<story><title>Soil in Midwestern US is eroding 10 to 1k times faster than it forms</title><url>https://www.umass.edu/news/article/soil-midwestern-us-eroding-10-1000-times-faster-it-forms-study-finds</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chubot</author><text>Good documentary about this issue on Netflix: Kiss the Ground (2020)&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.netflix.com&amp;#x2F;title&amp;#x2F;81321999&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.netflix.com&amp;#x2F;title&amp;#x2F;81321999&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It has some striking pictures of two farm fields side by side.&lt;p&gt;One supports diverse plant life and produces nutrient-rich food.  The plant roots prevent erosion, and retain water.  The soil is rich and black.  It&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;regenerative&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The other has brown, dry, dead soil.  It&amp;#x27;s tilled and irrigated and sprayed with chemicals.  It grows a single crop, a monoculture.&lt;p&gt;Multiply that by a hundred years and thousands of consolidating mega farms all over the world, and you have a huge amount of erosion&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;This problem has been well understood for decades (and by other civilizations for centuries), but is repressed &amp;#x2F; conveniently ignored by a wealthy, government-subsidized food industry&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a 2012 documentary about a 1994 project in China to restore degraded &amp;#x2F; desertified land, and it shows how poor entire states become when the soil is poor (which I suppose is not unlike the American midwest!)&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rethink.earth&amp;#x2F;turning-desert-to-fertile-farmland-on-the-loess-plateau&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rethink.earth&amp;#x2F;turning-desert-to-fertile-farmland-on-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chinese land has supported agriculture way longer than American land, and they have way more people, so they have these problems sooner&lt;p&gt;The US is going to get there</text></comment>
<story><title>Soil in Midwestern US is eroding 10 to 1k times faster than it forms</title><url>https://www.umass.edu/news/article/soil-midwestern-us-eroding-10-1000-times-faster-it-forms-study-finds</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jihadjihad</author><text>&amp;quot;Man – despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.&amp;quot; - Paul Harvey</text></comment>