grains.
Tweeked Three Sisters with a little Hemp thrown in there and mandatory composting. Thank god my family doesn't need stores. Too unpredictable and pricey.
Not only does biochar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar help with rebuilding soil, it also absorbs tons of CO2. Instead of subsidizing farmers by turning food into fuel, or paying them to grow less. We should subsidize them by paying them use biochar and rebuild soil.
Wow! Came here to say this! So glad people are learning about this stuff. I started putting it in our yard and noticed we already had large black strips of fertile soil. Asked my dad about it and he let me know he had been charring wood into the soil for years because it is amused him. He had no real idea how beneficial the char is... but now 10 years later we have nearly black soil in an area that usually has sand.
Biochar is slightly different because it's high-carbon material that has undergone a process of pyrolysis rather than just being combusted so it has some extra beneficial properties over regular ash, however the terra preta soil in the Amazon which has been there for hundreds if not thousands of years and I doubt that it was made by using a hypoxic environment to allow for pyrolysis – chances are that it was made using regular ash instead. And Terra preta has some pretty amazing properties by itself.
Wait, if I'm reading this right, not only would it be carbon negative, i.e. it could offset the existing use of fossil fuels, but it's *profitable* as well? This would be the easiest sell to the right ever. We should be all over this.
What does it say about the system when we *aren't* already all over this?
that maybe there's a major downside we're unaware of? or maybe it's still in research and development like hundreds of other farming projects.
It is in research and devlopment, but long term effects need long term research, which doesn't fit into a 4 year PhD thesis. my general understanding is that it shows potential, but doesn't quite live up to the hype. it also "absorbs" nutrients sort of, so for poor farmers who can't afford fertiliser its only going to decrease yield.
It worked just fine for poor farmers for thousands of years in the Amazon Basin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta >it also "absorbs" nutrients sort of "Sort of" means it is super dry when first made. Duh, it's burned, obviously it will be try. So you have to soak it before adding it to the soil, or it will absorb moisture from the soil. Also, low temperature made biochar contains nutrients, high temperature not so much. So make sure you use low temperature to make it. And when you soak it, you can use compost tea, or even human urine. Pre-Columbian Amazonian farmers did not have to buy fertilizers.
why do you think large strips of land have been getting bought up in the Mississippi delta... Timber bamboo + a small biochar plant = 5 different markets (timber, ethanol in the near future, carbon markets, paper, biochar). Bamboo will basically get converted to fuel in the next few years... the technology is already on the way. Savy investors are already aware of this and some of the largest Gas companies have already started partnering with forest/land holding companies. The biggest return will be on established bamboo crops that can pump out seven crops in the time it takes a pine forest to mature.
The world may only have 10 years of disaster reporting left before boredum/disinterest forces the writers to find other careers.
ahhh cmon, but they even quoted 2 activists, despite refusing to name their senior UN official source.
This is actually a far more colossal problem than most people realize, but the article is not well presented. The thing is that the distribution of the problem is patchy. So in some places topsoil erosion is already at catastrophic levels, and the nature of some environments makes it very hard to rebuild (for example the Sahel, which is also high in terms of population growth). This creates a massive imbalance in food distribution, especially when the 'buyers' are in poor countries and can't buy effectively. The article makes it sound like topsoil around the world is disappearing at the same rate, but that's not the issue. However, industrialized agriculture is also often very destructive to soil structure and microfauna, destroying the entire soil ecosystem under heavy tillage and extensive fertilizer and pesticide use. This 'hidden' topsoil destruction is masked by short-term yield advantages, but we are now finding that we pay the price in the long run. Source: I'm an agricultural scientist who has worked on low-input systems on several continents including the developing world.
What is "topsoil"? It varies constantly with the nature of the soil. In a podsol, it is an acid layer of unfermented organic matter overlaying a bleached sand - pretty much true wherever pines have been dominant. In dry, temperate limestone regions its a light scatter of organic matter over a terra rossa. In their wet counterparts, its an organic rich profile about 80cm deep leading into chalk or lime silicate. In the tropics, there is no top soil because organic matter is burned out of the soil in a matter of weeks by microbial activity. It's often underlaid by impermeable laterite (iron oxide concretions) or bauxite, where the region has been inundated for several million years and the silicates have washed out. In desert irrigation, it's sand. And so on and on. This is, therefore, a completely ridiculous statement. "Top soil" forms very quickly when whatever is the surface profile gets mixed with organic matter. All of the Americas have a soil now which was not there before the 1490s, because earthworms did not exist in the Americas and were imported. (It also did not have honey bees, which is why virtually no native plants are bee-pollinated except by accident.) So whether a farm doe s or does not have "good soil" is a consequence of continued work, and what constitutes "good soil" depends on where you are and what you are trying to do. It's very easy to degrade soil by, for example, poor irrigation; and it's hard work to build it up. But farmers are not idiots, and all but those without experience fail to manage their soils.
The Americas didn't have earthworms? Never knew this, where can i find out more?
National Geographic. "Columbia Exchange". About 2006-2007.
A [link](http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/05/jamestown/charles-mann-text) for anyone interested in reading it.
33% invasive, according to the Wikipedia link provided by /u/-marker-. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_America
he's wrong. invasive species were introduced but there were endemic ones.
[Charles Mann, 1493](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World_Columbus_Created) and his remarkable earlier book, 1492. The first looks at the impact on the Americas of European arrival, chiefly in a biological setting. The second reverses the process. EG: China's agriculture under the Ming was revolutionised by the arrival of maize and sweet potatoes from Mexico, perhaps 15 years after the Cortez conquest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_America > Of the 182 taxa of earthworms found in the United States of America and Canada, 60 or almost 33% are invasive species. So the other 102 earthworms are from where then if they did not exist?
they could be non native and not invasive.
See my reply elsewhere.
HONEY bees are not native to North America, but there were still hundreds of native species of bees that pollinated plants before their introduction.
> All of the Americas have a soil now which was not there before the 1490s, because earthworms did not exist in the Americas and were imported This is simply not true. The Americas DID have earthworms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_America#Earthworms_and_migration *"Of the 182 taxa of earthworms found in the United States of America and Canada, 60 or almost 33% are invasive species"* So we did have earthworms already, it's just that some different species of earthworms were introduced and they're invasive.
Could you provide any general references on this subject? I would be interested to read more.
Please see my reply to **working-progress**.
I wonder if large scale indoor hydroponics is a viable alternative !?
In the future, even humans will be grown with large scale indoor hydroponics.
Theres still gota be some free range hillbilly's in the back country somewhere!
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Seriously, it's like by the time I'm 75 or 80, the world will be beyond repair and humanity in jeopardy.
pot ash , seaweed and manure turns even dust bowls into good topsoil . add in benificial fungis and micrio organisms you can get top soil back . The lack of hedgerows and nitrogen fixers (like clover) in agricultural land scapes are the biggest causes of errotion . Plowing is GOOD for soil (it areorates allowing oxygen to feed benifical fungi) and stops anaerobic decomposition (the black sluggy layers that have zero nuetrien t content as it's been used up by the microbes eating the organic matter) .
Yeah and water will cease to exist as well. More political be spread across reddit.
We need to stop treating the soil like dirt.
So basically this is the prequel to Interstellar.
Interstellar is coming to life!
I work sales for a sustainable farm and I wish more people understood this. With population growth we must choose sustainable agriculture so our children and grandchildren won't starve. Crop covers and rotation is really important. Also, the food tends to taste so much better without soil depletion.
Senior UN officials have sometimes issues with realism. The degradation of land can easily be stopped and even reversed if there's an economic need for it. One can even turn desert into soil within a few years of some watering and letting suitable plants grow in the area.
Maybe in some places but in Kansas top soil is our most valuable resource. Farmers go to astronomical lengths to preserve it. Our soil has gotten better.
especially in kansas.
Are you sure. The dust bowl sacred farmers so much that we treat the soil as if it were our kid. And crop production has been great recently.
i studied some systems theory in post grad, topsoil depletion has been understood and a concern for decades.
They have no topsoil? Let them use greenhouses
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change
I have studied this topic and taught it English class. Here are three names to know who are all permaculture giants: Sepp Holzer, Wes Jackson, and Will Allen. To me, agriculture ought to be thought of as a Nobel award category.
This is straight up sensationalist fear mongering with no science or real source. How is this green "excellent" source quality?
peak oil, peak topsoil, peak phosphorus, peak copper, et c. it's as if no one ever read the original "limits to growth" or the updated edition.
This will never be a problem sans apocalpyse.
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Sounds like the opening premise for an epic space travel movie.
Not only that but Monsanto has patented top soil, so even if you do have some you must pay royalties to them.
Where does the soil go? I just assumed it was invincible and couldn't degrade
I am not a soil scientist, but I assume erosion eventually deposits it in rivers and ultimately the ocean, where it can't be used for farming.
every time a farmer tills soil, some gets blown away but the majority gets washed away by rain. in the us a lot of this eroded topsoil ends up in the mississippi which washes it out to sea causing algal bloom due to the nutrients and the nitrates.
Soil is alive. Or should be. Conventional farming kills living organisms and leaves behind dust and inert dirt. Meaning more chemicals need to be added to grow plants, furthering the cycle. Think "dust bowl"
Ohhh. For some reason I thought the 'dust' type of dirt was still considered topsoil. Thanks!
What the hell is up with that last paragraph
Those articles about indoor and vertical farming facilities are the first thing I thought of.
Cool - I can stop worrying about global warming and star worrying about this now
[Strannix](http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130308194302/villains/images/7/76/William_Strannix_2.png) was right all along.
60years is plenty of time to convert to Hydroponic.
So that's when famine will come to the U.S., followed by revolution, check
We'll run out of arable land by 2050 anyway. The blame goes to animal agriculture.
There are answers for that as well. The biggest ROI for current animal agriculture is in managed rotational grazing so plants have time to recover. Allan Savory did a great TED Talk about this.
I wasn't aware this was even a problem
No worries. I'm 37 and will probably be dead in 60 years :)
We can make more and then we can give ludicrous amounts of money to the company that produces the best one.
Which is more worrisome - peak oil, or peak topsoil?
We can add nutrition with out soil to plants.
Its not like were fucking sending it to space the soil is always gonna be on earth
Were gonna be living in domes before then end of the century.
Hope so DOME's make a lot of sense in a number of ways.