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I'm from California but I live in New Zealand. The birds here are very noisy in the morning. It's almost plague levels of birds on my farm, of many many varieties (Aussie Magpie, spurwing plover, thrush, morepork, tui, kingfisher, swamp harrier, wood pidgeon, ducks, and others that I haven't identified yet or forgot about. There are even a few exotics that escaped the conservatory in town and decided to live here and breed. Not to mention the bees everywhere, both honey and bumble.

Underfunding certainly can(has?) interfere with their ability to do their job. But proper funding might not help if regulatory capture is also in play.

I'm of the persuasion that governmental organisations need to be shaken up from time to time to prevent ossification, stagnation, inefficiencies, regulatory capture, ideological capture, etc... but the new agency needs to utilize the pieces from the old agency (not to start from scratch).

The problem is one of underestimating the vastness of what we don't yet understand. We know extensively (nearly completely) about physics and basic chemistry at the unit level. As we increase the complexity, we know less and less. Protein folding, hormone interactions, DNA, getting there but lots of unknowns. Go up another few levels and you get to entire organisms like yeasts, which we can model reasonably well. Plants and their soil environment is several levels of magnitude more complex yet.

Using shit will get you an outcome you can count on. Trying to formulate things otherwise is sure to get whatever you are testing for, but likely to miss something important that we won't understand for years to come. That's happened more times than I'd care to count.

Both parent and grandparent are saying something important here. Mineral availability from the microbiome via root interactions is critical. But throw nitrogen at a plant and it will rapidly grow utilizing CO2, O2 and water, leaving a mineral deficient plant. And that is true in any soil. Also, modern plants have been selected to be large and tender, which tends to be inversely coorelated to mineral density. So it's been a perfect storm against.