The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

Re:The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil by dijit on Thursday April 15, 2021 @04:59PM (#26826039)

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.

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Re:The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil by supernovae on Thursday April 15, 2021 @05:17PM (#26826225)

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...

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Re:The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil by failrate on Thursday April 15, 2021 @06:05PM (#26826733)

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.

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Re:The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil by dijit on Friday April 16, 2021 @04:35AM (#26831203)

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.

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