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

Reduced tillage is a big one. There’s a massive misconception out there that the best thing you can do for your soil is go dig it up and turn it over. Soil is alive, and tilling disrupts microbial and fungal action that contribute to its health - by physical rupture of fungal colonies but also by exposing underground life to more sunlight and oxygen. As you kill the top several inches by physical disruption, it becomes dust much more easily washed away by wind and rain: erosion.

We do it to remove weeds before planting, and loosen soil to ease germination. Planting mixed crops or cooperative cover crops are good alternatives for weeds which are massively underused. And overall we may just need to accept some immediate productivity loss in order to ensure long term survival. Farmers are smart, but not smart enough. Too much emphasis on operating tools and fertilizers to optimize yield like land is a machine you can tune, and not enough focus on reducing the need for all this with a more subtle approach with increasing long term yield but perhaps lower yield next year. With farmers always one season away from bankruptcy, you can see why they make the wrong trade offs.

Soil depletion is at the bottom of a lot of civilization collapses in event history. The whole reason the Egyptians lasted as long as they did is that the annual Nile flooding replenished their soil with minerals brought down from higher ground by the flow of water. It wasn’t just the water itself.

Ahh yes. Our weekly once in a life time crisis. Right on cue.

Dustbowl part Deux: Electric Boogaloo

Just use the animal agriculture land instead.

dammit i had “new dust bowl” on 2025’s bingo, not 2024’s

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.

Perfect reason to hand out more BCs. Need to keep the pop for only wanted children. More human than tons of starving unwanted kids.

Why is “unproductive” in quotes?

Even the soil is quiet quitting these days!

Not many people have mentioned this so I guess I’ll bring it up:

The two major factors negatively impacting sustainability of agriculture are

• 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.

• 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.

luckily we all have the excess given the low housing and health insurance costs.

Who was that one posting soil memes on Lemmy? Wasn’t it track_shovel?

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.

Source

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.