I come from a long line of farmers. My father was the last of our family to try to hold onto the farming tradition. He grew up on a farm, along with all my aunts and uncles. His generation was the first go to college. He chose business. He made a ton of money, and hated it. After leaving the business world in the mid 1980s to return to farming, it was not the same, and he soon returned to what was effectively day trading in the early to mid 1990s.

The transformation of farming is a direct result of corporatization and globalization, like almost every other sector of the economy. It's just more of the machine eating the world. Small, family farms, the kind that my ancestors toiled on, since unrecorded history, literally centuries, back to central Europe, were chewed up and spit out by the machine. The forests, the land, the local wildlife, now, too, the soil, all chewed up and digested in the pursuit of the one thing that the machine really craves: money.

It's the legacy of our entire economic focus on profit, growth, scale. No big conspiracy, no evil bad actors you can hate forever, just the summation of our value system expressed in the invisible hand of the market, jostled or cajoled here and there by policy, or retarded briefly by it, but always pointing in the same direction, eventually to consume all the natural resources, dipping over the threshold of sustainability to the reservoir of resources behind it, extracting and emptying it, until eventually there is nothing left.

I'm not sure how much this actually scales and makes enough money but it sure is an awesome tale (saw the movie on Netflix - https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829):

https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/

Your dad might love it, even if just for the nostalgia.

That said, I think some of the lessons in there are awesome. Both the ones about biodiversity but also perseverance in the light of 'disaster' striking and staying strong and going on with the biodiversity path instead of just resigning and saying "yep, alright, Big Farmer is right, this doesn't work".

it's a wonderful feel-good movie (i loved it), but i'm not sure whether this is actually a sustainable farming solution. afaik they make the farm profitable tourism, i.e. the guided tours, which wouldn't scale.

When I think of sustainable farming I envision the explosion of production coming out of the Amish community in south eastern Ohio (the area I know) right now. Long green houses (high tunnels) bursting with crops, solar panels everywhere, and markets and stores established nearby to make and sell value added goods from that food and to sell it fresh. These people are literally getting rich and they barely use any fossil fuels and they are merely a blip on the food radar.

Probably depends on the exact practices. If they till a lot to work manure into the ground, that loosens the soil allowing it to blow away.

Others use tractors, buy fertilizers and other crop treatments like anyone else.

Yeah, a nice goal would have been "100,000 new small farms in the first 100 days." The USDA should be promoting small speciality crop farms. The farmers markets are doing pretty good but if you shift policy to make factory vegetables reflect their true price it would increase profitablity of smaller farmers through more volume. You wouldn't need much to encourage a swell of speciality crop production farms. The impact from reduction to greenhouse gases would be immense if you had thousands of more local farms growing staples like broccoli, lettuce, spinach, green beans, peppers, tomatoes, and onions. "Speciality crops."

Self sustaining societies will always be out competed and subsumed by extractive ones.

Extractive ones will always burn out in the long run as they will run out of resources to extract. They either learn to live in the waste they've produced, i.e. they become recyclers, or they simply die off. It's a question of how much collateral damage they do over their lifetime.

No matter how bad they screw up, in the very long run, Earth has a tendency to figure out how to recycle the raw materials. After all, Earth's ecosystems are the result of surviving cataclysm after cataclysm, from volcanism to asteroid strikes to climate change, to invasive species after invasive species. It's got a lot of experience dealing with giant debris piles left over from one shitstorm after another, be that a biological plague or the ash of an impact event.

Yeah, mother earth is fine.

Whether humanity will suffer a catastrophe of our own making is another question.

"Mother earth is fine." I think this ignores the human status as a thinking animal, and the glaringly obvious responsibility we collectively share for keeping our biosphere in good condition. That is, that we keep the remarkable diversity of life intact, and do not pointlessly throw the most unique and precious part of our universe in a chipper to make more particle board furniture.

It is interesting that by incrementally converting the life-support system of our planet into dollar store trash, we could have similar impact on the biosphere as an ELE meteor impact! The tragedy is that, at least theoretically, this particular cause is avoidable. Or was. (Maybe science really is to blame? Wouldn't that be sad.)

While I think our views are similar, I clearly have a differing take on "Mother earth is fine."

To me, it implies that planet earth is as implacable as the rest of the universe. It doesn't have feelings. It doesn't care. And it will still be here for millennia yet.

This changes the conversation from:

"We're hurting mother earth."

to

"We're thinking animals and yet we're making a poor future for ourselves."

https://www.gocomics.com/joelpett/2009/12/13

I'm much more fatalistic for humans than either of you. We've been downright nasty to all other forms of life on this planet for millenia, and now we've stepped up from just being nasty to being positively ecocidal, ratcheting up the biodiversity loss with each new techno-monstrosity we create. We are 100% headed for the trash heap, IMHO.

You're right that we are "thinking animals", but we've got a global animus now that is obsessed money and growth. We're infected with a greed virus that I think is fatal to its host.

And the problem, as I see it, and alluded to in my OP, is that local incentives are all wrong now. Nearly every decision that is rewarded by the markets at a local level is bad in the long term. You can teach a small fraction of people so that they may become enlightened, but greed spreads faster, and is better rewarded. In a game-theoretic view of this, it will always pay to defect from those conserving and living sustainably, as you externalize the losses onto an unseen and uncared-for future, and spread that loss among everyone else. Moral hazard, everywhere. But now, with global civilization and industrialization, and instant communication, we've become more than a diseased troop of chimps headed for a brawl in the forest; we're an insanely overpowerful superorganism driven by unquenchable lust for exponential growth and armed with millions of years of energy reserves--even nuclear weapons! There's literally nowhere on Earth that we can't or won't go in search of resources or vacation potential.

As much of an atheist as I am, I can't help but feel a pang of spirituality about this, and that pang is, unfortunately, despair for the inhabitants of this green jewel that is being ravaged. And by inhabitants, I'm broad in including all living things, regardless if they are cute or have fangs and spit venom. All those funny animals, frogs, plants, fungi. They got fucked because money.

I'm not sure it's about money, per se. Consider all the societies that had money and didn't get as "successful" as the current one, not anywhere close.

The culprit is the scientific method, and in particular it's ability to give people repeatable, inhuman action-at-a-distance that amplified moral hazard 10000-fold.

The longer the distance between extraction and consumption the more fucked your civilization is.

As horrible as that sounds, there is a beautiful symmetry: science gives hope to spread life beyond Earth, and yet it is also provides a real path to the destruction of Earth, our only home.

Clearly Nature thinks the gamble is worth it.

I see it as a conjunction of the two.

Science is a good tool for getting things done. The how.

Money is the motivation for getting them done. The why.

You've both got good points.

Scientific capability enables fucked because money.

It's very curious to me, the connection between science, mind, learning, and economy. They are all optimization processes; narrowing the gap between the model of the world and the actual world, with science being a method of modeling and validating models, a method of learning. Minds are collections of learned models, and economy is the actualization of those models to accomplish the acquisition and use of resources.

I used the word "machine" before, and also the word "superorganism". I get this creepy feeling we're part of a cybernetic superorganism more akin to a slime mold, digesting the world not with funky stomach acids, but the humming sounds of a million bulldozers, pile-drivers, hammers breaking down and building up again. And now, in the 21st century, some kind of Star Trek computer sounds as the digitized stock market whirs away at a speed incomprehensible to these little pink-gray bundles of nerves prone to chemical stimulation.

All of those learning and optimization processes are harnessed, in bulk, towards the economy--harnessing the energy and mineral resources of this planet to create "wealth" for the value system of that machine. Even as just a software person, being light-years away from a bulldozer or a harvester, everything I have done inevitably feeds into making that machine more "efficient". I am rewarded, so my little life is improved. (I guess I shouldn't complain, the machine has made me relatively wealthy so far!?)

Well, you and I are just two tiny specks of the traveling wavefront of "Life" that started some billions of years ago, and which includes everything currently living, on every timescale. (another way to think of it is that every individual is characterized by the 4D path of its center of mass, describing a world-line totally unique in the lifetime of the universe, and that these paths intersect and when you zoom out, speed up time, the network becomes invisible and you just see something like a time-lapse of slime mould growth. It's as beautiful an image as it is disturbing, for some.)

One element of the world which is clearly already a "cybernetic organism" is the everyday "Corporation" - it is an actual fusion of humans and machines to achieve a goal. Corps have many emergent properties, none of which have their root in any individual person or machine. And note that this was true pre-information revolution! (And note: corps ALSO have a center of mass! Although this usually isn't the most useful characterization, its accurate.)

This is an interesting take on it. But it gives me great concern.

When it comes to evolution, individual organisms are needed by the thousands.

If we have one superorganism subsuming the whole planet, then what if it turns out this isn't the ideal evolutionary path?

Fermi Paradox Great filter comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

I agree with your thoughts as a general picture, except I think humans as a species will survive and not be a total wipeout.

But given how hard it is to predict the future, the details are : how much will it hurt?

How much of humanity will survive? How much biological diversity will we lose?

Aside, I don't think atheism/religion enables or precludes empathy for the living things in the world. 'Tis a sad future in many ways.

We don't have any "responsbility" to anyone or anything but our own desires.

You may not have loyalty, but if you're enjoying the fruits of society there is also responsibility to that society, otherwise one should probably extricate himself from society and see how long he makes it in the woods without it.

When I was referring to our own desires I was including human society.

The problem with psychological egoism is that it doesn't say anything.

Mother earth will be fine only until the sun expands to the point that it boils off the oceans and completely sterilizes all life within the next billion years.

I guess the dead rock ball will still be fine.

Not always, but as long as the unsustainable extraction lasts. By definition, it has to run out of the stuff it's extracting.

An observation I’ve made is that the strongest and most tangible criticism of modern farming practices comes from small/family farmers and homesteaders.

The two groups have almost no philosophy and practices in common. Different worlds.

My grandparents were all farmers. They did it for money, not because they loved corn and the smell of pig shit.

As soon as they paid off the loans for the land, they rented the farms out to someone else to work and moved to town to get easier jobs.

I love the smell of capitalism in the morning. Smells like...better than pig shit.

One argument in "Sapiens" [0], is that all of human history is a continuous repeat of this trove: We hunted the megafauna to extinction, converted the land to agriculture, and so on not because of evil, but because that for the individuals living at any given time this was the most beneficial course of action.

[0]: Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

My dad came from a farming family (dad worked in construction, but 3 of his brothers and 2 sisters had farms). Over time, they all lost or gave up their farms because they couldn't compete against the corporate farms. Two of them continued to farm their own land after selling their farms, but they no longer lived there.

> globalization

this is it right here. we're extracting all nutrients from a concentrated area and sending the yields far away. There's no replenishment.

Even the water shortages in California is not as simple as "farmers are using all the water". It's the demand for food far, far away.

Makes me think of easter island. When our civilization perishes, money will seem as useful as those statues.

Modified meme caption: Yea, we destroyed the environment, but for a brief moment, we sure mined a lot of Bitcoin.

> Modified meme caption: Yea, we destroyed the environment, but for a brief moment, we sure mined a lot of Bitcoin.

It's hysterical that Bitcoin is the punching bag, because when economies that are prone to hyper inflation give way, its BTC that is used in many of those same countries. Who also, resort back to subsistence or local Ag. And guess what, destroying your land is kind of antithetical to the whole farming thing...

Anyhow, regenerative Ag can now be a massive boon if the infrastructure bill gets properly allotted; I'm skeptical but this could really come to define late millennials and gen Z to ensure that the problems they inheritance from the most wasteful generation (boomers) has some chance of being remediated prior to it being depleted and ensuring famine.

I agree that Bitcoin is too easy a punching bag, but "we found a lot of hashes with leading zeros" didn't have the same brevity to it.

I am open to wondering if CO2 emissions are also too easy a punching bag. Crops can go way nonlinear when lacking mined water, lacking fertilizer, and lacking soil/biomes etc. I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag.

> I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag.

It's pretty vague, to be honest; but from what I've gathered many of its proponents are using it as a phase-in from the core of the New Green Deal, and is essentially a massive works project.

As a former farmer (Biodynamic) myself and a person that did Supply Chain I think that critical infrastructure doesn't just apply to the roads upon which freight travels on, also having a horrible factory farmed centralized food system is what created shortages during COVID and were revealed for all to see. There is no denying it that this model cannot function with just the slight amount of variance, 3PL continued to work and even improved during COVID in some industries, but none of that mattered in the end.

This incidentally led to crop losses due to a lack of labour, and many unnecessary deaths of workers like at meat packing plants had a shocking enough effect that made CSA memberships (shares in the Farm that grant you boxes of vegetables) the more viable option and revealed something that I knew from experience in the aforementioned industries (also culinary): the less food travels, the more savings can be passed on to the consumer, but also the higher a premium it has to it's targeted demographic.

The reason I highlight this is because critical infrastructure, as in the stuff that is of national security, after COVID has to include manufacturing of things like PPE and medical equipment as well as farming in a far more distributed manner--ventilators were just one of the examples of how far the US had fallen.

And the truth is the Department of Ag already has a lot of sound programs to help young, first time farmers: but a concerted effort to incentivize them with low to no interest loans for farming equipment and livestock for 10+ years would be a boon for so many wanting to get into farming and revitalize so many disenfranchised communities that were displaced in the 80s when mega pharmacorps forced their way that led to this big Ag system.

Simply removing a lot of subsidies to corn, soy farmers and using that to float the low interest loans would pay for itself in added revenue, moreover many farmers markets are now obligated to accept things like WIC and foodstamp programs to be accepted so we can readily pivot a low income community's diet in a decade, as seen in Detroit.

I'd include water/desalination as well, but to be honest I'm not sure that will be explored this go around, but may at a later time.

Money is very useful now, very very useful. Things do not need to last forever to have value.

This is wonderfully written, and really hit me in a way this topic hasn’t before.

Exactly.

I worked on a farm in my teens in 90s upstate ny that was like the last dying breath of the traditional family farm. It was a property that was intact since a land grant from a Dutch patroon and continuously farmed until around 2000. Today the family still owns it, and boards a few horses to pay the taxes.

The farmer was an old-school conservative farmer. He was a local Republican Party leader for awhile, a conservationist and just overall hardworking guy. The modern farm is more like an oil company. I think that 75 years from now, when we lament the fate of the impoverished Midwest Desert and will see the 1970s/1980s as a watershed moment where we flipped our entire governance philosophy to short term P&L, despite then obvious and already learned lessons of the past.

This makes me think of the Grapes of Wrath:

>Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.

>You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.

The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.

This is a romanticized view of the small family farm. Our farmibg practices in the US were imported from Europe and were not adapted to our climates. Settlers spread like locusts across land that was so fertile that even if they didn't know what to do, the soil would rescue them. Until it was finally so used up that it couldn't support crops.

Settlers didn't intuitively know how to farm the land at home, whether that was in the Mediterranean climate of the south of Europe or the temperate one in central Europe, or the colder one further north. And it's certainly not as if the European continent is somehow especially farmable without knowing anything about farming.

The wikipedia article on crop rotation[1] explains quite plainly that this has been evolving over eight thousand years, with a recent development pre-WW2 being in the southern US, and the most recent one being a shift to stopping crop rotation and instead switching to chemicals. That last particular update should be setting the alarm bells ringing.

The evidence doesn't really support your claim unless you think the entirety of Northern America had no concept of farming until colonialism arrived a few hundred years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation#History

The settlers had every opportunity to learn local farming practices from the Native Americans.

Instead, they did everything in their power to force their farming practices onto the land where they occupied.

Native Americans farmed. They farmed different crops that were actually suited to the local biome.

> The settlers had every opportunity to learn local farming practices from the Native Americans.

> Native Americans farmed. They farmed different crops that were actually suited to the local biome.

But many didn't. and those that did were often captured and conquered by those that didn't. The Comanche were the best known ones, but their were others. [0] That omission alone is what allows for many people to romanticize the horrible warfare and slavery that took place amongst the native people's perpetual state of warfare.

Also, it's kind of hard to learn from a people who once exposed to European diseases were wiped out in absurd numbers long before the settlers and colonizers would actually arrive.

Colonialism happens in waves, and can span long periods; it's worth reminding that the the first wave were people not interested in establishing a homestead lifestyle and a family farm but abject conquest, for that required the more disenfranchised and honestly peasant/pleb classes to be able to get to the 'New World' much later.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nomadic_peoples#Americ...

This is a weird take on history, it contradicts directly what I was taught and understood to be true. The dust bowl was pretty bad but as far as I understood it there was very little fertility to much of the land in what we now call the USA, which is why life was difficult for the early European settlers.

I saw something recently that showed the dustbowl was from loss of native grasses that had deep roots to crops that couldn't contain the soils and hold the bio-mass... Eventually without the root mass of the native grasses, it withered away...

The treatment of the soil as if it is infinite and something purely to be extract is exactly like oil and mineral mining no matter the scale...

Regardless of the dust bowl and the types of farmers that caused it, the hopes are that we learned how to farm within the ecology of the region(s) we live in and how those regions may vary from one another and we should build adaptive farms that work in harmony...

Can you explain all of the people who were living and farming here prior to the European invasion?

The land in the US is fertile. The prairies were incredibly fertile.

The reason I brought it up was because most farms in Native American USA were largely unproductive, and even agriculturally heavy tribes had to supplement their farms with hunting in winter.

I think you're being ungenerous to settlers from Europe; my ancestors were some of them. Soil conditions varied a lot! In Indiana, where my ancestors settled, there was largely forest, and great soil for farming, but the plains weren't that way. But regardless, yes, humans have very radically changed not only the soil ecology, but the entire ecology of North America over our entire time. But it's really picked up in the last 50 years. We're way past sustainability now.

The practices of 100 or 200 years ago were much more sustainable than what we have now. They had no pesticides or fertilizers, and they couldn't till the soil so thoroughly. Farms were smaller and the increased biodiversity of "pests" was actually better for the soils, if not for yields.

What has really tipped the balance is the "amazing" 4x crop yield increase over the last century. It came at the expense of literally every other living thing associated with the land: pests, grasses, trees, animals, birds, you name it. And it required juicing everything up on steroids, genetically modifying and breeding different crop varieties, and carpet-bombing an entire phylum of life with chemical warfare.

The practices of 150 years ago destroyed the soil. Farmers had to stop those in the 1930s. Since then plows have gone out of style and reduced soil loss greatly. Farmers who get 4x the yields are actually building soil, they have to because the soil they were left with by the 1980s wouldn't support those yields without doing things to build up the soil. It is years to build up though, if you can add 1mm of soil in a decade that is good. However you can also make what is left better without adding more.

We are not past sustainability.

Maybe in the broadest possible sense that it may yet be possible to live sustainably, but we are currently in overshoot, and it's not even close.

https://www.overshootday.org

Not at all. My respect for my late friend and employer may sound romanticized, but the business was a real and practical thing.

I think a farm being a vital business since the 1670s qualifies as adapted to the local climate.

In my region of the country, water and topsoil is abundant. But you can’t compete with massive western operations.

I'm not worried about the soil, I'm worried about the water. The Ogallala Aquifer is shrinking. The more it shrinks, the more there will be compaction preventing it from refilling to previous states. We can always grow food in water but getting clean water will be an increasingly difficult task. Look how bad it already is in CA.

You should be worried about soil. Increasing the soil organic matter improves its water holding capacity, improves tilth and increases infiltration rate. In turn that decreases how much water is needed for crops in dry times and allows recharging of aquifers.

With the currently degraded soil, farmers worry about a couple inches of rain causing washouts or flash floods. Water runs over the top of the soil into surface waterways. Healthy soil can infiltrate many inches of rain an hour.

Infiltration example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggDY35gGBkA

Longer soil health vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBnsgzeNIng

I'm not worried about the water, I'm worried about the phosphorus! Almost all of the fertilizer in the world is made from phosphorus that comes from Morocco and Western Sahara, and it appears that we're depleting it very quickly.

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/p...

(actually, I'm worried about the water and the soil too)

All the minerals needed for plant life are available in the sand, silt, and clay in soil. Soil life is the key to breaking down aggregate minerals into plant usable nutrients. In healthy soil fertilizing is not necessary.

It is hard to talk about soil life without sounding like a kook to most people. But, our practices of using synthetic fertilizers and spraying fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides are literally killing the soil's capacity to feed plants.

We can grow crops with far less water. Look at farms in Israel. The problem is that water prices don't account for externalities or sustainability, so in the short term farmers have little incentive to conserve.

How much of the water that Israel’s farms consume, depends on desalination? So, if it really long-term sustainable?

Desalination is sufficiently cheap to not be a material problem for US consumers (or other developed countries). State-of-the-art desalination plants in Israel are fulfilling contracts at ~$0.40/m^3 [1] and the per-capita water usage in the US is ~1200 m^3/yr [2]. Even if we assumed that the current price of water is $0, this would only amount to a $480/yr increase in expenditure per American which would constitute a one-time 1.4% increase of yearly expenditure for the median American. Note that this accounts for all agricultural production in the US; if we consider just water for domestic use such as drinking, bathing, and watering the lawn the average person only uses ~100 m^3/yr [3] which is ~$40/yr which is within reach of every household. This also assumes that increased water prices will not result in changes to water usage which is very doable as the US uses ~3-4x as much water per capita as other peer countries such as France and Germany and 10x the water of Israel which already needed to adjust to a regime of desalination water prices.

All in all, considered merely in economic terms, desalination is a perfectly viable solution to the water crisis in developed countries and would incur at most a relatively minor economic impact by this analysis. Note that this does not necessarily apply to developing countries where a $40/yr expenditure increase could be catastrophic. I am also not making any statement about non-economic considerations such as possible effects on the environment that may occur as a result of the need for increased power generation for mass desalination.

[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/05/27/203950...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263156/water-consumption...

[3] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts

So... the average person in Israel actually spends less on water (even though it is more expensive) because they use less?

That is remarkable.

Your analysis above is remarkably detailed, but it misses the point. When I used the term "sustainable" I was speaking of resource usage and environmental impact, not whether the practice was affordable.

We aren’t going to run out of seawater anytime soon

The resource constraint that matters for desalination right now is not obviously seawater. It is the energy input for desalination, which in many areas still depends on hydrocarbons.

Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting factor is electricity. And renewables continue to deliver Moore's law like improvements in the price and quantity of electricity, without any environmental externalities.

I actually think that desalination and solar are a good pairing but

> without any environmental externalities

doesn't sound quite right to me. In particular I think there are reasonable concerns regarding lifetime energy and environmental costs of solar panels, mining of and disposal (or recycling) of the rare materials used in the panels, etc.

TANSTAFL

> Why would desalination be unsustainable? The limiting factor is electricity.

Disposal of the extracted salt is a serious issue. You can’t just inject brackish water back into he ocean as it screws up the ecology of the near shore environment (or wherever else you’re willing to squirt it.

Most desalination plants do just inject saline water back into the ocean. There's no where else to put it. In most cases the outflow pipe runs some distance offshore into deeper water to reduce the environmental impact.

Actually, you can. It messes with very local ecology a bit, but is otherwise a drop in the ocean.

I love this comment :) Messing a bit with drops in the ocean is how we got here in the first place.

Aggressive farming messes with the environment a bit. There is just so much land, we can't possibly deplete all of it.

Did you see how much air we have? Yeah burning dirty stuff pollutes it, but then the wind blows and it's clean again.

> There is just so much land, we can't possibly deplete all of it.

Given that we are currently using 40% of the world's land area for agriculture, and that we are using ~0.0003% of the world's water, I don't think this is a fair criticism of my post. Only a fool would think that former isn't something to keep an eye on.

> I love this comment :) Messing a bit with drops in the ocean is how we got here in the first place.

No, we got here in the first place by messing with carbon and water and nutrient cycles that take tens of millions and hundreds of thousands of years to cycle through.

The atmospheric water cycle, on the other hand, operates on a scale of weeks. Seawater gets separated into brine and fresh water, fresh water irrigates crops, fresh water evaporates into clouds, clouds precipitate over the ocean. All of humanity's historic water consumption is quite literally a drop in the ocean. [1]

The volume of the oceans is 1.3 * 10^18 m^3. Humanity's annual consumption of fresh water is 4 * 10^12 m^3. Annual worldwide precipitation is ~5 * 10^14 m^3.

> Did you see how much air we have? Yeah burning dirty stuff pollutes it, but then the wind blows and it's clean again.

[1] Meanwhile, all of humanity's carbon emissions dwarf the ability of natural carbon sinks to absorb - because in hundreds of years, we have released carbon that took tens of millions of years to accumulate. The atmospheric water cycle operates on an entirely different scale. [2]

[2] The orders of magnitude between the unsustainability of <carbon use>, <land use>, <freshwater use>, and <seawater use> are each ~two orders of magnitude removed from eachother.

It's not the use of water that's the problem, it's the releasing of the brine. This will destroy the local ecosystem and historically we haven't been able to predict the consequences of that at all.

Why does desalination produce brackish water (this is a new term to me)? From context I expected "brackish water" to mean water that is saltier than seawater. But when I look it up, it's apparently water with salinity between fresh water and seawater.

definitions aside you should be able to understand that if you add salt to ocean water it will be saltier, not less salty, than it was before

> I'm not worried about the soil, I'm worried about the water.

Then quite frankly,m you only understand half of the problem; water will always be an issue even in times of abundance, the fact that when California goes from drought to deluge conditions nothing has been done to try and build infrastructure to replenish the aquifers that have been drained for decades.

The best we get, for all the taxes and myopic city planning is black ping pong balls, and then diverting the water into the Pacific Ocean. In my entire lifetime I will never understand how infinitely stupid this state has been about water despite Central Valley being such a vital to not just the US' food supply chain, but also for a lot out the rest of the World.

Desalination was always thought to be untenable until the preiumus could justify it, but the truth is I forsee some very affluent communities in SoCal (Carlsbad) will be the biggest benefactors of a near monopoly for reliable water sources.

Worth noting is that many Pharma megacoprs are in Carlsbad and the greater San Diego area who have learned from Nestle's business model to water rights in the developing world.

Do you have any papers on compaction induced reduction in water bearing capacity? This idea does not mesh with my understanding of the Ogallala as being generally coarse grained and thus not as at risk of what you’re suggesting. Compare to consolidation of fine grained soils which does have a hysteretical behavior relating to storage capacity.

It seems to me that aquifers aren't sustainable water sources to begin with--we shouldn't treat them as a primary water source, but rather as a reserve source for scarce years. On the other hand, topsoil could be sustainable (at least for very large time scales) provided it's properly managed.

I's not an "either/or". You should worry about both. Some areas are having a problem with soil, some with water and some with both.

Maybe we shouldn't burn ethanol in cars. Maybe we shouldn't load up every food product with corn syrup.

Corn in the US is heavily subsidized. It's why corn syrup is so prevalent in US foods, because the subsidies mean it's cheaper than any other sources of sugar.

In the US, Iowa is the largest producer of corn [1] (producing nearly 40% more than the next, Illinois,) and thus the greatest beneficiary of those corn subsidies. Could we reduce those corn subsidies? No, it's politically nonviable, in part because Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must have the first primaries in the US [2][3]. No candidate that has ever said anything against corn subsidies has won a primary.

[1] https://www.cropprophet.com/what-state-produces-the-most-cor...

[2] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-iowa-and-new-hampshi...

[3] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/01/why-the-iowa-cau...

This claim, often repeated, is misleading to the point of dishonesty.

Corn isn't really subsidized, and iowa corn farmers are not the benefactors of the agricultural bills. Cattle producers and chemical corporations are subsidized, and the way they're subsidized is by a myriad set of policies which encourage grain prices to stay very low. This makes cattle feed cheap and corn and soy inputs to chemical plants cheap.

If the price of corn doubled, farmers could afford to pay their mortgage and taxes without trying to extract every bit of possible yield. But then the price of beef would go up and the profits of 3M and Dupont would go down, and that's a far more powerful force than farmers in Iowa.

I'm kind of puzzled by this. Your post defies conventional wisdom (which you say is misleading). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because conventional wisdom is often misleading. But these links seem to indicate that in fact corn farmers ARE directly subsidized, both in terms of crop insurance (cheaper than market insurance is clearly a subsidy), as well as price protection. See that second link, especially ARC and PLC, which compensates farmers if their prices fall below benchmark rates set by Congress.

Is that not a direct subsidy? Are they wrong? (genuinely curious - your post is interesting enough that I felt I had to do some research to clarify my own thinking)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/examining-americas-farm-subs...

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

Subsidies have transitioned away from direct payments to subsidized insurance. The insurance isn’t just about natural disasters or crop loss, it guarantees minimum revenue based on farmed area, basically resulting in direct payments whenever prices are low. That has been successfully rebranded as “not a subsidy”.

https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn

The second link here is a deeply biased political position advocacy opinion piece, so it's a little bit onerous to 'refute' because every section is sort of a misleading half-truth. (I'm not sure what the best example would be, but I'm sure you've read something before where an author was cherry-picking statistics or casting factual elements in dishonest light so that they could support their stance, whether that was about vaccines or immigration or encryption or guns or whatever).

One thing that it does get right, is the section "they induce overproduction, inflate land prices, and harm the environment" which is absolutely true. My point in my previous post was that this systemic overproduction is to the benefit of corn buyers (cattle production, food processors, etc) and the detriment of corn producers.

In essence, the aggregate result of the myriad laws and programs impacting agricultural production is that grain producing farmers are left sitting helpless on a knife's edge. The only way to avoid bankruptcy is to pump your land full of petrochemicals to maximize yield. ARC is based on revenue, not profitability- it's encouraging high-cost, high-yield farming practices to guarantee plentiful grain supply to buyers. PLC is even more brazen- after completely distorting the true market price for animal feed by forcing grain growers to overproduce, we let them buy corn for less than it costs to grow and then force the farmers to rely on an insurance payment that's just enough to cover their debt & tax payments.

Basically, the grain producers are pawns in the ag subsidy game and the grain buyers are the kings.

I don't know much about direct corn subsidies, but we could talk about sugar tariffs -- which you could interpret as a subsidy to any substitute product producer -- like maybe corn syrup producers.

> Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must have the first primaries in the US

I'm confused, how can a single state unilaterally require that its primary is the earliest in the nation? What's to prevent another state from passing a law that its primary must be one day before Iowa's?

If another state scheduled their's ahead of Iowa's, Iowa's state officials would be legally required to reschedule Iowa's ahead of this other state's.

It would be super fun if another state passed a similar law.

is it bad of me that I want this to happen to end the madness. I can just imagine Iowa trying to sue another state for doing this.

They wouldn't have to. At the national conventions all delegates from states that go before iowa will be unable to vote by the existing rules and that limits what States would even be willing to try.

I want this to happen too

Infinite corecursion!

[edit] apparently corecursion isn't the correct term for when two functions call each other recursively? I thought there was a term for it

Thanks!

They can't stop other states from competing to be first.

Does this mean that if another state organizes a primary earlier than Iowa's primary, that Iowa will reschedule their primary to be even earlier than the other state?

This is basically what happened in 2008.

> I'm confused, how can a single state unilaterally require that its primary is the earliest in the nation?

It can’t, it requires cooperation of the other states.

It’s my understanding that these subsidies came into existence in the Great Depression when farming was unprofitable even while people were starving. The government came to the realization that free market forces are not enough to stabilize the supply of food, and when food becomes unavailable... bad things happen. Car companies can go out of business and the country will survive, airlines can fail and the country will survive, movie theaters can go bankrupt and the country will survive, but food? That’s an existential crisis for the whole nation. When large masses of people start to starve, you’re looking at political change. You don’t fuck around with your food supply. You can’t just leave that up to supply and demand. Hence it’s subsidized and managed.

The government subsidies on corn pushes Iowa farmers to produce more than normal (depleting the soil faster) and sell their corn regardless of the market price. This is mostly done at the behest of other industries and huge food corporation lobbyists. It's a perverse economic incentive to say the least. I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I also don't think there's a bright line between corn subsidies and Iowa somehow playing kingmaker in the caucuses.

And if you believe in a link between obesity, diabetes, and the prevalence of corn products in our food, the chain of causality looks even worse.

Big corn. Amazing plants have enslaved us.

There’s a brilliant chapter in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind about how as we domesticated wheat, it domesticated humans in return. Grains are thought to have been dropped along trade routes which allowed for humans to be less nomadic as crops became established. Then we got comfortable. Fascinating to think about.

> Corn in the US is heavily subsidized.

So is oil. So farming corn is actually subsidized at-least twice!

if you think about it, it is ridiculous that we burn food as fuel in our cars and add unhealthy amount of sugar syrup into everything

Food is fuel, always has been. An internal combustion engine is efficent compared to biological processes of motion.

There's nothing bucolic about farming -- ever. Both my wife and I come from farming families. I lost a great grandfather who effectively worked himself to death in his early 30s and my wife had a great grandfather who died from being attacked by a bull. Farming has always been very hard work. I have friends in tech who grew up in farming families and they are the few people in tech who can easily get up early in the morning because that's also a part of farming life -- get up before the sun is even up.

I don't know where the romanticized idea of farming life came from because it was never that great. Historically, it was just a way to provide food for your family and maybe make a profit on the side if you're lucky.

Most important is nitrogen-based fertilizer, that can easily be produced from any kind of electricity. Most of the other stuff are minerals that are cheaply mined anywhere and won't run out for the next few thousand years.

The most important oil consumption is for driving farm implements, but that can easily be changed to rapeseed oil in the short term and other green energy in the long term.

So no cause for panic.

Well I agree that the oil argument isn’t very good. But I don’t think the conclusion is “no cause for panic.”

I think water loss (especially from aquifers but also just drought and river diversion in California), soil erosion, habitat loss, and homogenisation are big worries. We’ve seen big problems from soil loss before in America where the prairie grass with its deep root systems holding the soil together was replaced by cereal crops with short roots and plowing exposing the soil. The result was the dust bowl.

If you don't have topsoil you don't have water retention and you don't have organisms and structure that avoids the need to till for aeration and mineral movement. That means the garbage soil we're left with must be watered from aquifers when it's not constantly raining, and we must till the soil then work in fertilizers, which wastes gas and time.

The path you say has "no cause for panic" is a path to cyclical famine in 50-100 years.

The path to famine is exponential population growth. No need for agriculture to fail as well. We do have bigger fish to fry than worry about soil quality as long as it is still fixable with fertilizer.

Personally I think the way of life that is destroying the topsoil is at the heart of most of our problems, and if we reverted to a more pastoral life where people are more connected to nature and the food they eat in some way a lot of issues we're facing would magically disappear. Most depression, obesity (with related health issues) and a good part of climate change are all a result of our messed up lifestyles.

Explain the reaction that turns electricity into nitrogen based fertilizer. What are the other inputs and outputs of the process? Are you forgetting the most important ingredient?

The Haber-Bosch reaction is what turns atmospheric dinitrogen (N2) into ammonia. Ammonia can be oxidized to make nitric acid and nitrate fertilizers, combined with carbon dioxide to make urea, or used as-is for fertilizer. The inputs to the Haber-Bosch reaction are hydrogen and nitrogen gases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

The nitrogen is easily separated from air. The hydrogen is the energetically expensive input. Most hydrogen is presently made by steam reforming fossil fuels. Hydrogen can also be produced from water and electricity via electrolysis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water

In the 20th century, surplus hydroelectric power from dams was used to electrolyze water for making ammonia. More direct demand for electricity and cheaper processes for making hydrogen from fossil fuels gradually eliminated it. Now people are planning to bring back large scale electrolytic hydrogen for fossil-free hydrogen from renewables:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/canada-is-set-to-have-one-th...

https://www.chemengonline.com/uniper-unveils-plans-for-germa...

So the process can hypothetically run from renewable energy in the future, but the primary energy source and primary source of hydrogen are probably both methane right now.

Methane can be and sometimes is produced from biomass.

And there are a few plants in operation that produce without any fossil inputs, but most of them aren't switched over yet, mostly because green hydrogen production isn't at the necessary scale yet and will probably be used for steel making first.

Perhaps a simple explanation would be to quantify the inputs and outputs, maybe from year to year. For instance the carbon footprint of farming should be shrinking if all of these green measures are coming online.

Rapeseed oil isn't green energy. It's just more big-Ag.

With that attitude we can just go back to the caves. Big-anything is what makes our society and level of population work, without Big-Ag we couldn't feed everyone. Without Big-Trans we couldn't distribute the food. Without Big-Trade, you would have to inefficiently buy from 20 small shops selling one item each. Without Big-Industry, your kitchen implements would be a pot and a kettle above the fireplace.

Rapeseed oil maybe isn't a perfect solution. But whining about everything that makes headway just because it isn't perfect yet also holds us back.

What a strange stance to take in a thread about how big-Ag has destroyed a third of US topsoil.

You've been brainwashed.

Sarah Taber covers this very well on her Twitter (even though she has a particular anti-dairy ax to grind)

There is more than one twitter account that comes up when you search for that name. I assume you mean this one (whom I happen to be following already and didn't realize it):

https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww

Yes that’s her.

From what I understand we probably all should.

Mark Shepard also complains from time to time that dairy supply is outstripping demand to the point where farmers can't make money off of it. That's dumb in it's own right but if you consider the ecological footprint, then we have a problem.