No topsoil left in Britain in 60 years

[TithonusSyndrome]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agricu ... years.html

Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard.

Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said. An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world's farming land "moderately or severely eroded", the Carbon Farming conference heard. A University of Sydney study, presented to the conference, found soil is being lost in China 57 times faster than it can be replaced through natural processes.

In Europe that figure is 17 times, in America 10 times while five times as much soil is being lost in Australia.

Soil is also a valuable store of carbon and can release the greenhouse gas if it is ploughed or dug up.

The conference heard world soil, including European and British soils, could vanish within about 60 years if drastic action was not taken. This will lead to a global food crisis, chronic food shortages and higher prices, the conference heard. Despite better than average farming practices, European soil might last for 100 years if no further damage occurs worldwide, scientists said.

In reality, however, increased land pressures aimed at compensating global production losses would likely mean it will run out faster, they added. Last September the government launched new plans to protect the nation's soil which included farmers being asked to use less fertiliser. Britain imports about 40 per cent of all its food it consumes, a figure that has steadily risen over the past few years. Almost £32 billion of food was imported into the UK in 2008 up from more than £27.7 billion the year before.

John Crawford, professor of Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Sydney, who presented the study, said it was unknown how long soil will last.
“It could be as little as 60 years and that is a scary figure because it is not obvious that we have time to reverse decline and still meet future demands for food,” he said. "It is not an exaggeration to say that soil is the most precious resource we have got, and... (we) are not up to the task of securing it for our children never mind our grand children."

Prof Crawford, the former chair of the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s Agri-Food Committee, said restoring soil required several factors. These factors include minimum ploughing, improved management and "resting" soil by covering crops which helps replace carbon in soil. It can however, take decades to significantly increase the amount of useful carbon in soil, which helps make it fertile. While organic farming could be part of the answer, he said there was "no clear evidence that we can feed the current population using organic approaches, never mind meeting demands in time".

Latest forecasts predict the world's population will grow from 6.8 billion to more than 9 billion by 2050, placing even further pressure on food production and farming. The world last year faced a cereal crisis as wheat stocks dropped to a 30-year low after demand for wheat and rice outstripped supply for the past six out of the previous seven years. This resulted in grain prices rocketing, which sparked civil unrest in many countries. Extreme evidence of how soil is being eroded was seen in September when Sydney was blanketed by its worst dust storm in 70 years.

Just in case anyone thought India was an isolated case.

Now I don't know how the consumption of topsoil is modeled, whether it bell curves the way oil does or not, but if it's going to be completely gone in 60 years then there's bound to be a point where demand outstrips availability long before then in the same way oil supply doesn't have to be gone before crisis strikes. If anyone knew where to look to find that kinda math, I'd be much obliged, but in lieu of it, I'm just gonna assume this is endemic worldwide and that most other breadbaskets are probably on similar timelines.

[Einzige]

Christ, that's a horrifying thought: a world in which sustainability strikes the entire foodchain with a single blow. Previously, when cases like this were reported, the trend seemed to be confined to a single geographical region. Peak oil, though it would damage all of man's domestic companions by proxy, wouldn't necessarily destroy all of our world's wildlife. But if our soil is no longer sufficient for growing our hardy crops, I can only dread to think for what the situation is like for our lesser, less sturdy flora.

[Surlethe]

I would be interested to see how individual farmers' incentives have helped play this out so far. This is the sort of example that libertarians love to cite about perverse policy side-effects (if the government weren't subsidizing farmers, would their soil be running out so quickly) and the sort of example we left-leaners like to cite about the tragedy of the commons, but it's not at all clear to me whether you can easily fit it into any one ideology, at least not without more information on farmers' incentives.

[Liberty]

Stuff like this makes me want to not have children. Er, any more children. I mean, what kind of life will they or their kids have?

I'm hoping this is largely alarmist.

[Surlethe]

Edit: What were the qualifications required to speak at this conference, anyway? How reliable is a single scientist as a source? I have become very suspicious of science reporting.

[Tritonic]

A University of Sydney study, presented to the conference, found soil is being lost in China 57 times faster than it can be replaced through natural processes.

Production meanwhile:



There's a strong correlation between yield and the usage of fertilizer when the local dirt has insufficient natural nutrients:



The Israelis and others even have done that in some areas of the desert, like you can see where barren nutrient-poor sandy dirt has been turned green with artificial irrigation and fertilizer in the circles here:

In Europe that figure is 17 times, in America 10 times while five times as much soil is being lost in Australia.

In the 1930s, things were much worse than they are now in the central U.S. during the dust bowl era, with stories (and pictures) of huge giant black clouds, nearly choking people and livestock. Though some soil is always constantly lost, now the loss rate is no longer enough to sustain such clouds.

I'd be curious where some of the figures in the article come from. The first 0.3 meters of land worldwide is like 8 * 10^13 metric tons of dirt (basic elementary school arithmetic plus lazily guesstimating density as close to 1500 kilograms a cubic meter), so, even under their 7.5 * 10^10 ton/yr loss rate, how do they decide that losing a relatively tiny portion of the preceding counts as losing the topsoil? How many millimeters down from the original surface do they define as topsoil?

Remember the pigeonhole effect. If 10 presentations had a boring conclusion and a 11th had an exciting prophecy of doom, which one would make the news?

[Alyrium Denryle]

I would be interested to see how individual farmers' incentives have helped play this out so far. This is the sort of example that libertarians love to cite about perverse policy side-effects (if the government weren't subsidizing farmers, would their soil be running out so quickly) and the sort of example we left-leaners like to cite about the tragedy of the commons, but it's not at all clear to me whether you can easily fit it into any one ideology, at least not without more information on farmers' incentives.

By letting fields go fallow, they allow soil to build up in those places (because presumably, grasses and other soil retaining plants grow there very quickly). So the Lolbertarians are just flat out wrong there. Irrigation and salinization of the soil causes the loss of topsoil.

[Alyrium Denryle]

There's a strong correlation between yield and the usage of fertilizer when the local dirt has insufficient natural nutrients:

God damn you are a moron. The high production, use of fertilizer and heavy irrigation is causing the loss of said topsoil.

The topsoil, you moron, is the physical medium in which the shallow rooted plants we use for food grow.

The Israelis and others even have done that in some areas of the desert, like you can see where barren nutrient-poor sandy dirt has been turned green with artificial irrigation and fertilizer in the circles here:

And in so doing they have drained entire watersheds, and in areas without large rivers (but with groundwater) they have tapped said groundwater dry.

Farming in a desert is a bad idea if you want to continue farming for long periods of time.

I'd be curious where some of the figures in the article come from. The first 0.3 meters of land worldwide is like 8 * 10^13 metric tons of dirt (basic elementary school arithmetic plus lazily guesstimating density as close to 1500 kilograms a cubic meter), so, even under their 7.5 * 10^10 ton/yr loss rate, how do they decide that losing a relatively tiny portion of the preceding counts as losing the topsoil? How many millimeters down from the original surface do they define as topsoil?

Read the original paper. Those terms are defined. Either way, the soil scientists know better than you.

Remember the pigeonhole effect. If 10 presentations had a boring conclusion and a 11th had an exciting prophecy of doom, which one would make the news?

Except when you do a review of the literature directly (as in, not getting your science news from the BBC etc, but getting it directly from the peer reviewed literature) you will find that this trend is pretty damn common in said literature these days. All I needed to do in order to find that out is do a search on my favorite research database, sort by relevance, and look at the first page.

[Tritonic]

The topsoil, you moron, is the physical medium in which the shallow rooted plants we use for food grow.

What you should be trying to argue about is nutrients, not simply physical mediums. (To take an extreme example, in hydroponics, sometimes even inert mediums like gravel can be used, because the nutrients there are supplied by an artificial solution; even you probably wouldn't try to claim that we're running out of all dirt period, when the whole debate is over some millimeters of it near the surface).

Farming in a desert is a bad idea if you want to continue farming for long periods of time.

Not if you use desalination of the unlimited permanent supply of water in the ocean. Let me preempt a predictable response by pointing out that the cost of desalination now can be such as $650 per acre-foot, which, while not quite as cheap as conventional irrigation water supplies (typically around $200 per acre-foot), is still rather moderate for industrialized countries like America. Total irrigation water usage is about a half acre-foot per American annually, though under no foreseeable circumstance would 100% of that have to be supplied by desalination alone.

Either way, the soil scientists know better than you.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (http://www.ers.usda.gov), as official as you get, estimates, for instance, 718 million metric tons world wheat production in the 2019-2020 crop year, versus how it was recently 672 million tons in the 2009-2010 crop year, continuing its overall growth from 580 million tons in the 2000-2001 crop year.

You seriously expect me to trust you over them, when, for instance, you're the one going on in the similar topic about collapse of agriculture production in 20 years? ("Is the growth rate enough for it to take over production of pretty much every food crop within 20 years? If not, shut the fuck up." http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 4&start=25).

Since you sound like the living embodiment of the Paul Ehrlich / Club of Rome environmentalist stereotype, the very start of credibility would begin by proving you wouldn't have said exactly the same thing and made the same short-term predictions 30 years ago (about disaster by the 1980s-1990s) if you were around in the 1970s.

Your whole mindset is wrong anyway, not approaching from a perspective of how to solve problems, a common fallacy of environmentalist biologists dealing with a subject in a different field than their own. (Ehrlich was one too, though terrible at math). Farmers and engineers have a more productive mindset.

[Tritonic]

What you should be trying to argue about is nutrients, not simply physical mediums.

To expand on this, since I have a feeling I need to state the most obvious points explicitly, ideal topsoil is best for plants, including high amounts of natural nutrients, but it isn't valid to assume that less-than-ideal soil means the death of agriculture. The point of the extreme example of farming previously barren sandy desert dirt was to illustrate how much artificial nutrient supplies (fertilizer) can and do get used to compensate. Even the soil several feet below the ground (a far, far deeper level than reached by soil erosion this century) is better in many locations like within the average U.S. midwest farmland than such as that sandy ground in the Sahara desert agriculture illustrations.

Of course, I noticed the other example of how much soil losses have been decreased (in America at least) compared to the giant dust clouds of the 1930s was utterly skimmed over.

[Einzige]

Ah, we have a big-spender on board. Lovely.

Let me preempt a predictable response by pointing out that the cost of desalination now can be such as $650 per acre-foot, which, while not quite as cheap as conventional irrigation water supplies (typically around $200 per acre-foot), is still rather moderate for industrialized countries like America. Total irrigation water usage is about a half acre-foot per American annually, though under no foreseeable circumstance would 100% of that have to be supplied by desalination alone.

Who's going to pay for a desalination programme, you liberal dipshit? You? Protip: we no longer have the means to engage in such an ambitious undertaking, and will not in the immediate future. Your misplaced optimism is wholly reliant on the idea that people will be willing to loosen their pursestrings enough to pay for all of this.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Ah, we have a big-spender on board. Lovely.

Who's going to pay for a desalination programme, you liberal dipshit? You? Protip: we no longer have the means to engage in such an ambitious undertaking, and will not in the immediate future. Your misplaced optimism is wholly reliant on the idea that people will be willing to loosen their pursestrings enough to pay for all of this.

The alternative, if you can call it that, you conservative fucktard, is starving.

Protip: The power of the government to make and enforce taxes states that people's pursestrings can and will be loosened, whether or not they wish to; and in fact they must be loosened forcibly, in order to get things nessessary for the good of all (irrigation, interstate highways; infrastructure) constructed.

Moron.

[Einzige]

Ah, we have a big-spender on board. Lovely.

Who's going to pay for a desalination programme, you liberal dipshit? You? Protip: we no longer have the means to engage in such an ambitious undertaking, and will not in the immediate future. Your misplaced optimism is wholly reliant on the idea that people will be willing to loosen their pursestrings enough to pay for all of this.

The alternative, if you can call it that, you conservative fucktard, is starving.

Protip: The power of the government to make and enforce taxes states that people's pursestrings can and will be loosened, whether or not they wish to; and in fact they must be loosened forcibly, in order to get things nessessary for the good of all (irrigation, interstate highways; infrastructure) constructed.

Moron.

Did I fucking say that I am personally opposed to this programme? I didn't even hint at it. What I said, if you had any reading comprehension skills worth speaking of, is that nobody who will be able to afford food in the future will need to pay for such a scheme, and nobody who can't afford food can afford to pay for it. Go ahead and force either of them if you want to. It's your head on a pike, not mine.

And don't call me a "conservative" again, you fucking imbecile.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Did I fucking say that I am personally opposed to this programme? I didn't even hint at it. What I said, if you had any reading comprehension skills worth speaking of, is that nobody who will be able to afford food in the future will need to pay for such a scheme, and nobody who can't afford food can afford to pay for it. Go ahead and force either of them if you want to. It's your head on a pike, not mine.

Force the first group to pay for it. The latter group will be much larger, and their votes will keep your head quite un-piked, TYVM.

And don't call me a "conservative" again, you fucking imbecile.

You start spouting conservative gibberish and calling someone a "liberal" in the same apparent tone as that used by Faux Noise, I'll call you a conservative, you feckwit.

[Einzige]

Force the first group to pay for it. The latter group will be much larger, and their votes will keep your head quite un-piked, TYVM.

Because, as we have clearly seen over the past two years, the political will of the latter is always independent of and opposed to the former.

You start spouting conservative gibberish and calling someone a "liberal" in the same apparent tone as that used by Faux Noise, I'll call you a conservative, you feckwit.

I suppose the gamut of the political spectrum is a little too broad for your narrow mind?

[Tritonic]

Who's going to pay for a desalination programme, you liberal dipshit? You? Protip: we no longer have the means to engage in such an ambitious undertaking, and will not in the immediate future. Your misplaced optimism is wholly reliant on the idea that people will be willing to loosen their pursestrings enough to pay for all of this.

In an imaginary unrealistic scenario where 100% of existing irrigation had to be replaced with desalination, the cost for the desalination plants would be about $325 per capita (at $650 per acre-foot of desalination and 0.5 acre-foot total annual American agricultural irrigation). However, not even remotely close to that relatively small figure would ever be required, since never is it necessary to go to 100% irrigation by desalination alone, as a lot of natural rainfall occurs and will continue. Desalination is just done when locally appropriate.

These figures may seem shockingly low, but most people in first-world countries drastically overestimate how much of their income is spent on agriculture in total, let alone a particular sub-component of it like irrigation expenses. You may spend even a few hundred dollars a month on food, after various processing, but, if you simply got raw unprocessed foods like bulk flour, sugar, etc, you'd find that you would spend only a fraction of a dollar a day total. (Though no ordinary individual does this for obvious reasons, you can quite literally buy 500 pounds of sugar on the international bulk market for a mere $100, as it goes for $450 a metric ton). The bulk of food expenses in America are processing and fancily cooking food, not the original "raw materials" production. That's why few people even know a farmer in their immediate family any more, unlike the old days, as so relatively few of our resources actually are devoted to food production anymore.

I can imagine you back in 1900, if someone suggested there would be trillions of dollars of electricity generating infrastructure, several hundred million vehicles, etc. later in the century. You'd be going on about how it never could be afforded. But there are literally hundreds of trillions of dollars a century (trillions a year) of both public and private investment in everything under the sun. The allocation varies by what is needed and what is profitable.

There is an increasing construction of desalination plants in some states today like even Florida. However, keep in mind that some regions don't even need irrigation, just having enough natural rainfall, while even existing irrigation isn't universally being depleted. Mostly we don't build a huge number of desalination plants because we haven't needed to do so, because our actual agricultural productivity trend with simply primarily conventional irrigation hasn't been towards collapse but rather this:



http://www.ers.usda.gov/

[Surlethe]

I would be interested to see how individual farmers' incentives have helped play this out so far. This is the sort of example that libertarians love to cite about perverse policy side-effects (if the government weren't subsidizing farmers, would their soil be running out so quickly) and the sort of example we left-leaners like to cite about the tragedy of the commons, but it's not at all clear to me whether you can easily fit it into any one ideology, at least not without more information on farmers' incentives.

By letting fields go fallow, they allow soil to build up in those places (because presumably, grasses and other soil retaining plants grow there very quickly). So the Lolbertarians are just flat out wrong there. Irrigation and salinization of the soil causes the loss of topsoil.

Are farmers letting soil go fallow, or are farm subsidies inducing more farmers to farm than would otherwise do so?

[Psychic_Sandwich]

Are farmers letting soil go fallow, or are farm subsidies inducing more farmers to farm than would otherwise do so?

In the EU at least, farmers are payed to let fields go fallow. I worked at a farm to help pay my way through uni, and he usually left about of a third of his land uncultivated. He rented the space out to campers and the like to get even more money off of it than he was payed by the EU.

[Wing Commander MAD]

I would be interested to see how individual farmers' incentives have helped play this out so far. This is the sort of example that libertarians love to cite about perverse policy side-effects (if the government weren't subsidizing farmers, would their soil be running out so quickly) and the sort of example we left-leaners like to cite about the tragedy of the commons, but it's not at all clear to me whether you can easily fit it into any one ideology, at least not without more information on farmers' incentives.

By letting fields go fallow, they allow soil to build up in those places (because presumably, grasses and other soil retaining plants grow there very quickly). So the Lolbertarians are just flat out wrong there. Irrigation and salinization of the soil causes the loss of topsoil.

Are farmers letting soil go fallow, or are farm subsidies inducing more farmers to farm than would otherwise do so?

I imagine they probably aren't letting the fields go fallow, even with the subsidies. The conservatives have been in power for what, 30 years now. I have feeling the idea of subsidizing famers to let their fields go fallow would strike them as terrible and wasteful, even if practical and intelligent. Besides, aren't we already producing excess crops like corn just for the sake of subsidizing the growers. That certainly would seem to imply that we aren't subsidizing them to let fields go fallow, rather only to produce crops that rot in storage. I'd certainly love to be proven wrong, I am just far far too cynical anymore to have faith in my fellow Americans to think more than 2-5 years ahead of time.

I also await Alyrium's eventual return, should be interesting . (grabs popcorn and looks for nice front row seat)

[Alyrium Denryle]

What you should be trying to argue about is nutrients, not simply physical mediums. (To take an extreme example, in hydroponics, sometimes even inert mediums like gravel can be used, because the nutrients there are supplied by an artificial solution; even you probably wouldn't try to claim that we're running out of all dirt period, when the whole debate is over some millimeters of it near the surface).

But we do not use hydroponics to grow on a large scale, and can only grow certain plants that way in the first place, plants that like waterlogged soil.

Also, there is dirt, and then there is soil. The topsoil is where the bacteria that facilitate the nutrient uptake of plants make their happy little livings. Without it, you must not only find a way to physically do your planting (because the soil under the layer of top soil tends to be hard), but you have to worry about damage to watersheds because without that soil binding up nutrients and other chemicals (like your heavy pesticide loads), they will just wash over the surface into the local watersheds(unless you are using a high permeability mineral soil like sand. In which case it wont wash over, it will be absorbed all nice and happy.... then leach through into the watersheds because it has no holding capacity). Mmmmm toxic algal blooms.

So yeah. You have dirt. Just not particularly useful dirt.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (http://www.ers.usda.gov), as official as you get, estimates, for instance, 718 million metric tons world wheat production in the 2019-2020 crop year, versus how it was recently 672 million tons in the 2009-2010 crop year, continuing its overall growth from 580 million tons in the 2000-2001 crop year.

They use a bad statistical technique called Extrapolation. They take the existing trends and extend them. The farther you get from the initial dataset, the less accurate that becomes and the wider the 95% confidence interval. It works OK in a system that you dont need to use partial differential equations to model, but in Dynamical systems that feed back in on themselves like agriculture it is a poor method.

The simple fact of the matter is, the scientists on the ground have a better and more detailed picture of what is going on in the worlds crop lands than the USDA will. Why? Because they use a particularly bad statistical technique for their estimations.

Additionally, even if I wanted to play that particular game, what you need to worry about is not overall production but production per person which has been dropping since 1996.



Growth in grain production has slowed down, which indicates a problem from an ecological standpoint as well as a food supply standpoint. Dumbfuck

Since you sound like the living embodiment of the Paul Ehrlich / Club of Rome environmentalist stereotype, the very start of credibility would begin by proving you wouldn't have said exactly the same thing and made the same short-term predictions 30 years ago (about disaster by the 1980s-1990s) if you were around in the 1970s.

You know what happened in the 70s that made his predictions not correct? The miracle that was Norman Borloug(sp). You know, the guy who started the Green Revolution. He bought us a few decades. Unfortunately the methods he used to do that are not sustainable in the long term (loss of top soil, soil salinization, groundwater depletion, destruction of watersheds, oceanic hypoxic zones, ride tides etc etc etc) so the solution was temporary. Massive technological upheavals are pretty much stochastic events. They are awesome when they do happen, but they are not something that should be relied upon when planning policy regarding land use or population growth. When those upheavals are centered around getting more out of natural processes than you should be able to you run the risk of degrading those same processes ability to do what you want them to. That is what is happening now. We have degraded topsoil, used groundwater to the point that aquifers are collapsing in on themselves, completely drained very very large river systems and polluted the ones that remain, and have caused a 20 thousand fold increase in the number of red tides in some areas. As a result, grain production per person has been falling since the mid 90s.

To expand on this, since I have a feeling I need to state the most obvious points explicitly, ideal topsoil is best for plants, including high amounts of natural nutrients, but it isn't valid to assume that less-than-ideal soil means the death of agriculture.

Not death. Just a massive decrease in production per person, which is what matters when you are talking about how many people will starve to death.

The point of the extreme example of farming previously barren sandy desert dirt was to illustrate how much artificial nutrient supplies (fertilizer) can and do get used to compensate.

Yes. And I pointed out that there are MASSIVE problems in the long term when you do that. Sure. It works for a few decades, but then the damage you cause to the ecosystem of the entire region starts to catch up to you.

Force the first group to pay for it. The latter group will be much larger, and their votes will keep your head quite un-piked, TYVM.

The problem is that most people are selfish greedy walking trash. And the rich people control who gets elected into office and thus who carries the tax burden.

[Liberty]

Are farmers letting soil go fallow, or are farm subsidies inducing more farmers to farm than would otherwise do so?

In the EU at least, farmers are payed to let fields go fallow. I worked at a farm to help pay my way through uni, and he usually left about of a third of his land uncultivated. He rented the space out to campers and the like to get even more money off of it than he was payed by the EU.

We have that (paying farmers to let land lay fallow) in the U.S. too, but I'm not sure how widespread it is.

Question: can't topsoil be replenished with compost? I grew up on land with soil like clay, and my dad added dead leaves and all sorts of compost products (banana peels, egg shells, rabbit pellets, etc) to replenish it. So, why don't we start getting everything we can to compost and replenishing (or creating?) topsoil? Or am I missing something here?

[Alyrium Denryle]

Are farmers letting soil go fallow, or are farm subsidies inducing more farmers to farm than would otherwise do so?

In the EU at least, farmers are payed to let fields go fallow. I worked at a farm to help pay my way through uni, and he usually left about of a third of his land uncultivated. He rented the space out to campers and the like to get even more money off of it than he was payed by the EU.

We have that (paying farmers to let land lay fallow) in the U.S. too, but I'm not sure how widespread it is.

Question: can't topsoil be replenished with compost? I grew up on land with soil like clay, and my dad added dead leaves and all sorts of compost products (banana peels, egg shells, rabbit pellets, etc) to replenish it. So, why don't we start getting everything we can to compost and replenishing (or creating?) topsoil? Or am I missing something here?

It does not so much replace the topsoil as enrich it. Though it may be useable as a substitute so long as the bacteria is there. The problem is you would need to add compost to 32% of the earths terrrestrial surface.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Scale, people. Get some fucking perspective. It's one thing to talk about a garden or allotment you're spreading household waste on, it's another to apply this same method to global food supplies. And no one has addressed how we're meant to do this with drastically increasing energy costs and one of the primary sources of I-NPK becoming ever harder to keep up with growing demand from other areas of industry. Desalination also only works well with very cheap energy and access to the sea. A lot of arable land is nowhere near the ocean, so this will have to be considered also. Before anyone says "solar", let me tell you that Saudi Arabia is giving up on solar and is instead going for natural gas to fuel such measures. That speaks volumes in itself, but then the KSA and most of the Middle-East are looking at a HUGE energy crisis while also needing to import most of their food. It's not very intuitive.

[Liberty]

Scale, people. Get some fucking perspective. It's one thing to talk about a garden or allotment you're spreading household waste on, it's another to apply this same method to global food supplies.

Excuse me for trying to be optimistic and practical, and for asking a simple question. Like I don't know there is a difference between half an acre and millions of acres.

I do wonder, though: Where does the waste from huge animal farms go? Could that be collected, treated, and added to fields? How about what's in landfills - could any of that be processed and added to fields? If the answer is no, just say so, and why, rather than ridiculing me.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Excuse me for trying to be optimistic and practical, and for asking a simple question. Like I don't know there is a difference between half an acre and millions of acres.

I do wonder, though: Where does the waste from huge animal farms go? Could that be collected, treated, and added to fields? How about what's in landfills - could any of that be processed and added to fields? If the answer is no, just say so, and why, rather than ridiculing me.

I wasn't directing that at you at all, but I do get weary of the same so called solutions from people who know better. Anyone can mention a technology that will solve all our problems. Sikon was very good at that. What they all missed was the fact that the humans involved caused the problem, not technology. It's rethinking how we're doing things, and monoculture is just going to have to disappear if we're to get anywhere.

As to your query, it may be possible, though again, energy put into doing this will be the main cost factor. Masanobu Fukuoka may have something of a solution for many problems we're seeing, but it will be for naught if we just keep adding more people to the stretched system or keep bigging up our diets.