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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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