The biggest problem with fertilization and why it is applied annually is that it is very mobile and washes away in the rain or breaks down or evaporates.
Normally other parts of the crop are left in the field too, like leaves and stems and whatever else doesn't sell.
https://www.cookinglight.com/eating-smart/nutrition-101/frui...
It's great if you can use less land for farming, but if concentration leads to the land being damaged beyond repair then what's the point? You'd just have to turn unused land into farmland, and if you're doing that you may as well use crop rotation intentionally.
If you need to deposit massive amounts of natural gas (used to make hydrogen used to make ammonia) on a small amount of land instead of using a larger amount of land and using slower methods to get nitrogen in the soil... there is surely a stable point where the soil is continually usable without needing a lot of fertilizer.
This is not a scientific statement at all; it's an attempt at an analogy that doesn't work. Farming w/ intensive fertilization doesn't "kill soil"; the soil is basically just a substrate to hold water and fertilizer, and a ton of farmland in the US is basically this. It's not natural, but it's a steady-state.
And if the change here just makes the potato and rice more efficient, you could get similar yield improvements from organic farming. Just rotate a legume in every few years, you're not going to break the ecosystem by growing potatoes faster.
This view is incredibly harmful. What lives in the soil is important too, small animals, insects, mushrooms... And the soil supports this. The density, temperature, texture are all factors to it.
Every time I get to the US, I'm aghast at the pitiful taste of the fruits and veggies. The way you are growing things produces volumes yes, but of tasteless empty shells of a plant.
Of course then you put sugar on everything because the raw thing is aweful to eat.
So you get obese people with nutrient deficiency, on top of a dead soil that is an ecological disaster.
Seing only one dimension of something or maximizing productivity always leads to some kind of unbalance, and the effects are far reaching.
We are good at growing a lot of food because big ag has figured out the science and is really damn good at it. In fact it is a miracle; only a few short generations ago famines were a common occurrence. Consistency of flavor and yield reigns supreme, because when someone orders a Big Mac or a Bud Light they want it to taste the same every time.
Now of course, there is a whole organic and craft market segment for people who disagree with that premise and it’s served quite well in the US for those who want to pay for it.
https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/SAG-16
I would say that’s more than just chemistry, unless you mean chemistry in a sense that’s so general the statement becomes a tautology.
And honestly I met so many farmers that have no idea what tomatoes should taste like it's not even funny. Dining at their table, I hear them rejoice the produce in their plate is so good while I cringe because they feels like clown noses compared to the real thing.
Just like people can't fathom that we used to have bird migrations that cover the entire sky, people don't realize what we have lost with food. And they think they do, they think you are some kind of bragging posh to tell them that that's not supposed to be like this.
But I ate strawberries from my mother in law garden yesterday. It felt like eating sweets.
I haven't eaten some like that for 20 years, and I'm a very picky buyer.
Her soil is full of life.
Fruits and vegetable have been selected for being awesome for centuries. If you treat them well, you will not want to eat a kit kat instead.
But I don't blame the kids that do: currently, the kit kat tastes way better that whatever they have for lunch.
And the message you are replying to is correct, supermarket tomatoes are different variety, farmers get paid for mass, not for taste.
Supermarkets have giant charts that determine shape, roundness, and colour of tomato. They will buy perfectly round, red tomato that tastes like water. They will not buy an ugly but tasty tomato from a farmer.
The variety matters, but that's not the end of the story.
However, it results in a tomato that - while it looks like a normal tomato - the sugars and other flavours don't develop in the same way, rendering it bland.
If you want to buy tomatoes that taste good, you can get them from a farmers market and they will taste a lot better - even if grown in the same soil with the same techniques as the supermarket tomatoes. Alternatively canned/frozen/preserved tomatoes tend to be made with naturally ripened tomatoes. Obviously you can't really used those tomatoes the same way you'd use a raw tomato, though.
This isn't specific to tomatoes, many commercial fruits and veggies are picked before they're ripe.
Soil biology is no "magic" though.
> Now of course, there is a whole organic and craft market segment for people who disagree
It's almost as if you were suggesting that organic regenerative ag is based on some sort of non-scientific cult but that's not really the case.
From an agricultural stand point not necessarily from a consumers who are passionate about it perspective, there's a huge amount of culty anti science.
There's one easy proove, anything grown the way you describe taste like nothing compared to an healthy plant. Quality farming is not about volume or look but the actual quality of the produce.
I wouldn't call what you say science at all. As soon as you state that you know everything and that someone who disagrees is anti-science is just plain arrogance, not science. If you're really interested in science though, please read the huge amount of research on soil and plant that has been done since the 1950's so that you catch up at least....
Edit: Forgot to mention something, soil is not only for plants, there's a whole ecosystem that depends on it and need to be taken into account
I'm not talking about eating for pleasure, but you can definitely taste that something is wrong with industrially grown veggies and fruits (and the same apply for animal farming).
That's absolutely not true, it's been tested by thousands of people and you can try it yourself. Taste is affected by variety and ripeness, waay before it has anything to do with the soil.
Do your study in the south of italia in the summer for a fair fight.
Don't know about nutrients though, since I have no real means to check for that.
So it seems, at least for some plants it is possible to selectively breed them over long times to make them adapt to greenhouse/hydroponics/etc without losing their taste.
And I remember the real taste of berries, because I picked them in the wild in forests in my youth, and sometimes, though much less often even now.
I want to highlight that it's a relatively recent discovery that almost all plants live in a symbiotic relationship with fungi (Mycorrhiza) in the soil, which I wasn't taught in school.
Plants can also live without, but the existence of Mycorrhiza fungi impacts plant productivity and robustness.
Nutrients in plants decreased by small amount, but fresh plants in our diet decreased by 90%. Never in history have humans consumed exclusively fried chicken and deef fried potato. The diets are the real culprit.
There are complex factors, for example our supply chain takes tomatoes before they are ripe - a ripe tomato is so soft, it's impossible to get to the consumer in one piece
Give a person delicious plants, and they will eat them.
Growing alfalfa would help, but that is often not that profitable compared to reaping the soil and throwing on more artificial fertilizer until the soil is garbage.
Method boils down to, no till, plant a mix of cover crops, and don't plant mono culture. Ended up getting a inch of top soil a year.
You're starting halfway on the track. Most things you plant in arid soil won't grow, which is the situation where the GP started from. Sure, once you have a soil quality where your crop mix grows, it will take less than 50 years.
"How to get an inch of topsoil?" - "first, have an inch of topsoil" isn't really the scenario the GP was thinking of.
Or, crazy idea, just do exactly what we do with fertilizer. Identify what's missing, prepare it en masse, and add it back in. This could include microbes, minerals, certain types of organic material, you name it. As our understanding of a system improves so too does our ability to efficiently manipulate it to achieve the end result that we want.
For the record, I believe you drastically underestimate our current practices and capabilities. We've been performing nitrogen fixation on an industrial scale since the early 1900s.
Its not about capabilities, ita about cost.
"Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279
"Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032337