I can see why farmers are extracting every bit of profit from the soil that they absolutely can. The machine demands it of them. Farms are huge operations nowadays, and from what I can tell, small family-owned and run corn and beans farms are half a century in the past at this point. The soil is just one more casualty of growthism.
It is purely anecdotal. It greatly depends on the location and the generational age of the farmer the extent to which they are concerned with soil conservation. Cultural practices in farming tend to have wide adoption swings, (neighbors see what their neighbors are doing, etc) Entire counties will be using conventional methods and within a few seasons swap to lower disturbance methods.
Conservation tillage practices—including no-till, strip-till, and mulch-till—vary widely across crops and regions[0]:
• Conservation tillage was used on roughly 70 percent of soybean (2012), 65 percent of corn (2016), 67 percent of wheat (2017), and 40 percent of cotton (2015) acres.
• The share of total conservation tillage that is no-till also varied from 67 percent (45 percent of total acreage) in wheat (2017) and 56 percent (40 percent of total acreage) in soybeans (2012) to 44 percent (18 percent of total acreage) in cotton (2015) and 42 percent (27 percent of total acreage) in corn (2016).
• For individual crops, the rate of no-till varies by region. The likelihood of no-till corn, for example, is relatively high in the Northern Great Plains (50 percent of conservation tillage in corn, 34 percent of total corn acreage), Prairie Gateway (69 percent of conservation tillage, 49 percent of corn), and the South (the Eastern Uplands, Southern Seaboard, and Mississippi Portal combined) (67 percent of conservation tillage, 53 percent of corn).
• Almost 50 percent of corn, soybean, wheat, and cotton acreage was in no-till or strip-till at some time over a 4-year period (including the survey and 3 previous years), but only about 20 percent of these acres were in no-till or strip-till all 4 years.
I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive.
[0]: Tillage Intensity and Conservation Cropping in the United States, USDA 2018
It could be right. The smaller the farmer the less likely they are to realize how much the investment in better farming is worth it. The very large farmers have the numbers showing the investment is worth it, they control a lot of land, but are only a minority of farmers.
I'm still with you that > 90% is a bad estimate, but it isn't as bad as you make it out.
The 20+ year trend in farm size is unmistakeable across the signficant economic classes, btw. Farms are increasing in size and the number of farms is decreasing.
In the long run farmers are care about soil health make more money than those that don't. The rule of thumb is it takes 7 years before no-til is more profitable than conventional tillage. Once you get no-till going though it uses a lot less fuel (pulling a plow through soil uses a lot of energy).
Farmers have also caught onto the fact that modern computers and equipment allow you to see what parts of the field you doing what. When you sell the farm they will make it worth while to build up your soil as farms that yield better are worth more than farms that yield poorly.
In the end you are right - far too many farmers are not caring for their soil as they should. All the big ones are though as they have figured out the long term investment is worth it.
We run a little market garden. I follow all sorts of agronomy feeds and information and then read and watch what other growers are doing. Even the most "regenerative" and "ecological" growers don't seem to get it... There's no free lunch. I've read analysis which points out that there is not even enough manure produced on the planet to fertilize our farm fields without chemical additions, and don't even think about compost, it's not even close... and all the soil retention and cover cropping one does will only slow down, not reverse, top soil loss. If you're not losing carbon in your soils, it's because you're bringing it in from somewhere else, and it's lost there.
So many permaculture types trying to imply that what works for them in their backyard city gardens works on a large scale. It does not. I learned the hard way.
I see "no till" market garden growers whose solution is basically to dump 100 cubic yards of compost on their beds each year and plant into that instead of tilling. This is the Richard Perkins etc. method, and it's intellectual dishonesty. All that compost comes from somewhere and that place now in turn has a carbon deficit.
At least, this is all the case until we can find a way to efficiently extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into solid soil ammendment. Trees and cover crops can't do it fast enough.
Yes, atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by bacteria, but it's not just on legumes, they are simply the most known and prominent.
If your comment was true, fertile soil would never have developed in the first place. Read posts where people are gaining about an inch of topsoil per year (in good conditions). They are not trucking it in. Even on depleted soil there is a natural succession that slowly develops fertile soil (not in all conditions, but again, not trucked in, just needs moisture, wind not blowing it off etc).
> If you're not losing carbon in your soils, it's because you're bringing it in from somewhere else, and it's lost there.
Heralding imported soil as soil regeneration is flawed, but so is your premise.
Carbon consumption happens through soil disturbance but also by natural oxidation and microbial processes in the soil. And some of the carbon in the plant matter is from the soil, as well.
The permaculturists are right that natural spaces are mostly self-regenerative systems. The problem is they don't feed people. At least not beyond hunter gatherer type densities.
Then add on top of that that most market garden type places are consuming quantities of unrenewable peat (potting mixes for transplant or nursery growing) and plastic (silage tarps and landscape fabric for occlusion, nursery pots, greenhouse poly, etc.) and fossil fuels... And large scale cash crop farms have their own rather drastic inputs as well.
Growing crops is extractive. We can fiddle with the parameters of how extractive, but farming needs inputs. So we need to think about where those inputs come from.
> Every bit of plant matter we ship off our farms in the form of food is carbon and nitrogen that is no longer in our soils.
Do you concede this¹ is false?
To be clear, I completely agree the vast majority of agriculture is extractive. What I think we're discussing is whether (or how much) growing crops must necessarily be extractive.
As I think I've said, I agree it's dishonest accounting to include imported plant matter in regenerative farming². Either way, it only reflects on current practices, as do comments about peat. Your experiences and failures, or those of your neighbors only speak of the inadequacies of specific methods. Comments about oil and plastic bear no sway in the topic at hand.
I specifically take issue with the claim that carbon is a soil resource that must be depleted when growing substantial amounts of food. Yes, when taking away crops, we (necessarily) remove nutrients, and some may necessarily require replenishing, but they are not carbon (or even nitrogen).
Carbon it is in fact one of few resources that comes from thin air, and plants can absorb (fix) it by themselves. Forests show that plants can fix CO₂, in substantial quantities. Conversely, forest mining shows carbon is released when you destroy the soil.
When farming, carbon is the one resource that is not industrially added to the soil³. Most of the carbon is in fact burned, either biologically or physically and cannot be returned.
As specific counter-example, in a discussion of soil regeneration, I've read claims of an inch of topsoil growth per year. Whatever they were doing or supplementing, I don't think they⁴ trucked in an inch of carbon/topsoil per year. Are you claiming it's impossible?
¹ As in, it was not present in soil, as your original claim seems to be.
² Imported matter does seem a good and legitimate way to quicken the process of soil regeneration, if it then becomes net-producing.
³ Carbon is only added in small, non-replenishing quantities, or small areas, not materially changing the carbon balance by itself.
⁴ I'm aware there are those that do repeatedly truck-in an inch of topsoil.
I suppose I don’t know the chemical compound that constitute “solid soil amendment” though. If it includes functionally free nitrogen/ammonia and proper management of land or equipment, is this still not possible?
In addition, plain sand and clay is very poor at retaining nutrients and moisture. Organic matter tends to soak up nutrients like a sponge. This is why media based hydroponics uses porous material like volcanic rock and pumice.
Unclear what they expect to happen next.
You sure about that? When I was ARS, sure there were 3-4 farmers I met who took SOC and and soil health seriously; individuals who wanted to think about their soil as an ecosystem and grow their soils as they did their crops. Then there were the other 96-97 farmers you would meet who could give two wiffs of stinky piss about doing anything other than extracting as much value off their land as quickly as possible. This was typically done with high degrees of tillage, large quantities of fertilizer, and significant doses of herbicide. If there SOC levels dropped below 5%, they would just buy in lime and lime the shit out of the fields. Rinse, wash hands, repeat.
Its purely anecdotal, but the *vast* majority of farmers I had the opportunity were not good farmers and not interested in any kind of longer term relationship with their soils. Most seems like they were trying to extract maybe 5-15 more years of growth out of their soils before they were completely depleted of SOC and basically not usable as farm-able land. We're talking about a region that prior to cultivation had SOC levels in the 30-40s; most of the soils there now are down at below 10%, many as low as 5%, which is borderline being able to grow anything at all.