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- cross-posted to:
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Summary
Grocery prices are expected to rise globally as soil degradation, driven by overfarming, deforestation, and climate change, reduces farmland productivity.
The UN estimates 33% of the world’s soils are degraded, with 90% at risk by 2050. Poor soil forces farmers to use costly fertilizers or abandon fields, raising prices for staples like bread, vegetables, and meat.
Experts advocate for sustainable practices like regenerative agriculture, cover cropping, and reduced tillage to restore soil health.
Innovations and government subsidies could mitigate impacts, but immediate action is critical to ensure food security.
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Ahh yes. Our weekly once in a life time crisis. Right on cue.
So lets keep paving over farmland to build single family homes instead of building real cities.
Real cities aren’t profitable enough.
Suburban sprawl isn’t really profitable either, our system is flawed to let developers take the profits while the municipality cannot afford to maintain the neighborhood a few years down the line.
I take your meaning, but I disagree it’s not profitable, developers make enormous profits scraping the land of life and slapping concrete and paint on it.
Gee, spoke about heavy metals being deposited in our fields via exhaust and tractor tires a while ago and was called stupid. It’s not stupid, tractors are bad for soil and should be replaced with drones.
Wow, I didn’t realize drones had gotten powerful enough to plow, seed, and harvest. That’s amazing, do you have any links to plowing drones? Sounds cool.
The entire point is to not plow ever. It’s bad to penetrate the soil.
We have drones that can farm. I’m not going to list them all because it’s clear you lack any foundational knowledge and just need a summary, so here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_drone
My own family uses drones in farming here in the US. Not for everything, yet, but gee, if our government would fund it, it would happen immediately. Idk how this is surprising.
This weeks excuse for the billionaires to increase their take.
And do nothing to fix the problems their capitalism creates.
They just take the money, they leave the problems for the poors
Soil depletion killed the Sumerians. It’s older than billionaires. If we attribute every single problem to class inequality, eventually we’re going to be wrong, because there are other problems in the world. If you think billionaires have power over us, nature is vastly more powerful.
It’s no joke: conventional Ag is extremely tough on soils, and depletes soil organic matter, and reduces topsoil thickness though ploughing. Add on top of that contamination from various sources (not just Ag) and the picture is bleak.
conventional ag
Industrial farming is incredibly harmful to the soil. There are other methods that are far less harmful and can actually be beneficial to soil health, the problem is they don’t scale well.
There is a great YouTube channel called No-Till Growers that really goes into some cool farming methods that are much less destructive
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hNyu4_RWGZo
Edit: this is probably a better video and I think it’s in a playlist about soil health. But honestly all of his videos are great
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4aZhevnaLWw&list=PLGMgkMLKOtWv0efQXhQtuu01WfWL5yBDf&index=1&pp=iAQB
I have been doing no plow, no till gardening for over 20 years and it outproduces conventional gardening by a lot.
Conventional Ag is a method, distinguishing it from regenerative Ag etc.
Fair enough, I’m far from an expert
conventional Ag is extremely tough on soils
No shit. My daughter and husband bought a house built on the corner of a field in Ohio that was farmed for years. You couldn’t get a shovel into the ground there because it was like cement.
Right?? My first thought was, another excuse to raise prices and shrinkflate even more. Because that’s the solution! 🤬
Just use the animal agriculture land instead.
Well hopefully the world will figure this out, or population On a small scale it’s so obvious that soil needs to be managed for a healthy garden or small farm. Big farms just throw down fertilizer (which was a world changing improvement to agriculture) and don’t do enough to keep the soil alive and healthy. The headline “poor soil forces fertilizer use” is sort of backwards as it’s the industrial farming that’s sucked the life out of the soil.
The world will figure it out via mass migrations and war, unfortunately.
With genocide and plagues, oh my!
Why is “unproductive” in quotes?
I guess journalists are finally implying nuance exists.
There’s also simply way too many people on earth as it is. My country - one of the smallest on earth- had 15 million people back in 1995. Right now, 30 years later, we’re at 18 million. And in 2037, they’re expecting 19 million.
Small numbers on a global scale, but definitely a lot of growth that’s causing issues. There’s a housing shortage, rising prices, healthcare and pensions are under threat, etc etc.
And there’s places that are much, much worse. For example, even India is encouraging population growth. When the country is still very poor. That’s going to help their economy in the short run, but it’s going to be a much larger problem down the line.
We need a controlled population decline, sooner rather than later.
But then who’s going to fight our wars
Or buy all the useless crap being consistently pumped out in virtually every industry
We’re going to top out around 12 billion according to demographers. And this is not some theory. Most developed countries are already seeing slowing birth rates and in cases like Japan it’s quite far along.
Given how inefficient and self-destructive most of our farming is, I’m quite optimistic that it’s possible to support 12 billion sustainably. I don’t like this talk of “too many people” because it leads us to generally devalue people. If we’re not actively planning for who to remove first then we’re at least shrugging when thousands die in a disaster.
We don’t have to cheapen ourselves this way. We just have to live and work smarter.
Well you can also turn that around and ask: why do we need more people? What does another individual add?
One might argue that a baby born today might cure cancer or all known diseases. They might invent free, unlimited energy. They could be the greatest writer to ever live. Humanity’s best poet. He could bring about world peace.
But he could also be our next Hitler, Saddam Hussein, etc.
Earth is a finite planet. It’s not getting any bigger. So every human we add to it, takes up yet another square meter that consumes resources for an average of 80 years or so. I’ve seen my country get more crowded and the problems it causes.
We don’t need more people. At all.
Be the change you want to see in the world then, and leave it. After all, what do you add? Why even comment here? Do we need more people with more opinions?
I don’t mean any of that. I just say it aloud to show how petty and shitty it is. Of course if people are just numbers on a tablet then you don’t give a shit if it’s 2 billion or 3 billion. But I would hazard to guess that if you got out more, travelled more, talked to more people, saw where they lived, sang for their childrens’ birthdays and spoke at their funerals, held their hands in the ER, that you would appreciate the fact that everyone does add something. And that although there is no shortage of cruelty and stupidity in our world, it is also overflowing with love and ingenuity.
I think it’s beautiful. And I don’t presume to know what the “right” number of people is to make a world. Frankly I find that talk disturbing.
You can absolutely mean those things. I’ve said them to others, so they don’t offend me.
I agree that everyone’s a unique individual. But when looking at problems on a global scale, you need to approach things objectively and dispassionately.
From a purely statistics standpoint, I and 1 sibling should be here. Because that’s the replacement rate for when my parents die. A life for a life, so to speak.
Problem is, my parents had three kids. So now we’ve already gone above that replacement rate. And globally, more people have kids above the replacement rate, hence the population growth.
I don’t have or want kids. That’s not for me, and I don’t want them to be born in a world that’s going to get rapidly worse to live in. Unfortunately, not everyone is willing or capable to make such choices.
I’ll point out the way you said that you and 1 of your siblings should be here. Only two, but it definitely includes you. Because you are special. See, everyone thinks this. You can say you meant any 2 of you, but those weren’t the words you chose.
Saying the world has too many people is like saying there’s too damn much traffic. You are the traffic. But everyone always grants himself special status, because they are the main character in their story.
Don’t go too hard on your parents for having 3 kids. As you yourself said, you have to look at things at a global scale. And since some people won’t have any kids, and some kids will die, it’s perfectly fine for many couples to have three children, even in a society on track for mere replacement.
Anyway griping about being over the replacement rate is increasingly irrelevant as developing societies are all dropping below it. There’s a very strong correlation between a society developing and their birth rate slowing, and demographers have done the math to arrive at a probable max of 12 billion. There’s no grounded argument that this number of people can’t be supported sustainably with current technology, and no other argument for their superfluity, except misanthropy. Which, if you’ve sincerely told people to kill themselves, you definitely suffer from. Anyway enjoy that unique, and apparently very sunny life you think you probably shouldn’t be living.
Either we reduce our population in a controlled way, or nature is going to do it in a brutal one through famine, drought, and disease.
Yay pseudoscience!!
Who was that one posting soil memes on Lemmy? Wasn’t it track_shovel?
uh-oh, it’s the worst thing
Not many people have mentioned this so I guess I’ll bring it up:
The two major factors negatively impacting sustainability of agriculture are
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Ammonia (NH3) is mined as a way to enrich agriculture with Protein, more specifically the ammonia bonds with nitrogen allowing plant development, but it’s not exactly infinite. Synthetic Ammonia can be produced but is extremely emission heavy as it is often a petrochemical byproduct with the vast majority of Hydrogen (H) is produced from fossil fuels refining.
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Modern Invasive Pests/Disease are commonly spread across continents. Lack of plant biodiversity leads to viral outbreaks called “blights” which can lower or even wipe out entire regions of crops. Invasive species most notably insects can plague regions for years without any natural predators. Globalization and Industrialization have created these hurdles, but the yield of such practices are absolutely necessary to feed the current human population.
There are no solutions except reducing the human population. Which isn’t going to happen, because people are stupid animals and the people we’ve empowered all over the world are morons who cannot read the writing on the wall.
This isn’t even true. The carrying capacity of earth for people hasn’t been met. We can absolutely engineer things to be both sustainable and livable at current populations. Rhetoric that advises we “depopulate” is borderline neo-fascism, the same stuff Christians say to bring on the apocalypse.
James Cassidy at Oregon State University has his SOIL lecture series on YouTube. We have many ways to repair our soil and to improve farming. Killing people/ “depopulating” isn’t one of them. Shame on you.
I’m saying we need to have less kids and you’re saying that belief is christofascism, lmao
Despite many noteworthy christofascists supporting population growth such as Elon Musk.
Have fun engineering an entirely new way to supply food for over 7 Billion people that nobody has ever tried before. I look forward to your results. It’s a good thing you were taught by the world’s greatest minds over on fucking YouTube.
Read again, he’s a soil scientist and professor at OSU that made his lecture available for free on YouTube.
You didn’t say “less kids,” you said smaller population.
And I can see how much of an appetite you have for learning things that aren’t “kill kill death death,” so yeah. Won’t waste more of my time explaining. You can’t even be bothered to understand that professors can post lectures online.
And you, after watching a couple of lessons on YouTube, are here lecturing me despite knowing absolutely nothing of my qualifications. I retract nothing.
“kill kill death death,”
You’re the first person to mention killing or death in this entire thread.
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One of solution to this problem is veganic farming.
Agriculture is a major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and biodiversity loss, mostly through deforestation for the cultivation of animal feeds; enteric fermentation from ruminants like cattle, fertilizers and manure; and soil degradation from intensive farming practices. There is currently a push to transform our farming systems to attempt to alleviate the almost-assured catastrophic burden of increasing amounts of atmospheric carbon. Many forms of agriculture claim they have evolved to follow a more regenerative form of agriculture by increasing soil organic matter (SOM), thus capturing said carbon in their soils. This study reports SOM results from one veganic agriculture (VA) farm from a study period of seven years. There was an observed increase of SOM from 5.2% to 7.2%, equating to an increase of 38.46% over the study’s duration, suggesting that VA is an effective farming mechanism for increasing soil organic matter utilizing 100% plant-based regenerative practices and materials to nourish the soil. The VA farm also realized respectable yields per hectare, reporting a 46% increase in total crop production. This was all achieved by growing a diversity of plant-based crops, implementing four-year crop rotations, building soil fertility through plant-based inputs, cover cropping, and leaving the farm’s fields covered as often as possible. Additionally, by its processes, the VA farm fully eliminated the industrial chain of animal agriculture and associated land use and methane emissions, suggesting VA to be a holistically regenerative form of agriculture, in comparison to animal-based forms of any other system.
has not been peer reviewed.
Then I read their methods … It should not pass peer review. Their variable control is shit.
However all they appear to advocate for, are the things that historically we have done, and are mentioned in the article.
Veganic Farming? Its just Vegans trying to hijack a normal process of crop rotation and cover cropping so they can make some snide remark that apparently it is animal feed that’s the problem.
Veganic farming has been around since 1996.
That is very dismissive as veganic farming avoids the problems of pollution from fossil fuels, manure, chemicals, over enrichment and crop contamination.
dammit i had “new dust bowl” on 2025’s bingo, not 2024’s
We haven’t reached dust bowl levels yet lol
Where I am, definitely not. I guess I should have been explicit I wasn’t limiting it to Oklahoma.
The best thing for the environment and soil health is to not farm it. There is no such thing as environmentally friendly agriculture. It is always destructive.
We farm the land we do because it’s profitable.
Irrigated acres make up less than 7% of the land area used for agriculture but produce 65% of the total yield.
Protected culture (greenhouses, high tunnels, etc) produce 10x to 20x more per acre than open field production.
Increasing our water storage and transport infrastructure on a massive scale, combined with expansion of protected culture could reduce our agricultural land requirements by as much as 80%. All wiithout changing our diets.
Imagine 80% of the farmland rewilded? Massive stretches of native ecosystems rebounding without fertilizer or sprays.
I imagine harvesting, planting, and everything else that needs to be done is much harder in “protected culture” compared to normal agriculture.
We farm the way we do because we have always done it like this, except on a smaller scale obviously, otherwise almost everyone would still be a farmer.
Completely moving over to “protected culture” would be enormously expensive, hard, and unless some really advanced technical advancements happen so, impossible.
Irrigated and/or protected culture… Protected culture for the crops that make sense. Irrigated in for all others.
We farm the way we do because historically we go through periods of innovation then stagnation. When the way we farm no longer works and we either rapidly innovate again or the civilization flounders and dies due to famine and war.
“Enormously expensive,” it’s all in perspective. It’s damn cheap compared to the cost of the environmental damage we are currently doing. FYI The equipment and technology already exist to do it as well.
Irrigated? That seems incredibly water intensive.
FYI The equipment and technology already exist to do it as well.
How do you farm crops like wheat and corn that way?
Agriculture is water intensive. The more land we use, the more water we need. Whether from the sky or from a irrigation canal, it’s still water used to grow crops not native environments. Reducing our land footprint reduces our total water usage. That’s what matters, not the per hectare usage.
Corn and wheat - just irrigating itincreases the average yield by 2x to 10x depending on the region.
If you’ve never been in a 50 hectare greenhouse it’s hard to imagine (they are 12-15m tall). These greenhouses are all in soil as well. The larger a greenhouse is the more efficient it is as maintaining temperature. You can get 2-3 cycles per year in them depending on light levels. So the yields are irrigated + 50% per cycle and 2-3 cycles per year instead of 1 cycle. Supplemental lighting can push it to a solid 3 cycles.
There are ways to create sustainable farms. It’s about diversity of crops and cycling what crops are grown each year.
https://www.edibleforestgardens.com/
There is no environmentally friendly factory farming. There is no healthy market-conscious farming. There are absolutely ways to be kind to the earth and grow food for a small community.
We need food for billions not a small community.
Food forest = lower environmental impact per acre but a higher environmental cost per kg of production. It’s also highly environmentally irresponsible to add in invasive species, disease, and pests into and established ecosystem. These are all spread by seed, soil, and plant tissue of the crops we grow.
But…billions make up many small communities. That’s my point. Self-reliance, mutual aid. That’s the answer. Not globalized solutions.
But… we don’t have unlimited hectares of suitable land for people to fuck up. That’s the point… A food forest concept would require every last bit of ariable land on the planet and still not provide enough food for everyone.
The entire idea shows a complete lack of understanding what it takes to feed people at the scale of billions.
If we quit beef our problems would be over.
99% of us do non ag jobs and if we moved to everyone trying to farm a billion would starve and the worlds economy would implode.
Lack of resources would lead to both local and global violence as desperate people hurt each other.
Imagine a city of a million people abandoning all the work they do to all collectively invade rural areas to set up farms they have no idea how to run!
I’m sorry, what exactly is your point? Stop eating vegetables, just eat meat? And why would every single person need to do this? The point of “community” is relying on others more locally. We need to downscale dramatically. The end goal being self reliance on community, but that’s not sudden exodus of every single person next Tuesday to move out of cities. Why would it be? It seems like you’re going way out of your way to make a point you don’t even believe.
You’re taking the proposed solution to an extreme end of the spectrum in an effort to argue against it.
We don’t need all ~7 billion of us to become self sufficient farmers. We don’t even need 1 billion of us to become farmers.
What we need in the immediate short term is to encourage the adoption of better agricultural practices, such that the mega farms that currently support us can continue to support us, while minimizing their environmental* impact.
What we need in the medium term is to encourage people to create local food gardens in their communities, via education campaigns and subsidies. By no means does that mean every living being on the planet needs to take up a trowel and a hoe, but people should be encouraged to participate in the production of their own food.
What we need in the long term is to find solutions that turn those local food gardens into permanent, sustainable, long term solutions that can support entire communities. Vertical farming, indoor hydroponics, stuff like that. Which means publicly funded research and more subsidies.
There’s steps to it. It’s a process. It will take time, it won’t happen overnight. No one is suggesting that “a city of a million people abandon all the work they do and collectively invade rural areas to set up farms they have no idea how to run”. That’s a strawman you’ve made up in your head.
I’m gonna fucking uninstall this app I’m having a nervous breakdown fuck off i just want some memes not existential fucking dread GAAAAHHHH
“Why is WW3 and world-ending climate change so stressful? Can’t you just post memes about Mondays and lasagna?”
There’s also porn here, you know…
tell me about it, dude.
We’re on the precipice of total collapse. Farmlands failing, Ocean Currents are collapsing, Climate change is accelerating, Intellectuals are being demonized in favor of ignorance and fascism… The possibility of WW3 hanging over us thanks to all of the previous.
the next 20 years are going to be the cursed time that “may you live in interesting times” was talking about.
How nice of you to conveniently list out all the current events worth having an existential crisis over, in a reply to a person having an existential crisis
I exist to serve.
They didn’t list them all, the climate change one is more nuanced than that: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/23/earth-breach-planetary-boundaries-health-check-oceans
Yes there are 9 planetary boundaries for us to be able to live here, and we’ve crossed 7 of them.
People SHOULD be having existential crises. Wtf are existential crises for if not SPECIES ENDING EVENTS? That’s why we evolved to freak tf out over this, to help us care enough to address it. That you all would rather numb yourself to it is a testament to how shitty of a species humans truly are. Our ONE fucking advantage is not intelligence, but adaptability. Go on, adapt. Get this shit figured out.
Dawg they are having an existential crisis. A bunch of us are, because just about every thread on the big communities on here remind us of how shit things are every day. I wouldn’t rather be numb to it, and I’m not suggesting other people to be numb to it. I’m saying it’s funny that someone wrote a comment about how much this site reminds them of all the shit going on, then someone replies directly to them with a list of more shit.
Please don’t get yourself into the mindset that because everything is shit, we all have to feel like shit all the time too.
