I’ve heard a lot about intensive farming. Not a fan, but it doesn’t come from nowhere. Artificial fertilizer and intensive farms mean more people can be fed with less land, less deforestation.
Monocrops didn’t come from nowhere either, not everywhere can grow everything.
But wow we have fucked things up.
No, it means they can make even more money off the deforested land.
I’m surprised no one posted a link of this old Veratasium video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY).
Sorry about this being a YT link. I wish he’d co-publosh elsewhere, but oh well.
That dude is pretty cozy with industry, I don’t really trust him. He’s been dodgy for a long time.
I started looking into food gardening back when covid began. I’m not anywhere near being self sufficient in vegetables, and the price can barely compete with stores, but I’ve learned a lot and it really tastes a lot better. That alone is worth the effort.
Without even opening the article, let me guess. Industrial farming ruins the soil and so the crop can’t absorb the nutrients because they’re just not there? Almost like large-scale profit-first thinking comes back to bite our collective arses like it fucking consistently does in all other areas of life?
Interesting. I would have assumed that it was all the science providing bigger vegetables, but that more volume wasn’t scaling linearly with more nutrition.
So, I’m a software developer and what knowledge I have of this is primarily due to just being a kid of a botanist who deeply cared about the subject, and spending lots and lots of time out growing food because we were poor and needed to eat. When your life depends on something, you learn as much as you can about it.
Breeding plants to be larger and consume more is probably a factor. Mistreating the soil is probably a bigger factor than people expect, though.
It’s easy to think of soil as just a substrate, since we can’t really see it or navigate it it’s hard to properly visualise it. It consists of several strata, all with different properties. Healthy soil is full of bacteria, fungi, and little insects that live and die in it. All their activity help bring about nutrients and process the soil, aerate it. A lot of people are shocked to discover that the roots of plants also need air.
Industrial agriculture focuses a lot on big monocultures. As much as possible you want a field to have a single crop and nothing else. Herbicides are used to kill off anything that isn’t the wanted crop, pesticides are used to kill off whatever might want to feast on the crop, fungicides… etc. Then we spread loads of nutrients over the field in the hope of replenishing whatever the crops drain from the soil.
It works to an extent. A lot of nutrients just run off into surrounding areas and waters, it’s one of the reasons the Baltic Sea is basically dead.
Different plants have different properties. We mostly just see the top of plants, but like ice bergs a significant portion of them exists underground. Different plants have different root systems, some spread wide in the topsoil and help bind it together, preventing runoff and erosion. Some have really long roots (tap roots, like dandelion), reaching deep into the soil, pulling up minerals (nutrients) from the far reaches and eventually when they die, they get dispersed among the topsoil. Some fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, and bind it into the soil when they die and break down.
With big industrial monocultures, you lose all of that. There’s nothing to hold the soil in place, there’s nothing to pull nutrients across strata, there’s no ecosystem to constantly process and enrich the soil for you.
The plants all evolved together, and just like animals they competed for different niches. Some animals eat vegetable matter on the ground, some evolved tall statures and long necks to reach further up. Some plants evolved wide root networks to absorb nutrients from a large area, some evolved long roots to penetrate deeper into the earth where other plants can’t reach.
There’s also fungi and bacteria everywhere, they live in the root systems, doing their work and helping the plants out, similarly to how we have bacteria in our guts.
I think even if you took profit out of this we’d still have this problem (might be more inclined to fix it though). We need to feed a lot of people. to do that efficiently high yield is needed causing the areas where we farm to become over farmed and the vegetables bred to be larger rather than nutrition focused.
Apparently normal plowing (the thing we’ve been doing for millenia) can damage the soil and reduce the nutrients going to the crops.
There is the elephant in the room; the majority of land dedicated to agriculture, that’s both land for grazing and land for growing food, is dedicated to raising and feeding animals. I think the number is around 80%, with the amount of land dedicated to growing food is somewhere around 45%?
We’re wasteful with vegetables and the like already, when we are wasteful with meat, we’re also throwing away all the input that went into the chain prior to it.
I don’t like to dictate what people should eat. I was born and raised a lacto-ovo vegetarian, and nowadays I’m almost entirely plant based. Switching over to a plant based diet was easy for me, there wasn’t much to switch out. I also in general loathe when people try to fuss over others food, I was on the receiving end of that all the time as a kid and it’s incredibly tiring.
That said, reducing our dependence on animal agriculture would be a boon to the world.
That’s a bingo
Any time I see this, it’s always read in his voice and accent, and today is no exception.
I’m so surprised! I don’t think this is news on account of this being the stuff my mother babbled about 26 years ago when she was re-schooling into botany.
It’s why people talk about small scale agriculture and permacultures.
It’s why people talk about small scale agriculture and permacultures.
Not sure small scale farming really solves that, but one reason for perms cultures and agroforestry is they’re more resilient and require less water to produce the same quantity of food.
Agro forestry is a concept which is getting way too little focus, considering the risk of large scale draughts becoming more common
Not-news on a news website? Well colour me shocked.
Seriously though, people still need to hear this.
This is true.
The strains of vegetables are at least as much of a factor I would presume. They have been going towards GE crops to take pesticides more and produce higher outputs.
It’s mostly that, not the soil, as they use fertilizers, which do work, despite many of those fertilizers being sewage, (which is a legitimate, traditional, and good fertilizer,) that is mixed with industrial waste from municipal water systems.
It’s all fucked.
You’re right to point out that there’s other factors as well.
But then you just went … off the rails?
This is well-known, just not widely discussed.
It’s a combination of soil being depleted from micro minerals, and every plant is bred for yield, not flavor or nutrition.
Yeild, plus….shelf life, ability to withstand shipping, size, and looks.
Not flavor… unless sugary. Things like grapes, apples, or carrots have gotten crazy sweet.
Where I am it’s not even sweet. It’s just tasteless. The bananas are grey, the apples have no flavor.
Your bananas are very likely coming from the exact same place everyone else’s bananas come from. There aren’t many places to get em from.
Yep banana clones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana
“This is the Bad Place.”
“not flavor”
This one hit;s hard. I was getting seeds at a food bank to grow peppers. I went on to say, oh you need to starve them of water (increasing potency) and the twat told me “I guess you’re not hungry enough” sigh the whole point of hot peppers is to flavor that potato I was going to eat.
Ah yes, remember how many people starved to death as the result of the great pepper famine? Almost 1. /s
I got a good laugh out that, thanks
You can’t continue to farm on the same land season after season. The soil needs to regenerate. Rotational farming practices is the key not dumping nitrogen into the soil and constant tilling. You get zero water retention and poor soil health / biome.
This isn’t really true. The need to move land is caused by western farming practices. Food forests can operate on the same land indefinitely as they did for native americans for millenia because they are a mix of plants that keep the soil well regulated. They also produce more food per acre than monocultures. They’re just more labor intensive to harvest. You can’t use machines you have to pick things by hand.
The article talks about zinc and selenium, which are metallic elements that are not regenerated in soil on seasonal timescales. We’d need millions of years for the crust to renew and dredge up more rocky sources from the mantle. It is a mass balance problem - each bit of zinc in the wheat you eat used to be out in the field, but now it is in your body until you excrete it as waste … then it probably ends up in the ocean or a landfill depending on where your water treatment plant is. Very little waste is recovered for fertilizer.
The solution here is going to be more fertilizers, not less, with micronutrients sourced from mines with richer deposits than the soil holds. The only other solution is moving food production to virgin land, which means destroying even more nature and will ruin that soil as well in time.
See also phosphorous, which the world is rapidly running out of. Phosphorous is regenerated through sedimentation in the ocean crust, and subsequent tectonic activity moving that crust to the surface. There’s less than a century of phosphate rock reserves left. Fertilizers won’t even be an option in this case, and it is a slow-motion emergency.
I learned something new today…
Crop rotation is a required practice, in the United States, for farms seeking organic certification.[24] The “Crop Rotation Practice Standard” for the National Organic Program under the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, section §205.205, states that
Farmers are required to implement a crop rotation that maintains or builds soil organic matter, works to control pests, manages and conserves nutrients, and protects against erosion. Producers of perennial crops that aren’t rotated may utilize other practices, such as cover crops, to maintain soil health.[13]
(From Wikipedia article on Crop Rotation)
I had never realized that. I generally don’t pick organic because I believe that, for the most part, the majority of “organic” farming is mostly marketing geared at anti-science people, and fully organic farming is not scalable enough to replace modern ag.
But that’s definitely a tick in the “pro” column.
i grew up in rural illinois literally surrounded by farmland. the only crop rotation they did was cycle corn and soybeans over and over again. so they arent doing much.
I feel like we already knew this was caused by poor soil quality? Like, we fertilize fields with ammonium nitrate, urea, and diammonium phosphate. You’ll notice there’s no potassium, magnesium, zinc, iron, or copper being added back. There’s less in every harvest.
The good news is that we already have the tools to fix this, in breeding, soil health, markets and policy.
There’s literally nothing breeding can do to add micro-nutrients back to our food, and markets got us to this point.
The only solution is policy targeting soil health, and that’s it.
I think you forgot potash, which provides… let me check my notes… potassium. And micronutients like zinc, boron, copper and mag as well as many others are applied via seed-placed fert as well as foliar application.
Nobody here knows shit all about how crops are fertilized, obviously.
Compost and manure also add back nutrients.
Yet, soil quality is declining, as is stated in the article. Why? It seems to me that farmers aren’t adding back nearly enough, and are just relying on nitrogen and phosphorus. Maybe because it’s cheaper and easier to apply, but I can only guess at why they are neglecting their soil health.
There’s different levels of farmers, but the ones that stick around are the ones that pay attention to soil health because it’s where their profits are made in the long term.
But most of them consider themselves doing a pretty fair job of keeping soils healthy. It’s not always done how the keyboard warriors want, because of realities on the ground like sourcing and transporting large amounts of compost and manure, or the excessive cost of manufactured but easily transportable fertilizers.
And it’s pretty funny to watch people bitch about the ethics of livestock on one hand, but want farmers to use manure on the other. If you can figure out a way to strain the PFAS and chemicals out of city waste and make it a non-toxic mess, then get it to where the food is grown, I’m sure everyone would be all ears. While you’re at it, get that food waste gathered up and put it on a truck. I’ll take it in a heartbeat.
I’ve gotten very used to how Lemmy despises farmers, it’s pretty depressing actually to work like a dog for next to nothing in order to have people hate you for feeding them.
I think most of the hate is (or at least should be) directed at the industry itself, meaning the big corporations and private equity firms that are screwing everybody to extract as much profit as possible. The same people are probably screwing you.
If they’re directing their ire at you, a literal farmer who actually does the sowing and harvesting, then that’s wrong and unfair. And honestly a lot of leftists need to be better about actually supporting the working class instead of constantly talking down to anyone who doesn’t have a master’s degree in communism.
Another part of it is the (wrong) perception that farmers are all trump supporters. It seems like it because those are the ones we see in the headlines saying they regret their voting decisions. But I know several farmers who are lifelong democrats and as anti-trump as anyone I know. So being mad at farmers as a whole just because some farmers voted stupid, would be like being mad at all tech workers or all retail staff just because some people in those professions voted stupid. It’s a pretty ignorant overgeneralization.
Agreed. I did see that farms that apply for or keep an organic tag must rotate the crops to keep the tag. Right now only about 15% of our (U.S.) crops purchased are organic but I would imagine with education and policies/regulations.
It may be harder for specific crops like corn, but they supposedly have already seen nutrients rise greatly in situations where they have rotated the crops by such policies.
Hopefully it’s a problem that can be solved pretty quickly.
As with anything lobbying will promote misinformation and strawmen that will slow down fixes … because the health of others doesn’t matter more than having an extra profit.
We can try to breed them back in with their wild ancestors. Or just start over with the wild ancestors
That will not add potassium, magnesium, zinc, iron, or copper to the harvest. That only comes from the soil.
Ah I was talking phytonutrients vs micronutrients I guess.
We can fix the soil for micros but we have to re breed the plants to fix phytos
Capitalism, where we ruin everything and never stop to ask whether it’s a bad idea. But don’t worry y’all. In a few short years we could be sharecroppers on Mars. I’m sure the soil there is fine!
plus no pesky labor laws on mars
RFK Jr recommends higher perchlorate levels in your potatoes to improve your constitution.
but they’ve already violated my constitution
deleted by creator
That’s just his Charisma score talking.
The good news is that we already have the tools to fix this, in breeding, soil health, markets and policy.
Why isn’t composting part of the solution? If those minerals aren’t going into our bodies then they should at least be returned to the soil instead of to the dump.
I would say composting falls under soil health.
And policy
Our ecosystem has a limit to what it can support. Some people call it a ‘carrying capacity’, but I prefer to call it ‘Shareholder Returns’.
Agricultural collapse has taken down more than one civilization.
Micronutrient pools are largely controlled by mineral weathering. Here, they’ve depleted these pools by intensive agriculture. The pools are slow to replenish, which is why we are pinched now with less nutrition in vegetables
Basically, the mineral components in the soil - whatever rock the soil particles came from - undergo chemical and physical degradation, releasing micro nutrients bound within them.
Potassium is a good example even though it’s a macro nutrient - the mechanism is the same for the most part
Rock is the slowest but largest pool of nutrients like K. With K in particular, clays can bind it and desorb it depending on clay type and hydration status. That K is generally more available to the plants.
Think of it this way: you have a mountain with diamonds in it, and a pick axe. That’s your mineral K. You can chip away and get more diamonds but it’s hard to do so and time consuming.
There’s also a smaller pile of diamonds that you can just sell to people. That’s your available K.
Then there is diamonds you are getting polished, that can later be sold. That’s your clays
I’m today years old when I realized that most many, if not most, types of rocks contain carbon and potassium.
C and K. That’s half of being a rock.
Given I can’t change agricultural practices on my own but I can change what and where I buy, is there anyway to buy more nutritious vegetables?
You can buy produce labeled as organic or Bio depending on where you are. You can also support your local farmer’s market. There’s a small traditional farm close to where I live that lets you harvest tomatoes yourself in the summer and they definitely taste very different from the ones at the discounter.
Anything that says “regenerative farming”. I grow some of what we eat and don’t use much fertilizer just get good local compost dirt and try to rotate crops.
As*
"But reduced nutrients in crops combined with the rise of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, could push around 5 million UK working-age adults below safe levels of essential vitamins and minerals, experts warn. "
The report is a google doc. How would one download it out of google, and then share a link to it here on Fedi? I’d rather not share google links. Hollow Harvest: Rebuilding the nutritional value of crops in an age of abundant calories
I’ve long attempted to, and recommend to others that they eat nutritionally dense/ calorically poor foods. Don’t Panic; Go Organic
As a (ovo-lacto-)vegetarian who is also on a GLP-1 medication…I’m making sure I take a compounded one with added B vitamins. B is hard enough to get on a meatless diet…and I really feel like certain foods are just passing through me barely digested…particularly greens.
I should probably add a multi vitamin into my daily regimen.
Nutritional yeast has b vitamins and tastes good sprinkled on a lot of stuff.
I sit there dumping it on salad greens and eating it plain like that like some kind of goblin.
I’m not even vegetarian.
You might be able to use pandoc to convert the report to text format or something easier to share and share through pastebin or similar service
si, pero no tiempo.
As things are you have to spend a bit more time, or money if you want the freedom from corporations.
convenience is where they get us, to be sure.
Because you live on a fucking island and you ran out of soil.
This article is about the UK.
This article implies something about the whole world, though. Like it or not, more and more places are replacing common sense with capitalism.
This article implies something about the whole world, though.
Where? Where does it do that?
Like it or not, more and more places are replacing common sense with capitalism.
That is so fucking vague and meaningless, why don’t you just smell your own farts instead?
Used up all the beta carotine to shoot down the Nazis.
People around here really don’t like being reminded that the West actually fought the Nazis.
only once we felt like it.
