https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10531600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7905466/
Monoculture (conventional corn or soybean for example) uses huge amounts of synthetic fertilizer to increase yields per acre far beyond what the soil can naturally sustain. Wide swaths of American farmland has lost literally feet of topsoil over the past 50 years. The soil is largely sterile, and depleted of minerals. Monoculture also means the ecosystem that can replenish the soil is absent.
>This crop rotation benefits both alfalfa and wheat/barley/corn. On the one hand, cereals tend to decrease the development of weeds, leaving the field free for the alfalfa cultivation. On the other hand, there are findings suggesting that corn following alfalfa yields approximately 10% more than corn following corn.[1]
Having more corn doesn't mean that the corn or soil has more micronutrients. Corn is nitrogen heavy, so rotation makes sense if yields are all you care about.
No, that's not what it means. Farmers producing food that meets the "organic" label may follow those practices but it's not a requirement.
So does ‘conventional’ farming
Fertilizer is like doping. It works! But it comes at a long term cost. Anyway, now we can go down two paths, hyper-modern indoor farming which is expanding in Europe and organic farming that is growing in the US and Europe. Conventional industrial farming is going to get hit from both sides.
Also, the big things keeping corn going is sugar duties and ethanol subsidies. Without those, alot of the crop would disappear.
My family are farmers in Australia. We are currently going through the worst drought we have ever had. We've had 7 inches of rain this year vs our annual rainfall of 26 inches. We are still growing a (very small) crop. This is possible because of soil conservation, no-till agriculture, and having healthy soil that conserves moisture.
Farmers who haven't adopted these techniques are bankrupt.
in the US and Europe, it is possible to not engage in best practice farming techniques, because government subsidies (20 Bn USD in America, 59 Bn Euro in the EU) remove the competitive pressures that that force best practice (it really isn't as simple as 'just forcing more production out of the soil by adding more fertilizer_.
Yes, of course there are still farmers not following best practice. It's a normal distribution
If only the world were just. As you say, countries with legislature captured by farming lobbies are no longer subject to survival pressures.
However, there's a lot of non-falsifiable marketing woo out there, and it needs to be held accountable for that deficiency. If we don't, the woo wins every time, because it can't be held accountable for its problems, and we lose our ability to collectively learn and improve.
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.
An idiom about never taking down a fence one knows not the provenance or reason for comes to mind.
Not that I'm saying I entirely agree with the viewpoint myself, but the rate of catastrophic unintended consequences we facilitate (I.e biodiversity crisis, creation of superbugs, introduction of invasive species) through artificial selection pressures tends to elicit pause at the suggestion we just "toss some minerals in and be done with it".
Interesting. Could you please expand on that? Personally, I find the desire to control inherently suspicious.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control
Merriam Webster says that meaning (definition 1a) of the word "control" is archaic, but I still hear it used from time to time. It's commonly used in a number of European languages.
Manure works fine. That doesn't mean it's anywhere near optimal.
Whatever product fits into the economies of scale, and selective commoditization solely for the sake of profit concentration not nutrition or environment.
But back to the idea of measuring everything. These are the counterpoints I can think about regarding measuring and controling:
* Measuring and controlling cost resources, some less, some more. E.g. It is easier to measure yields than to measure nutrition.
* There is imperfect knowledge on how to respond (control) after a given measurement, or even what measurements are important. E.g. Premature optimization, Goodhart's law, lack of certainty regarding nutrition.
* There are conflicting interests on what the result of controlling should be. E.g. more profits or more nutrition?
* Under appropriate circumstances systems can respond to variability or keep functioning without human control or input. This is resilience. E.g. Pollinating insects, edible weeds.
>Soil Fertility: Crops more easily resist disease, survive drought, and tolerate insects when grown in good soil. Organic crop producers build soil quality by adding compost, animal manures, or green manures. As soil organisms break down these inputs, they convert nutrients into forms plants can absorb and create humus that sustains soil quality. Organic producers must not apply sewage sludge or biosolids to soil. Additionally, organic crop producers use cover crops to protect the soil from wind and water erosion. Soil-conserving practices include the use of cover crops, mulches, conservation tillage, contour plowing, and strip cropping.
It could be the opposite too. There's some evidence that, in some cases, purely hydroponic greenhouse-grown produce, which often qualifies and is sold as "organic", has fewer nutrients than soil-grown produce.
Some organic fertilizers I’ve used at my home garden: bone meal, blood meal, fish emulsion and egg shell.
One concrete example is how certain modern strains of apple seeds have weaker dormancy, causing imbibing and radicand emergence to occur prematurely, usually before the apple is even eaten. Such changes are an unintended consequence of human selection for size. It's possible that the tinkering required to increase plant vigor in the presence of non-organic pesticides has a greater adverse effect on mineral content. Though there are lots of other variables to consider as well such as soils, fertilizers, storage and transportation, the positioning of plants, whether they are able to share nutrients.
[1] - https://www.vitacost.com/blog/food-nutrition/nutrition/how-i...