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.
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]
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.
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…
(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.