The Top 40

Sorry to the agribusiness apologists, but this one has merit. For evidence of that, see the places in Kansas (for example) where the immediate area of the local church is ten feet or more above the countless acres of monoculture farmland around it.

Take nutrients out of the soil and put nothing but a small selection of inorganic minerals back - and sooner or later you don't have soil at all. I would have thought that the Dustbowl would have taught America that, but apparently not.

Americans aren't the only ones who do this, by the way.

The drastic action that will be required to meet this crisis will be (a) central planning; and (b) reduce the world's population.

Socialism and extermination - your only solution to every problem.

Here in the US we would have to tear down all of the dikes and levees along the Mississippi River and allow it to flood and replenish the soil on the farm land like it's supposed to. That's what made it so fertile in the first place, along with locations like the Nile River valley. But we can't/won't because too many towns and cities have been build on the flood plain.

Sorry to the agribusiness apologists, but this one has merit.

Which misses the point. "Crises" are regularly hijacked and amplified out of all proportion to their original merit and level of hazard by an aggregate of activists, politicians, and bureaucrats. The end result is that, instead of dealing with the issue in a rational, affordable manner, we get hugely expensive draconian fiats from a collection of virtual criminals.

Exactly, Mikey and Don! If it ain't one crisis, it's another... overpopulation, second-hand smoke, cell-phone induced brain tumors, impending ice-age followed shortly by global warming since renamed "climate change", silicon breast implants, heterosexual AIDS in America, and on and on... All to be solved by central planning and population control with the resident tenured leftist intellectual elitists (NOT elites, as proven by Obama's incompetent reign thus far) manning (term used very loosely) the controls.

It is all very Ozian to me. I imagine Obama as the Wizard behind the curtain, madly pulling levers and pushing buttons to try to affect the change he wants - elbows flying and only puffs of smoke and failed special effects resulting. Meanwhile, the Krugmans, Beinarts, Cohns and Chaits sound suspiciously like the Scarecrow after he gets his brains (picture his serious expression here), except they say such absurdities as, "It isn't that we've spent too much. WE HAVEN'T SPENT ENOUGH!" and "The economy is in the sh**ter. MORE TAXES!" and "What the Massachusetts voters really wanted was SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!"

Time to wake up Fletcher. You're back in Kansas.

Gerard, this has been going on since before you were born. Soil wears out, gets washed or blown away. So we use fertilizer of various sorts, mulch, and crop rotation. Hell, Amazonian Indians figured out how to replenish their soil way back when, because all that rain leached it out. There are even places where soil manufactured back before the 16th century supports a higher population density than other parts of Amazonia.

The point is this, it's a good idea to engage in soil use practices that conserves what we've got as much as we can. For while the soil is replenished over time, it's not certain nor swift.

I'm quite aware of the top-soil issue and the foundation for it. I'm all for it. What I dislike is the continual ginning up of the next big crisis by grant-seeking "scientists."

You can be sure that the developed world and much of the undeveloped world is hip to the cycle and is doing and has done much since, say, the 1930s to limit it and to retain it. That coupled with new strains of crops, new methods of irrigation that are plain for all those who fly above the midwest (for example) to see, and the gigantic growth of yields make me an extreme doubter as to the "urgency" of the matter.

...instead of dealing with the issue in a rational, affordable manner, we get hugely expensive draconian fiats from a collection of virtual criminals.

Which either don't work at all, or make the problem worse through unintended/unanticipated consequences. The first step should be to get the science nailed down, and then think through any proposed solutions, but the fear-mongers jump on initial readouts, and whip up the panic. All for their own benefit, of course.

And yet, Israel has made the desert to bloom. . .

Soil does wear away, blow away, get depleted and washed away. Soil also deposits and builds up and is enriched and improved and created anew. In fact we know quite well how to make and retain soil, and have ample materials to do just that where needed.

Soil loss is not a magic catastrophe liberals can manipulate to guarantee them dictatorial control over everything and everyone else. It is simply a large but manageable scientific problem. As mentioned above, Israel turned supposedly impossible land into an agricultural paradise. Eastern Washington State has been transfigured from high plateau desert to abundant food factory using not much more than alfalfa and irrigation canals.

Sorry about that, future Algores of the loam. We can, and will, fix our soil problems without you forcing re-education camps, draconian population reduction schemes or massive income and power redistribution on the rest of us. Nice try, though.

The erosion of soil fertility is indeed a problem. I do agree that it is not a problem looking for another draconian leftist Endlosung.

How big a problem is it? Ask any farmer if his land is more fertile now than it was last year or the years before and he will tell you it is not. Ask him how his crops would perform if he used no fertilizer, pesticides or herbicides and he’ll tell you he would have virtually no yields at all (especially with today’s hybrids and genetics).

Why wouldn’t he have a yield? If I can plant a little garden in my untilled back yard and have a flourishing little paradise, then why can’t the big farmer? The industrial farmer cannot because he has depleted his N-P-K nutrients and must apply all or part of it annually in the most cost effective way he can (i.e. by spraying it on). Also, grower have almost completely lost soil trace elements which are critical in extracting what nutrients remain in the soil and in creating conditions unfriendly to competitive pests and weeds.

Culturally, the problem is well explained by Wendell Berry in his collection of essays, “Art of the Commonplace.” (To read this portion of his essay google the terms “Wendel Berry ‘fertility as waste’” and select books.google.com) Our treatment of the soil, he argues, is a product of culture. The countryside feeds the cities, the cities poop the food down the drain and it all gets flushed down the river.

Incidentally, those countries that have succeeded in turning their deserts into paradise have done so by importing their fertility from the ocean. There is more than enough nutrients and trace minerals in the ocean to support the world’s populations.

The modern fertilizers currently in use are petroleum derivatives, imported from the Middle East. That’s all fine, but what are we going to do when the oil is gone? I’m all for nuclear energy, but can’t fertilize your land with protons and neutrons. Even more ridiculous, the US subsidizes ethanol which comes from corn which would not be possible without the fertility inputs that originated in the Middle East.

There is indeed a soil fertility crisis looming, but the solution will not come from just more stupid institutions. The solution is get government with their subsidies and large agribusiness with their corrupt monopolization out of it and let the land go back to the free market and individuals who are willing to work for a living.

God intended for man to be the steward of the land. If in our orgies of consumption we exploit each other and rape the land by turning its fertility into cash without re-investing in it, we will go the way immoral societies have gone (i.e. the Soviet Union). Incidentally, God Himself explains the consequences corrupt culture and the land in Leviticus 18:

Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:
And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.
Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you:
(For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;)
That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you.

… Sheesh, the ghost of Scipio haunts me!

How soon some forget, if they ever learned, the environmental record of Central Planning.//

It takes a nonentity to think of everything--Balzac

Mike @ 9:38...
"...tear down all of the dikes and levees along the Mississippi River and allow it to flood and replenish the soil on the farm land like it's supposed to...."

'Zactly.

In my mind, the most prominent of these man-made river structures is the Corps of Engineer's attempt at keeping the Atchafalaya from capturing the Mississippi.

From The New Yorker Feb. 1987....

"...In each decade since about 1860, the Atchafalaya River had drawn off more water from the Mississippi than it had in the decade before. By the late nineteen-forties, when Rabalais was in his teens, the volume approached one-third. As the Atchafalaya widened and deepened, eroding headward, offering the Mississippi an increasingly attractive alternative, it was preparing for nothing less than an absolute capture...."

This, IMO, is the real tragedy of Katrina. The Atchafalaya is going to capture the Mississippi one day. I love New Orleans, but it is doomed...sinking below the water line a bit more every day while the Mississippi silts itself up. In ten thousand years, when they dig this place up, I just know they're going to ask themselves: "What the fuck were they thinking that they thought they could keep that river from flowing where it wants to go?"

As several erudite commenters have pointed out, soil loss is a real but manageable problem. Good practices exist for reducing or preventing topsoil loss, but everything involves tradeoffs. For example, conservation tillage practices (such as no-till) leave crop residue in the field, tying down the soil and helping rebuild organic matter content. Unfortunately, it also can offer overwinter habitat for pests. Farmers and ag professionals have to consider all these factors.

For anyone interested, there's a pretty good soils exhibit right now at the Smithsonian.

And I live in Lansing, Michigan; right near Michigan State University. The university's agriculture programs are among the best, the university has many farms (I have driven by 'Sheep Training and Research' and wondered what they are training the sheep to research? A joke!).

When the MSU agriculture school provides a fully researched and footnoted report on agricultural doom, then I will listen. And those cites better be available and based on reality.