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- cross-posted to:
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Summary
Grocery prices are expected to rise globally as soil degradation, driven by overfarming, deforestation, and climate change, reduces farmland productivity.
The UN estimates 33% of the world’s soils are degraded, with 90% at risk by 2050. Poor soil forces farmers to use costly fertilizers or abandon fields, raising prices for staples like bread, vegetables, and meat.
Experts advocate for sustainable practices like regenerative agriculture, cover cropping, and reduced tillage to restore soil health.
Innovations and government subsidies could mitigate impacts, but immediate action is critical to ensure food security.
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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
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.
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.
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.
Why? It’s the next generation’s problem. And what have they done for us!?
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.
99% of us do non ag jobs and if we moved to everyone trying to farm a billion would starve and the worlds economy would implode.
Lack of resources would lead to both local and global violence as desperate people hurt each other.
Imagine a city of a million people abandoning all the work they do to all collectively invade rural areas to set up farms they have no idea how to run!
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.
If we quit beef our problems would be over.
I imagine harvesting, planting, and everything else that needs to be done is much harder in “protected culture” compared to normal agriculture.
We farm the way we do because we have always done it like this, except on a smaller scale obviously, otherwise almost everyone would still be a farmer.
Completely moving over to “protected culture” would be enormously expensive, hard, and unless some really advanced technical advancements happen so, impossible.
Irrigated and/or protected culture… Protected culture for the crops that make sense. Irrigated in for all others.
We farm the way we do because historically we go through periods of innovation then stagnation. When the way we farm no longer works and we either rapidly innovate again or the civilization flounders and dies due to famine and war.
“Enormously expensive,” it’s all in perspective. It’s damn cheap compared to the cost of the environmental damage we are currently doing. FYI The equipment and technology already exist to do it as well.
Irrigated? That seems incredibly water intensive.
FYI The equipment and technology already exist to do it as well.
How do you farm crops like wheat and corn that way?
Agriculture is water intensive. The more land we use, the more water we need. Whether from the sky or from a irrigation canal, it’s still water used to grow crops not native environments. Reducing our land footprint reduces our total water usage. That’s what matters, not the per hectare usage.
Corn and wheat - just irrigating itincreases the average yield by 2x to 10x depending on the region.
If you’ve never been in a 50 hectare greenhouse it’s hard to imagine (they are 12-15m tall). These greenhouses are all in soil as well. The larger a greenhouse is the more efficient it is as maintaining temperature. You can get 2-3 cycles per year in them depending on light levels. So the yields are irrigated + 50% per cycle and 2-3 cycles per year instead of 1 cycle. Supplemental lighting can push it to a solid 3 cycles.
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 is extremely tough on soils
No shit. My daughter and husband bought a house built on the corner of a field in Ohio that was farmed for years. You couldn’t get a shovel into the ground there because it was like cement.
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
I have been doing no plow, no till gardening for over 20 years and it outproduces conventional gardening by a lot.
Conventional Ag is a method, distinguishing it from regenerative Ag etc.
Fair enough, I’m far from an expert
Right?? My first thought was, another excuse to raise prices and shrinkflate even more. Because that’s the solution! 🤬
Soil depletion killed the Sumerians. It’s older than billionaires. If we attribute every single problem to class inequality, eventually we’re going to be wrong, because there are other problems in the world. If you think billionaires have power over us, nature is vastly more powerful.
And do nothing to fix the problems their capitalism creates.
They just take the money, they leave the problems for the poors
dammit i had “new dust bowl” on 2025’s bingo, not 2024’s
We haven’t reached dust bowl levels yet lol
One of solution to this problem is veganic farming.
Agriculture is a major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and biodiversity loss, mostly through deforestation for the cultivation of animal feeds; enteric fermentation from ruminants like cattle, fertilizers and manure; and soil degradation from intensive farming practices. There is currently a push to transform our farming systems to attempt to alleviate the almost-assured catastrophic burden of increasing amounts of atmospheric carbon. Many forms of agriculture claim they have evolved to follow a more regenerative form of agriculture by increasing soil organic matter (SOM), thus capturing said carbon in their soils. This study reports SOM results from one veganic agriculture (VA) farm from a study period of seven years. There was an observed increase of SOM from 5.2% to 7.2%, equating to an increase of 38.46% over the study’s duration, suggesting that VA is an effective farming mechanism for increasing soil organic matter utilizing 100% plant-based regenerative practices and materials to nourish the soil. The VA farm also realized respectable yields per hectare, reporting a 46% increase in total crop production. This was all achieved by growing a diversity of plant-based crops, implementing four-year crop rotations, building soil fertility through plant-based inputs, cover cropping, and leaving the farm’s fields covered as often as possible. Additionally, by its processes, the VA farm fully eliminated the industrial chain of animal agriculture and associated land use and methane emissions, suggesting VA to be a holistically regenerative form of agriculture, in comparison to animal-based forms of any other system.
has not been peer reviewed.
Then I read their methods … It should not pass peer review. Their variable control is shit.
However all they appear to advocate for, are the things that historically we have done, and are mentioned in the article.
Veganic Farming? Its just Vegans trying to hijack a normal process of crop rotation and cover cropping so they can make some snide remark that apparently it is animal feed that’s the problem.
“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.
Not everything is class and inter generational warfare. This has been building for centuries. The Sumerians compromised their soil and this eventually erased them.
It’s the intensive farming of animal agriculture straining the land as it is not allowing it to rest.
Yes, it’s a riff on how everything is the millennials’ fault in the news the past decade or so.
staples like bread, vegetables, and meat.
One of these is vastly different from the others in terms of planetary destruction.
I’m glad that deep distrust I’ve harboured regarding brussel sprouts has finally been validated.
I know! Bread, right? It’s bread. right?
Of course it’s bread. Just think about the energy required to bake them!
Gluten bad.
I know a vegan with celiacs.
She’s real inspirational whenever I see people say they can’t go vegan. If she can do it, then almost anyone can.
It’s true, my great great grandfather ate bread.
Is he alive? No. Coincidence? I think not.
Sorry for your loss.
Stop letting the media brain wash you
Don’t believe everything you read.
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.
With genocide and plagues, oh my!
[Existential crisis threatening all human life] Oh no, the economy!
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.
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.
Well you can also turn that around and ask: why do we need more people? What does another individual add?
One might argue that a baby born today might cure cancer or all known diseases. They might invent free, unlimited energy. They could be the greatest writer to ever live. Humanity’s best poet. He could bring about world peace.
But he could also be our next Hitler, Saddam Hussein, etc.
Earth is a finite planet. It’s not getting any bigger. So every human we add to it, takes up yet another square meter that consumes resources for an average of 80 years or so. I’ve seen my country get more crowded and the problems it causes.
We don’t need more people. At all.
Be the change you want to see in the world then, and leave it. After all, what do you add? Why even comment here? Do we need more people with more opinions?
I don’t mean any of that. I just say it aloud to show how petty and shitty it is. Of course if people are just numbers on a tablet then you don’t give a shit if it’s 2 billion or 3 billion. But I would hazard to guess that if you got out more, travelled more, talked to more people, saw where they lived, sang for their childrens’ birthdays and spoke at their funerals, held their hands in the ER, that you would appreciate the fact that everyone does add something. And that although there is no shortage of cruelty and stupidity in our world, it is also overflowing with love and ingenuity.
I think it’s beautiful. And I don’t presume to know what the “right” number of people is to make a world. Frankly I find that talk disturbing.
You can absolutely mean those things. I’ve said them to others, so they don’t offend me.
I agree that everyone’s a unique individual. But when looking at problems on a global scale, you need to approach things objectively and dispassionately.
From a purely statistics standpoint, I and 1 sibling should be here. Because that’s the replacement rate for when my parents die. A life for a life, so to speak.
Problem is, my parents had three kids. So now we’ve already gone above that replacement rate. And globally, more people have kids above the replacement rate, hence the population growth.
I don’t have or want kids. That’s not for me, and I don’t want them to be born in a world that’s going to get rapidly worse to live in. Unfortunately, not everyone is willing or capable to make such choices.
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.
Yay pseudoscience!!
But then who’s going to fight our wars
Or buy all the useless crap being consistently pumped out in virtually every industry
Even the soil is quiet quitting these days!
luckily we all have the excess given the low housing and health insurance costs.
“Millennial and Gen-Z soil is ‘quiet quitting’”
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