How much fertilizer does the Iowan farmer need to add to their field to achieve that? How many years can they maintain that yield without eroding the soil?
Ammonia can be generated through electrolysis as feed-stock for Haber-Bosch to get nitrogen, so literally forever. The reason we use petroleum is because it's currently cheaper than solar PV electrolysis.
Sure, but it would take some time to transition to ramp up production to the scale required by world-scale agriculture. We're using petroleum for this because it was cheap & easy. Not saying we can't transition, but it will take time.
Right, but it's possible with existing tech and there's no scenario where oil disappears all at once. Its a highly geographically distributed resource.
Who cares? Fertilizer is nitrogen that literally comes out of the air. Erosion is vastly overstated by permaculture enthusiasts and can be mitigated vy changes to tillage and irrigation. Erosion in the Midwest clocks in at about 0.04 mm per year, but there's plenty of new soil deposition around the Mississippi. It's a manageable issue.
Extremely wrong how? There's a great an well sourced section in Vaclav Smil's How to Feed the World about this very topic. I also cited a specific erosion figure. But I guess that doesn't matter.
looking forward to reading it! definitely skeptical about your erosion rates, will have to go do my own research later (quick look, USDA estimates for the Corn Belt (~5 tons/acre/year on average)). if your info is coming from one book then i'm doubly skeptical, though i would bet that a soil scientist would probably agree with me and i'm def wondering if you might've misread the book?
i'm not a farmer, but i do manage woodlands, have a huge garden, volunteered on farms over the years, worked in a sustainable ag non-profit, and have even tried distributing sweet potatoes, etc, so i have an avid interest in agriculture and our food system.
aside from the fact that the soil is one of the three most important components for growing food, therefore it's extremely important to take care of it if we want our species to live into future centuries... there is a lot of evidence that shows that industrial ag creates erosion problems (one easy example: all of the national forests in my area was degraded farm land that they converted to woodlands in the 30s, because they learned this fact that hard way then). believing that hunger is a solved problem because of 20th century style agriculture is a fallacy. the dust bowl is one historical example that shows how this system can fail spectacularly, and it's all based in how we manage the topsoil, a natural resource just like oil or water.
we lost the moment we tried to overcome natural systems with chemicals (we've had a good run but i believe it's gonna be an anomaly in history). you can use science + natural systems in your favor to grow food. taking care of the topsoil is objective number one. food is a byproduct of good soil. the soil is a living system and chemicals kill that ecosystem to our detriment.
technology is definitely not the answer here. you are welcome to go try to grow food on mars without soil. good luck!
I initially copied the wrong number, the correct number is 1mm per year, coming from a Unas Amherst study not Smil’s book. It’s high vs pre industrial rates, but not catastrophic and as Smil points out there are plenty of places where land being farmed industrially is gaining soil.
glad we're working from the same figure now. 1mm per year is not insignificant, and soil is not a renewable resource... probably a fine amount of soil loss for a farmer's lifetime, but a land manager needs to think over centuries and not in profit cycles.
> and as Smil points out there are plenty of places where land being farmed industrially is gaining soil.
i would bet at least $100 this happens where they do cover crops and actually manage the soil as a resource to be preserved
Thats 1mm in the upper Midwest around the Great Lakes, wind is doubtless a factor. You can’t generalize to all industrial ag from a dozen sites in 3 geographically similar states.
Right, but tillage is not a set in stone practice. The Nebraska Corn Board is now advocating no-til corn planting[1]. Apparently it's already dominant in Western Canada and more than half of Montana cropland is managed without tilling.
Herbicide is a whole different discussion and probably too deep a rabbit hole so far down thread.
An axolotl is a salamander that has evolved neoteny (imagine a frog staying as a tadpole its whole life). It's also specifically adapted to a specific lake system in Mexico City. If it is kept in water under 57°F (14°C) it will die in a few days. They are also extremely sensitive to changes in the water quality or chemistry. It's not clear that this one will even survive after being rescued
There aren’t many baby salamanders that size, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_giant_salamander#Breed... says “external gills remain until a length of about 20 cm (8 in) at an age of 3 years”, so it could be. I wouldn’t know whether these look similar, though.
No one electron goes the 1600 mile distance. An increase of cheap energy supply in one place lowers likelihood of production elsewhere, but it is more diffuse than selling Iowan energy in California.
I find similar happening with Gemini Pro. Despite paying for Pro, it regularly locks me out, without visibility into consumption. Nothing on the plan comparison page indicates limits. https://one.google.com/about/plans
I use a variant of access tracking by treating things like stacks.
My bins are stacked like in the article's photos. When I am done with a bin, it goes on the top. Least recently accessed bin is on the bottom. I need to get better about cache eviction though.
This also works with clothing on a rack. Put clean clothes on the left. Choose what to wear from the right. Eventually, the things you don't like wearing will all be on the right. This also happens to sort clothes by season.
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