Dirt deteriorating

WASHINGTON (AP) — Science has provided the souped-up seeds to feed the world, through biotechnology and old-fashioned crossbreeding. Now the problem is the dirt they're planted in.

As seeds get better, much of the world's soil is getting worse and people are going hungry. Scientists say if they can get the world out of the economically triggered global food crisis, better dirt will be at the root of the solution.

Soils around the world are deteriorating with about one-fifth of the world's cropland considered degraded in some manner. The poor quality has cut production by about one-sixth, according to a World Resources Institute study. Some scientists consider it a slow-motion disaster.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/080508-food-dirt.html

Maybe this is why food has less nutrients in it.

Maybe a possible reason for why we eat more food by volume.Eat more to get the level of nutrients we need,Nutrients that are becoming less and less prevalent in our food because the soil is depleting..

If fertilizer had always been used the soil would not have degraded.

much longer.

I don't think they need to be a component of the fertilizer.

it is composted material, sea weed, or dung. You have to have the land to grow that compost material or feed those animals.

Obviously this is geared towards dealing with climate change but it would also appear to make a difference in soil quality. Better management, that's all I'm saying.

Where they can't afford fertilizers. Not here. That said, the best thing you can do is raise your own organic garden where you KNOW exactly what's in the soil. Kitchen scraps, horse poo, and other dead plants all make GREAT compost and enrich your soil and your veggies, and thereby, you!

Fertile soil in ancient Amazon site may help to curb global warming.

Washington, April 11 (ANI): The discovery of some of the most fertile soil in the world at an ancient site of charcoal deposit in central Amazon, might help to revolutionize farming, as well as curb global warming.

Fifteen hundred years ago, tribes people from the central Amazon basin, mixed their soil with charcoal derived from animal bone and tree bark. Today, at the site of this charcoal deposit, scientists have found some of the richest, most fertile soil in the world.

Because this ancient, remarkably simple farming technique seems far ahead of its time, it holds promise as a carbon-negative strategy to rein in world hunger as well as greenhouse gases.

(snip)
Charcoal fertilization can permanently increase soil organic matter content and improve soil quality, persisting in soil for hundreds to thousands of years, said Mingxin Guo and colleagues from Delaware State University.

More here: http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sports/fertile-soil-in-ancient-amazon-site-may-help-to-curb-global-warming_10036819.html

The problem is not fertilizer per se., but poor agricultural practices that do not add back into the soil the materials which plants extract for their survival and growth. Something as simple as plowing stubble back into the field to decay as compost rather than burning it off would make a significant difference.

This reminds me of a similar study done a few years ago. It compared nutritional values determined back in the 1950s with the nutritional values from identical crops 50 years latter. The results were staggering: food itself has become less nutritious, as decades and centuries of crop production in the same ground has seriously depleted the soil. Replacing the vast richness of organic compost with a very few chemicals does not help.

it should actually be titled something to effect that much of the world is too poor, unwilling, uneducated, or otherwise unable to use chemical fertilizer and sustainable farming techniques. note, though, that it would be impossible to have an indefinitely sustainable farming technique, even for relatively short values of "indefinitely," without the use of chemical fertilizer. fact is, the only way not to "deplete" soil that you're growing a crop on is to transport plant nutrients in some sort of plant-available form from one area to another. the idea that you could forever use livestock manure and other waste when you're feeding the livestock grain from the same land is akin to proposing a perpetual motion machine. it's great to recycle, but there will always be a long-term loss of certain nutrients, and you will have to deal with that even under the best sustainable farming scenarios. that said, nitrogen is... pretty damned plentiful in the atmosphere. the use of nitrogen fertilizers could be at least somewhat ameliorated by intelligent crop rotation practices, at least in some areas where it can be made economically feasible.

anyway.... nutrients are becoming less and less prevalent in our food? really? i know some people like to spout off various nonsense in that vein, but that doesn't make it true. when we're talking about depleted soils, we're usually talking about lower production. i suppose there may be some micronutrients could theoretically become depleted over time. but that's not what the article is actually about. where i can pin the thesis of the article down, it's actually talking about nitrogen-depleted soils and not much else. that's a problem that can develop very rapidly, but it's also a problem with a number of potential, usually fairly simple solutions. the haber process is *already* what we're using to feed the world.

there are plenty of serious soil and farmland depletion issues though. the biggest ones i can think of are soil erosion, salinization, overuse of limited water resources, overgrazing, and other issues mostly resulting from poor management practices. hell, you can even include urban sprawl in that category.

farmland?

:argh: