Depleted soil leads to reduced yields, forcing farmers to rely on fertilizers that raise food production costs, consumer prices.

nah it’s the tarrifs bro

  • dRLY [none/use name]English
    3•3 days ago

    Waiting for the fuck-head right-wing war hawks to claim that it was somehow the “CeeCeePee” that fucked up our soil (unironically). And not the massively profit driven shortsighted corps that push farmers to only grow lots of the same crops without proper rotations. We learned nothing from the Dust Bowl in the US or any number of similar fuck-ups that have happened across the globe over the last hundred years alone.

  • Infamousblt [any]MEnglish
    77•5 days ago

    You know, that’s interesting. I know a farmer who does small farming (for CSA boxes and local restaurants) and his farm is doing just fine because he grows a variety of things, properly takes care of his field, cycles crops around, composts all the waste, uses natural things like chickens and bees to help care for the land…his farm is producing really well even though this was kind of a weird year for his region.

    Almost like if you farm properly to grow food for people to eat instead of farming for short term profit alone, the land doesn’t turn into a giant dustbowl bean-think

  • @merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
    33•5 days ago

    I know this is the doomer sub but soil “productivity” isn’t a permanent problem, it’s an economic one and a sign of a system under stress.

    Soil health can be restored, but it’s easier and cheaper for farmers to declare soil “unproductive” (to project capitalistic language onto a natural process) than to take the action to restore it.

    Bookchin was cooking so hard when he helped invent the concept of dialectical naturalism because this is a perfect example of it in action, but also a perfect example of how we still have autonomy to repair our food chain.

  • Gorb [they/them]English
    39•5 days ago

    Have they tried using jira to make the soil work faster? The soil needs to be send on a time management course

  • GiorgioBoymoder [none/use name]English
    36•5 days ago

    :chuckles-i’m-in-danger:

    been waiting for this to break into the mainstream for a while. really hate that I’m increasingly viewing the rest of my life as waiting around until I starve to death. Or asphyxiating if things go reeeeeally bad.

    • Wheaties [she/her]English
      20•5 days ago

      anecdotal, but I knew a guy who knew a guy who did contract work analyzing soil for companies

      Combination of pesticides and fertilizer get you stuck in a loop of constantly buying more of each to combat the long-term effects of last year’s fertilizer and pesticides. Also, apparently cannabis growers are the most egregious of these industrial agriculture producers. Being in a weird space with federal regulations, there isn’t much oversight in regard to the sort of fertilizer and pesticides they use, so it ends up being the very worst sorts available.

  • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]English
    16•5 days ago

    Oh you thought you could just slather fertilizer on your field every year and get infinite gains? Fucking loser modern farmers.

    Three field system stay winning (I don’t know literally anything about agriculture).

  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]English
    14•5 days ago

    The sort of large scale, highly mechanized agriculture that led to today’s cheap-by-historical-standards food prices was never going to last, and the future is probably going to see a large portion of the workforce in high-income countries return to agriculture. Get your land before Bill Gates does, I guess.