World News

This weeks excuse for the billionaires to increase their take.

"Here's how the millennials' love of vegetables is destroying the planet"

[Existential crisis threatening all human life] Oh no, the economy!

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.

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.

Ahh yes. Our weekly once in a life time crisis. Right on cue.

staples like bread, vegetables, and meat.

One of these is vastly different from the others in terms of planetary destruction.

I'm gonna fucking uninstall this app I'm having a nervous breakdown fuck off i just want some memes not existential fucking dread GAAAAHHHH

"Millennial and Gen-Z soil is 'quiet quitting'"

Expected to rise? Check your receipts; they’ve been rising.

dammit i had "new dust bowl" on 2025's bingo, not 2024's

There’s also simply way too many people on earth as it is. My country - one of the smallest on earth- had 15 million people back in 1995. Right now, 30 years later, we’re at 18 million. And in 2037, they’re expecting 19 million.

Small numbers on a global scale, but definitely a lot of growth that’s causing issues. There’s a housing shortage, rising prices, healthcare and pensions are under threat, etc etc.

And there’s places that are much, much worse. For example, even India is encouraging population growth. When the country is still very poor. That’s going to help their economy in the short run, but it’s going to be a much larger problem down the line.

We need a controlled population decline, sooner rather than later.

Dustbowl part Deux: Electric Boogaloo

Just use the animal agriculture land instead.

Well hopefully the world will figure this out, or population On a small scale it's so obvious that soil needs to be managed for a healthy garden or small farm. Big farms just throw down fertilizer (which was a world changing improvement to agriculture) and don't do enough to keep the soil alive and healthy. The headline "poor soil forces fertilizer use" is sort of backwards as it's the industrial farming that's sucked the life out of the soil.

So lets keep paving over farmland to build single family homes instead of building real cities.