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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

Scary stuff. What is the solution? Make it illegal to grow crops in a way that destroys soil? Is this a partisan issue?

"Eat mor Chiken" as the chic-fil'a cows say?

It's a partisan issue in that there are those still trying to convince the American public that climate change isn't real, or that it's not caused by humans, or that it's not a real problem for people, or that doing anything that would impact the profits of the corporations who contribute the most to it would be entirely unacceptable.

We've known for a very long time that large parts of the western US were at severe risk of desertification and that combined with increasing temperatures there could come a time when they may not be fit to sustain large populations. I'm surprised to see projections that it'll be so bad in the midwest as well. It's sort of telling that they've been preparing for likely civil unrest as a result of drought (https://drought.unl.edu/Publications/News.aspx?id=388)

There's no one solution to the problem, but the good news is that this isn't a problem limited to the US. Governments around the world have been working on finding solutions for decades. (https://www.dw.com/en/holding-back-the-growing-desert/a-1862...) so I'm still hopeful that however broken our political system is or becomes, it won't prevent the exploration of new restoration techniques.

The European Commission supports the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)

>What is the solution? Make it illegal to grow crops in a way that destroys soil?

That would be a start. Farming practices that have been known for centuries to maintain field fertility have been discarded because it reduces average annual yield (and thus, profits). It's been artificially propped up by the use of nitrogen rich fertilizer, but that's a dwindling supply.

> "Eat mor Chiken" as the chic-fil'a cows say?

Eating less meat and eating more crops directly would improve our odds.

Why do you say nitrogen fertiliser is a dwindling supply?

The majority of synthetic fertilizers are produced from oil and gas products. Recent events have put some supply constrain on those.

You mean the organic farming practices that destroyed the Tigris and Euphrates, or the ones that caused the 30's first bowl or many others?

We know what causes soul loss. The primary factor is tillage.

And if you want to grow food on land without tillage the best way is to use more herbicide and more fertilizer, or to turn it into pasture and raise animals on the land.

Why would you assume your parent comments is referring to farming practices from around the gilded age in the USA? Do you think they were more focused on long-term soil health at the cost of short-term profits back then?

organic farming that caused the dustbowl ?!

the modern understanding of organic farming is not related to whatever you are trying to imply and impugn. It is a lazy use of language with an obvious fallacy. One liners like that are common in politics aimed at the under-educated; wrong audience here.

I said centuries, not the 1930s. Industrialization culture upended many tried and true practices that had been used for a millennium and not all of their replacements are equally sustainable, even if they are more efficient in the short term.

The best thing society could do for itself is stop obsessing over growth-seeking and find a way to live sustainably again.

Farms in the 1930s were still mostly animal powered and used the same techniques that have been used for thousands of years.

From the perspective of the soil, "industrial agriculture" means the plough and monoculture, both of which have been around for over 5000 years.

Any replacement for industrial agriculture has to feed 7 billion people without raising prices significantly. Good luck with that.

That's wrong and obviously so. Established farming practices did not work for 5000 years and then suddenly stop working in the past century. The practices themselves changed. If you want something to search up, there's the increasingly common term "peak fertilizer."

> Any replacement for industrial agriculture has to feed 7 billion people without raising prices significantly. Good luck with that.

It's 8 billion now. The single most important thing that can be done in that arena is curtail meat consumption. Calories-per-acre are several times higher when the crops are used to feed humans directly rather than the inefficient roundabout of feeding animals then feeding the animals to humans. We will both increase our total food supply and reduce the need for tilling and artificial soil fertilization without having to add a single acre of cropfield.

Crops also require much fewer resources (water, electricity, human labor, land area, etc.) to produce and manage than livestock, and do not emit methane.

Historical breadbaskets such as the Middle East, Egypt, Ethiopia and Mexico did not lose that status in the past 100 years, nor were they destroyed by fertilizer. Today, the breadbaskets of the world are places like North America and the Ukraine that have been under cultivation for less than 500 years.

Crop yields have increased substantially in the past century. Established farming practices did not suddenly stop working in the past century.

>And thus profits. It reduces the supply of food, which will likely cause more land to be used for farming. Also less people can afford a vegetable and can only eat corn syrup. This goes against the push for a growing population. If we had time to first accept and plan around a shrinking population we could afford to use less land or use the current one in a less aggressive way.

1. Collect and use compost on farms

2. Use more sustainable, ground cover crops like hemp.

Or clover, as it fixates nitrogen into the soil.

Hemp isn't any more or less sustainable than any other crop.

This isn't about marijuana. Marijuana should and will eventually be legal.

This is about the cargo cult that has surrounded hemp.

Hemp is in the C3 photosynthesis category, as are million of other plants.

Generally speaking, switchgrass or any other C4 grass will produce more biomass in identical conditions, than hemp.

If your goal is biomass, switchgrass also has the benefit of not being an invasive, non-native, species in North America.

Produce electricity where we currently grow food and use that energy to grow food closer to where we eat it.

And support policies that encourage ownership at the local level, prevent multinational corporations and billionaires from buying up the producing assets.

Lots of crazy locals are pushing back out of aesthetics or emotional attachment to farming even if that farming isn’t good for the land. Uphill battle ahead against these folks.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/30/its-got-...

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/01/12/solar_en...

https://futurism.com/19606

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-expansion-stalled-...

It looks like a lot of these folks are being coordinated by a political group, “Citizens for Responsible Solar.”

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1154867064/solar-power-misinf...

https://www.eenews.net/articles/meet-the-nimby-people-trying...

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