Category: ag

  • World Soil Day the down-and-dirty on Ag

    When you eat, and as you eat today, give thanks to the soil that made it all possible.
    USDA on Soil Day. December 5th.

    Today is World Soil Day, and the the truth is in the soil. Neglect the soil long enough and all you have is depleted crops. AND no, it does not come in the usual 6-6-6 fertilizers that concentrate on only 3 components in the fertilizer while neglecting how the soil got depleted in the first place.

    It has to do with cycles. Farms were never meant to have all the crops hauled away to the cities, with no mechanism to return the nutrients. We experienced this during dust bowl of the great depression, where top soil had been depleted and the ag practices tilled the land so the remaining topsoil was readily blown away.

    We all need to think more about closed-loop ag systems. All crops begin with the nutrients and the soil. We neglect and deplete them at our own demise.

    Eat well today, and think about fertile soil and healthy food systems.

    Bon Appetite.

  • Finding Where U.S. Forests Have Been Undisturbed for a Quarter Century « Landsat Science

    Finding Where U.S. Forests Have Been Undisturbed for a Quarter Century « Landsat Science:

    This is a very cool study of the “old forests” that are undisturbed in the USA. The Northeast and the pacific maintained some undisturbed forests; the south was really bad. There are many plants, animals and entire ecosystems that rely on old forests. This study demonstrates how bad it is and how much worse it could get over the next few generations (of humans).

    This is a 25 year study using landsat technology (through 2010), so it doesn’t address the prior 200 years since the pilgrims came to visit north america.

    One of the things that we harp on endlessly at this cite is the compounding effects of human actions. In this case. The study uses exponential decay to show the compounding effects of old forest degradation. In 100 years there would be only about 20% of the old forest left in a business as usual (BAS) scenario. But that number would drop to only about 4% in another 100 years. That means that in 200 to 300 years we could expect virtually no old forests to exist.

    It would be interesting if the last 10 years are significantly different. The Great Recession caused commodity prices to plummet. Wood and paper were especially hard hit. The demise of coal — mining and burning — in the US would help as well. Urban sprawl, slowed to a crawl.

    Haung points out that the big opportunities to mitigate (old) forest loss is in the south and by minimizing fires in the west. Of course, if we let the old forest go to near zero, we could have an easy opportunity for exponential regrowth. (I’m being facetious, of course, once forest — especially old forest — has be used for other purposes, it is nearly impossible to move it back to nature and keep it there for 100 years or more.)

    Doctor Haung, what do you think the current trend might be? Are we starting to “bend the curve” (as the old addage in finance and climate change goes)?

    Visit Dr. haung’s Page at U of Maryland and see a link to the study here: http://geog.umd.edu/facultyprofile/Huang/Chengquan

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  • Is 2015 The Year Soil Becomes Climate Change’s Hottest Topic? | ThinkProgress

    Is 2015 The Year Soil Becomes Climate Change’s Hottest Topic? | ThinkProgress:

    Global Soil Week was last week.

    It slipped by without even a stain on the knees for most of us.

    Give a look at this recount of the week’s activities and the progress to address the issues we are generating for out soil, our top soil and the planet in general.

    This is really ugly. One estimate is that we could deplete all top soil within 60 years. (Gotta question this one a little bit, but the concept is valid.)

    And new studies show that the problem gets worse and worse as the temperatures of the planet rise.

    Really ugly.

    Smarter ag management and no-till farming is a great place to start on the critical, really CRITICAL, environmental issue.

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  • Efforts Grow to Take the Sting Out of the Bee Die-Off – WSJ

    Efforts Grow to Take the Sting Out of the Bee Die-Off – WSJ:

    Generally, the topics discussed here aim to look at the sustainability of trends or activities. CCD is worrisome on many levels of sustainability.

    This is an interesting update on the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) of bee hives world wide.

    Look at the ugly research related to the mix of pesticides and fungicides that seem to cause the demise of bee hives. (See prior SustainZine blog on this.)

    It is interesting that the consumer seems largely unaware of this very, very serious problem. To mix he metaphors, bees are the canary in the coal mine of world agriculture. Those things that will kill the bees, may also kill the rest of us over time… assuming that the demise of the world’s pollinators does not wipe out the food supply first.

    There are so very many issues related to mono-cultures. That is the miles and miles of a single crop. Without diversity, massive amounts of pesticides, fertilizers, fungicides, etc. are needed. When something does get through the defense barrier they can get out of control quickly. The weevil in the cotton, the greening in the oranges, the pollinators in the almonds. Amphibians like frogs are interesting to watch, they can be totally wiped out based on what is happening with the water, with the land, or both. The death of the piglet litters?

    Golf courses and row crops are a biological wasteland. It takes a lot to keep one croup growing in an area, and all the others out.

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  • Sustainability becomes a business law

    Sustainability becomes a business law:

    This is a straight-forward article about sustainability in the ag world.

    There are business forces that are pushing toward sustainability as a “business law”. Sustainability has always been a “law of nature”. Break the law consistently and you should expect “unpredictable” results. (Well, probably somewhat predictable, but certainly not good results.)

    With the move toward $1T in non-GMO (organic-ish) worldwide, it is certainly clear that Ag needs to take the market seriously.

    The market may make the non-sustainable business models extinct, long before the non-sustainable practices exhaust the non-sustainable businesses.

    Look for an upcoming article here on “Fertilizer, a broken and non-sustainable business model”.

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