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Summary
Grocery prices are expected to rise globally as soil degradation, driven by overfarming, deforestation, and climate change, reduces farmland productivity.
The UN estimates 33% of the world’s soils are degraded, with 90% at risk by 2050. Poor soil forces farmers to use costly fertilizers or abandon fields, raising prices for staples like bread, vegetables, and meat.
Experts advocate for sustainable practices like regenerative agriculture, cover cropping, and reduced tillage to restore soil health.
Innovations and government subsidies could mitigate impacts, but immediate action is critical to ensure food security.
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Who was that one posting soil memes on Lemmy? Wasn’t it track_shovel?
dammit i had “new dust bowl” on 2025’s bingo, not 2024’s
We haven’t reached dust bowl levels yet lol
Where I am, definitely not. I guess I should have been explicit I wasn’t limiting it to Oklahoma.
luckily we all have the excess given the low housing and health insurance costs.
Reduced tillage is a big one. There’s a massive misconception out there that the best thing you can do for your soil is go dig it up and turn it over. Soil is alive, and tilling disrupts microbial and fungal action that contribute to its health - by physical rupture of fungal colonies but also by exposing underground life to more sunlight and oxygen. As you kill the top several inches by physical disruption, it becomes dust much more easily washed away by wind and rain: erosion.
We do it to remove weeds before planting, and loosen soil to ease germination. Planting mixed crops or cooperative cover crops are good alternatives for weeds which are massively underused. And overall we may just need to accept some immediate productivity loss in order to ensure long term survival. Farmers are smart, but not smart enough. Too much emphasis on operating tools and fertilizers to optimize yield like land is a machine you can tune, and not enough focus on reducing the need for all this with a more subtle approach with increasing long term yield but perhaps lower yield next year. With farmers always one season away from bankruptcy, you can see why they make the wrong trade offs.
Soil depletion is at the bottom of a lot of civilization collapses in event history. The whole reason the Egyptians lasted as long as they did is that the annual Nile flooding replenished their soil with minerals brought down from higher ground by the flow of water. It wasn’t just the water itself.
No till or low toll is pretty much the default on most soil types now, at least on North America and Europe. There some areas where its not the case but I wouldn’t judge anyone unless I had many years of experience in their particular environment. Sometimes what looks dumb from outside isn’t possible or feasible when you’re in the middle of it.
One problem we’ve found with no till after 20 years is stratification compaction just from rainfall and equipment, even with tramlining. Its starting to seem like it needs a working up every few years, or planting down to forage and more active livestock action. The advantage with that would be better carbon sequestration but its not really profitable if land prices/rent are high in that area.
And yes, in a profession with millions of dollars on the line every season, its really hard to make changes if you’re just getting by.
And overall we may just need to accept some immediate productivity loss in order to ensure long term survival.
I see a massive issue in this plan.
Why? It’s the next generation’s problem. And what have they done for us!?
Seriously, those freeloading babies need to get a pair of bootstraps
The best thing for the environment and soil health is to not farm it. There is no such thing as environmentally friendly agriculture. It is always destructive.
We farm the land we do because it’s profitable.
Irrigated acres make up less than 7% of the land area used for agriculture but produce 65% of the total yield.
Protected culture (greenhouses, high tunnels, etc) produce 10x to 20x more per acre than open field production.
Increasing our water storage and transport infrastructure on a massive scale, combined with expansion of protected culture could reduce our agricultural land requirements by as much as 80%. All wiithout changing our diets.
Imagine 80% of the farmland rewilded? Massive stretches of native ecosystems rebounding without fertilizer or sprays.
There are ways to create sustainable farms. It’s about diversity of crops and cycling what crops are grown each year.
https://www.edibleforestgardens.com/
There is no environmentally friendly factory farming. There is no healthy market-conscious farming. There are absolutely ways to be kind to the earth and grow food for a small community.
We need food for billions not a small community.
Food forest = lower environmental impact per acre but a higher environmental cost per kg of production. It’s also highly environmentally irresponsible to add in invasive species, disease, and pests into and established ecosystem. These are all spread by seed, soil, and plant tissue of the crops we grow.
But…billions make up many small communities. That’s my point. Self-reliance, mutual aid. That’s the answer. Not globalized solutions.
99% of us do non ag jobs and if we moved to everyone trying to farm a billion would starve and the worlds economy would implode.
Lack of resources would lead to both local and global violence as desperate people hurt each other.
Imagine a city of a million people abandoning all the work they do to all collectively invade rural areas to set up farms they have no idea how to run!
I’m sorry, what exactly is your point? Stop eating vegetables, just eat meat? And why would every single person need to do this? The point of “community” is relying on others more locally. We need to downscale dramatically. The end goal being self reliance on community, but that’s not sudden exodus of every single person next Tuesday to move out of cities. Why would it be? It seems like you’re going way out of your way to make a point you don’t even believe.
You’re taking the proposed solution to an extreme end of the spectrum in an effort to argue against it.
We don’t need all ~7 billion of us to become self sufficient farmers. We don’t even need 1 billion of us to become farmers.
What we need in the immediate short term is to encourage the adoption of better agricultural practices, such that the mega farms that currently support us can continue to support us, while minimizing their environmental* impact.
What we need in the medium term is to encourage people to create local food gardens in their communities, via education campaigns and subsidies. By no means does that mean every living being on the planet needs to take up a trowel and a hoe, but people should be encouraged to participate in the production of their own food.
What we need in the long term is to find solutions that turn those local food gardens into permanent, sustainable, long term solutions that can support entire communities. Vertical farming, indoor hydroponics, stuff like that. Which means publicly funded research and more subsidies.
There’s steps to it. It’s a process. It will take time, it won’t happen overnight. No one is suggesting that “a city of a million people abandon all the work they do and collectively invade rural areas to set up farms they have no idea how to run”. That’s a strawman you’ve made up in your head.
We don’t need a billion to become farmers either in fact as now only a fraction of a percent need to. We can be less wasteful without Having any additional people involved in ag. If anything its liable to be more automated not less.
But… we don’t have unlimited hectares of suitable land for people to fuck up. That’s the point… A food forest concept would require every last bit of ariable land on the planet and still not provide enough food for everyone.
The entire idea shows a complete lack of understanding what it takes to feed people at the scale of billions.
If we quit beef our problems would be over.
I imagine harvesting, planting, and everything else that needs to be done is much harder in “protected culture” compared to normal agriculture.
We farm the way we do because we have always done it like this, except on a smaller scale obviously, otherwise almost everyone would still be a farmer.
Completely moving over to “protected culture” would be enormously expensive, hard, and unless some really advanced technical advancements happen so, impossible.
Irrigated and/or protected culture… Protected culture for the crops that make sense. Irrigated in for all others.
We farm the way we do because historically we go through periods of innovation then stagnation. When the way we farm no longer works and we either rapidly innovate again or the civilization flounders and dies due to famine and war.
“Enormously expensive,” it’s all in perspective. It’s damn cheap compared to the cost of the environmental damage we are currently doing. FYI The equipment and technology already exist to do it as well.
Irrigated? That seems incredibly water intensive.
FYI The equipment and technology already exist to do it as well.
How do you farm crops like wheat and corn that way?
Agriculture is water intensive. The more land we use, the more water we need. Whether from the sky or from a irrigation canal, it’s still water used to grow crops not native environments. Reducing our land footprint reduces our total water usage. That’s what matters, not the per hectare usage.
Corn and wheat - just irrigating itincreases the average yield by 2x to 10x depending on the region.
If you’ve never been in a 50 hectare greenhouse it’s hard to imagine (they are 12-15m tall). These greenhouses are all in soil as well. The larger a greenhouse is the more efficient it is as maintaining temperature. You can get 2-3 cycles per year in them depending on light levels. So the yields are irrigated + 50% per cycle and 2-3 cycles per year instead of 1 cycle. Supplemental lighting can push it to a solid 3 cycles.
If it really is as perfect as you say, it sounds way more profitable.
Not sure capitalism is the issue at play here.
Even the soil is quiet quitting these days!
uh-oh, it’s the worst thing
[Existential crisis threatening all human life] Oh no, the economy!
“Millennial and Gen-Z soil is ‘quiet quitting’”
deleted by creator
Expected to rise? Check your receipts; they’ve been rising.
Yes, we know. Everyone knows. But if you think this is bad, you have no idea how much worse it can get.
how much worse it
canwill get.Oh sure, but I bet you . . . drive a car!?! Yyeeahh! So let’s all remember to thank those wonderful oil gas and coal giants who make our wonderful lifes so wonderful and totally didn’t kill the planet Chinese hoax ok thanks.
Gee, spoke about heavy metals being deposited in our fields via exhaust and tractor tires a while ago and was called stupid. It’s not stupid, tractors are bad for soil and should be replaced with drones.
Wow, I didn’t realize drones had gotten powerful enough to plow, seed, and harvest. That’s amazing, do you have any links to plowing drones? Sounds cool.
The entire point is to not plow ever. It’s bad to penetrate the soil.
We have drones that can farm. I’m not going to list them all because it’s clear you lack any foundational knowledge and just need a summary, so here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_drone
My own family uses drones in farming here in the US. Not for everything, yet, but gee, if our government would fund it, it would happen immediately. Idk how this is surprising.
“Here’s how the millennials’ love of vegetables is destroying the planet”
It’s the intensive farming of animal agriculture straining the land as it is not allowing it to rest.
Yes, it’s a riff on how everything is the millennials’ fault in the news the past decade or so.
“Fewer Millennials are farming, and that’s bad for everyone.”
“Here’s why feudalism is the remedy for selfish, lazy millennials.”
This is gonna happen, I guarantee it 😂.
This damn country.
Not everything is class and inter generational warfare. This has been building for centuries. The Sumerians compromised their soil and this eventually erased them.
So lets keep paving over farmland to build single family homes instead of building real cities.
Real cities aren’t profitable enough.
Suburban sprawl isn’t really profitable either, our system is flawed to let developers take the profits while the municipality cannot afford to maintain the neighborhood a few years down the line.
I take your meaning, but I disagree it’s not profitable, developers make enormous profits scraping the land of life and slapping concrete and paint on it.
Not many people have mentioned this so I guess I’ll bring it up:
The two major factors negatively impacting sustainability of agriculture are
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Ammonia (NH3) is mined as a way to enrich agriculture with Protein, more specifically the ammonia bonds with nitrogen allowing plant development, but it’s not exactly infinite. Synthetic Ammonia can be produced but is extremely emission heavy as it is often a petrochemical byproduct with the vast majority of Hydrogen (H) is produced from fossil fuels refining.
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Modern Invasive Pests/Disease are commonly spread across continents. Lack of plant biodiversity leads to viral outbreaks called “blights” which can lower or even wipe out entire regions of crops. Invasive species most notably insects can plague regions for years without any natural predators. Globalization and Industrialization have created these hurdles, but the yield of such practices are absolutely necessary to feed the current human population.
There are no solutions except reducing the human population. Which isn’t going to happen, because people are stupid animals and the people we’ve empowered all over the world are morons who cannot read the writing on the wall.
This isn’t even true. The carrying capacity of earth for people hasn’t been met. We can absolutely engineer things to be both sustainable and livable at current populations. Rhetoric that advises we “depopulate” is borderline neo-fascism, the same stuff Christians say to bring on the apocalypse.
James Cassidy at Oregon State University has his SOIL lecture series on YouTube. We have many ways to repair our soil and to improve farming. Killing people/ “depopulating” isn’t one of them. Shame on you.
I’m saying we need to have less kids and you’re saying that belief is christofascism, lmao
Despite many noteworthy christofascists supporting population growth such as Elon Musk.
Have fun engineering an entirely new way to supply food for over 7 Billion people that nobody has ever tried before. I look forward to your results. It’s a good thing you were taught by the world’s greatest minds over on fucking YouTube.
Read again, he’s a soil scientist and professor at OSU that made his lecture available for free on YouTube.
You didn’t say “less kids,” you said smaller population.
And I can see how much of an appetite you have for learning things that aren’t “kill kill death death,” so yeah. Won’t waste more of my time explaining. You can’t even be bothered to understand that professors can post lectures online.
And you, after watching a couple of lessons on YouTube, are here lecturing me despite knowing absolutely nothing of my qualifications. I retract nothing.
“kill kill death death,”
You’re the first person to mention killing or death in this entire thread.
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Why is “unproductive” in quotes?
I guess journalists are finally implying nuance exists.
