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Posted: **Tue 15 Jun 2010, 08:16:03**

I always get grief when I bring this up but no-till has changed the whole "landscape" by reducing soil loss much more than reduced till or conservation tillage and even more than strip till. You need to remember, no-till has only been around since '98 but has a large penetration in the market - especially corn (no time to look that up).

Monsanto is an evil company and that sucks but the fact is soil loss on no-till is about 50%f of strip till - compare no-till soil loss at 1.14 tons/acre/year to conventional till at 12 tons/acre/year!

Cellulosic ethanol is a worry too, because with no-till especially the more residue you remove from a field the less protection it has. Compared to leaving 100% of corn residue, removing 100% increases erosion 236%

Iowa study

In case someone doesn't get it, "no-till" means no cultivation to prepare the seedbed or eliminate weed competition, instead it uses herbicide tolerant crops and Round-up.

Posted: **Tue 15 Jun 2010, 16:46:01**

No till is indeed mostly done with massive application of herbicides.

But, from what I've heard, this is not absolutely necessary. Careful use of cover crops, especially grasses like annual rye, can block out most weed seeds by taking up all the root space. And the rotted roots and stems develop the soil and draw carbon out of the atmosphere. A single four-month-old rye plant has a root system that, if extended in a straight line, would stretch 137 miles.

Stories like the above encourage me to pursue a long-time day dream--compost business.

Someone in the know told me the other day that Miracle Grow is now selling more compost and other soil supplements than it is actual Miracle Grow.

Posted: **Tue 15 Jun 2010, 17:39:05**

dohboi wrote:Careful use of cover crops...

Yea, I've played with this in the garden, basically grow a winter cover, push it over and crimp it (to keep it from regrowing) in the spring and plant your transplants through this "killed cover", it works like mulch by shading out the competition.
Here are some cool studies http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/chatham/ag/SustAg/research.html

Doesn't work for grain crops tho, neither does strip till, and of course grain crops are the biggest and that's where the big erosion happens - and where Roundup Ready works, as long as enough crop residue is left after harvest.

Actually, Round Up Ready seeds reduced use of some of the really nasty herbicides like 2-4-D & Paraquat that were used routinely before RR seeds - they stayed toxic for a long time and there was no doubt they killed people. Unfortunately I think this is turning around now with tolerance to glyphosate building.

Farmers have gotten used to making 2 passes a year through the field since the turn of the century - 1 to drill and 1 to harvest with one application of round-up by buggy or plane. If they have to go back to 5 or 6 passes, plus spraying 2-4-D while diesel is at $6 or $10 a gallon your happy meal is gonna be costing quite a few cents more.

Posted: **Tue 15 Jun 2010, 18:28:35**

My only doubt about peak soil would be Africa.. that continent is massive, and it's only just begun to see serious industrial agriculture. The Chinese and Indians are buying up lots of land right now.

Posted: **Tue 15 Jun 2010, 19:28:33**

Sixstrings wrote:My only doubt about peak soil would be Africa.. that continent is massive, and it's only just begun to see serious industrial agriculture. The Chinese and Indians are buying up lots of land right now.

Large parts of Africa are semi arid and have suffered centuries of over grazing. I cant give a definative answer to the soil status of much of the continent other than to say it was becoming an issue at the end of the colonial era.

Very large parts of Southern Africa were desert with mobile sand dunes during the holocene climate optimum and have relativly thin soil and like Australia have not experianced major glaciation or vulcanicity in the past few 100 million years.

You would need to here form an expert before banking on Africa.

Posted: **Wed 19 Dec 2012, 20:04:41**

http://money.msn.com/now/post.aspx?post ... 3841186b8d

Posted: **Tue 28 May 2013, 12:01:26**

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNON5iNf07o

Excellent intro for people to get their head around what we need to do to repair, restore and reinvigorate natural ecosystems.

Posted: **Mon 09 Feb 2015, 07:56:51**

5 reasons Peak Food is the world’s No. 1 ticking time bomb

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/5-reas ... 2015-02-06

farm production can’t feed the 10 billion humans forecast on Planet Earth by 2050. Can we wait till 2050 for the fallout? No. The clock’s ticking on the Peak Food disaster dead ahead. We’re at the critical tipping point, the planet is boiling over...

“Do the technologies exist? Or are you saying they will someday, ‘as in, we know there will be a cure for cancer, but we have no idea when or how’?”

...the entire global food industry may just whimsically go on thinking short-term profits living in a fantasy world, hoping that someday, maybe they’ll get bailed out by some magical technology that just may not be there when they get there.

...as things get worse and Peak Food starts descending rapidly down the other side of the peak, all that optimism, the magical technology, all the promises of capitalist solutions will still be little comfort for the more than one billion people worldwide who already live in extreme poverty...

...We already have trouble feeding the 7.3 billion people already here today. And it’s virtually impossible to feed another 3 billion by 2050, warns Jeremy Grantham, whose firm is an investment manager for $120 billion, and also funds the Grantham Research Center at the London School of Economics.

Bill Gates caps population at 8 billion people. Columbia University’s Jeff Sachs, head of the Earth Institute and a key adviser to the UN Secretary General, warns that five billion is the max Earth can sustain. Yet, at today’s trajectory, it’s 10 billion, a disaster waiting to happen.

The Bush Pentagon already warned us that by 2020 the planet’s “carrying capacity” will be so drastically compromised America’s war machine is already preparing military defense systems for the coming “all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies.”

...Grantham ... reinforces the Pentagon’s worst fears, warning of an “inevitable mismatch between finite resources and exponential population growth” with a “bubble-like explosion of prices for raw materials,” plus commodity shortages that are a major “threat to the long-term viability of our species when we reach a population level of 10 billion,” making “it impossible to feed the 10 billion people.”

Bad news: the planet’s “carrying capacity” cannot feed 10 billion people. So that constrains all technological optimism., forcing Grantham conclusion: “As the population continues to grow, we will be stressed by recurrent shortages of hydrocarbons, metals, water, and, especially, fertilizer. Our global agriculture, though, will clearly bear the greatest stresses.”

...American politicians damn well better start to deal with Grantham’s five constraints:

>>We’re “running out completely of potassium (potash) and phosphorus (phosphates) and eroding our soils … Their total or nearly total depletion would make it impossible to feed the 10 billion people ...

>>“Potassium and phosphorus are necessary for all life; they cannot be manufactured and cannot be substituted for ...

>>“Globally, soil is eroding at a rate that is several times that of the natural replacement rate …

>>“Poor countries found mostly in Africa and Asia will almost certainly suffer from increasing malnutrition and starvation. The possibility of foreign assistance on the scale required seems remote.

>>“Many stresses on agriculture will be exacerbated … by increasing temperatures … increased weather instability … frequent and severe droughts and floods.”

...Capitalism “cannot deal with the tragedy of the commons, e.g., overfishing, collective soil erosion, and air contamination.” Just the opposite, unregulated free markets just makes things worse.

Posted: **Mon 09 Feb 2015, 09:32:48**

dohboi wrote:[
...Capitalism “cannot deal with the tragedy of the commons, e.g., overfishing, collective soil erosion, and air contamination.” Just the opposite, unregulated free markets just makes things worse.

Socialism cannot deal with it either.

Posted: **Mon 09 Feb 2015, 10:50:20**

All of the above; systemic destruction of planetary carrying capacity. Worry not, though. Not a thing you can do about it.

Posted: **Mon 09 Feb 2015, 12:04:47**

"Socialism cannot deal with it either."

Perhaps. Depends on the brand of socialism. In any case, I'm pretty sure socialism is not what Grantham had in mind.

Perhaps it's time to create some non-19th century systems for the 21st??

Posted: **Mon 09 Feb 2015, 12:27:07**

vtsnowedin wrote:Socialism cannot deal with it either.

Capitalism is not the problem any more than socialism is the solution.

No "ism" that relies on profit - and socialism relies on surplus and profit as much as capitalism - is the solution.

But the version of unregulated capitalism pushed in the US is the problem - just as "unregulated communism" is a problem.

Posted: **Mon 09 Feb 2015, 17:15:31**

pstarr wrote:Socialism can deal with it. Americans are programmed to waste. You have been well-trained by the Masters. In America, the amount you throw away is a measure of your freedom. It is everywhere. The right measures their freedom by the size and sound of their truck. Or their family. The left measures their freedom by the miles on their frequent-flier account.

In the corporate world because of the bottom line you see minimum waste and often good efficiency in operations but super waste in the propoganda of consumption and products with built in obsolescence.

The opposition to regulating product design for longevity would be huge but then again if consumers one day have to cut way way back we might see some wise corporations designing and promoting products that last decades.

Afterall, the airline industry has this incentive....... ironic that the industry that has the best products for longevity is in an industry that wastes fuel with discretionary spénding of bird watchers for example coming to Mount Totumas

Posted: **Mon 09 Feb 2015, 17:39:48**

Organopónicos or starvation and zombies with guns,history suggests socialism has a better chance of achieving it.
Farmers become well paid public servants ,education shifts quickly to training farmers in organic agriculture ,land is not privately owned,profit is not the motivation just nutrition.

Posted: **Mon 09 Feb 2015, 17:45:21**

If you don't have mucho deneros, do you want to live in a culture that is basically organized in maximizing the advantages of those with 'capital' or one that is organized to aid the society as a whole.

Basically, that's what it comes down to.

Of course, you can do capitalism badly (basically, by not tempering with a good dose of real socialism), and you can do socialism badly (by making it into hierarchy, bureaucracy, elitism, leader worship, etc).

But done well, socialism is always going to be 'friendlier' to life than capitalism, imvho.

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