vtsnowedin wrote:Obviously you haven't driven around the central USA much.
I lived 8 years in Illinois spent 2 years in Champagne Urbana and lived 3 years in Salina Kansas. I know very very well what I speak of. I studied tall grass prairie ecology.
I am not an arm chair internet scientist spewing bullshit. 99 percent of the tall grass prairie has been eliminated from Iowa, Indiana, Illinois. That is right 99%.
Distribution of Illinois Prairies
In 1820, Illinois had 22 million acres of prairie land and 14 million acres of forests. Prairies were mainly in the northern two-thirds of the state with forests in the southern one-third. All but nine counties had large areas of prairies. In central Illinois, trees could only be found in scattered sites called "prairie groves" or along waterways.
By 1900, most of Illinois ' prairies were gone. The majority of these lands were converted to agricultural practices. By 1978, less than 2,300 acres of high quality prairie remained in the entire state. Most of the undisturbed prairie sites today are found along railroad rights-of-way, in pioneer cemeteries and in places that are not suitable for farming.
VTS, that is 2,300 acres remaining of an original 22 million acres.
https://www.dnr.illinois.gov/education/ ... iries.aspx
Source: DNR website
Anyway, you move west from the midwest into Kansas and Oklahama and you slowly go from tall grass prairie to short grass prairie. More arid landscape. Here there is more acreage still remaining. What you referred to above. This is land for grazing, too arid without irrigation to plant soy or corn. Grazing cattle for grass fed beef without pumping them full of corn and antibiotics in feedlots at a sustainable carrying capacity is absolutely viable and in agreement with what I mentioned in my last post. You preserve the habitat, graze ruminants at low densities, etc.
The Tall grass prairie soils in the mid west were perhaps the worlds most fertile soils with humus layers reaching 8 meters depth. With adequate rainfall in the mid west the economic incentives to convert Iowa, Indiana and Illinois to one vast soy and corn monoculture was too great. If you drive from southern Indiana through Illinois and into Iowa you will see one vast uninterrupted monoculture of corn and soy. The only remaining significant tall grass prairie is along old railroad right of way and a few abandoned military munition sites that were converted over the nature reserves. Here is a great example of a refuge tall grass prairie.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/main/midewin/home
Remember the importance of maintaining refuge habitat. These are the places out of which one day when Kudzu Ape recedes that nature will reclaim and recolonize former habitat.
I was very active in preserving a very small tract of tall grass prairie in the west suburbs of CHicago when I in my late teens. Here is a link of some pictures of this wonderful refuge prairie, Wolf Road Prairie... These are my photographs.
https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipO ... TKVtMaang4
So let's take this as a case study of what I was discussing in my previous post. Those 8 meter deep prairie soils are still fertile but the humus top soil level has eroded by more than 2/3rds. Subsidized agro industry has sucked nutrients year after year, corn for ethanol, bit export markets. This is no way to manage a potential renewable resource. This is the egregious mis use of agricultural land as a result of globalization. These former tall grass prairies could be restored by 50% and you could take the other 50% and feed the US population easily on their grain requirements especially if you allow beef cattle to graze in larger tracks of short grass prairie out west instead of feeding them subsidized corn in what was previously tall grass prairie! Talk about stupid. We can easily feed our population and maintain a renewable agriculture resource and restore 50% of the former habitat if we didn't turn this resource into a major export industry of GMO corn and soy sprayed to hell with herbicides and insecticides. All the negative environmental impacts often discussed here.
The same efforts that went into ready Round Up corn and soy with patented seeds all brought to you by Monsanto could have been directed toward perennial varieties of wheat and corn. Imagine that, corn and wheat from a perennial plants that require no soil tilling and preserve top soil and mirror the prairie ecology. Could we still do this? Yes. Are there efforts in this direction? Yes... Ask me if your are interested. That is another post..
Anyway, this misuse as you see with tall grass prairies was repeated all over the world again and again and here is the silver lining. If we contract back to a billion and if we abandon the export market of corn and soy and if we property manage this valuable habitat we really really could have 10 million acres of tall grass prairies with buffalo roaming on them within 5 decades. This possibility is at our finger tips. If we choose. Which we wont before we experience some serious overshoot humble pie..... finger licking good.