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by Turing_Machine
3012 days ago
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"Are those improvements sustainable?" Available evidence suggests yes. http://plantsci.missouri.edu/grains/corn/graphs/USA-corn-yie... "Agriculture that is generating high yields from converting very fertile natural ecosystems into deserts" Iowa didn't look much like a desert the last time I was there. "Failure ecosystems that have been farmed out of existence in antiquity are still as barren as thousand years ago" Yeah, that's why you don't want to rely on "organic" farming. Good thing we don't do that any more. |
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I don't know the specifics of Iowa, but European soil can only keep up with the rising yields thanks to the dung of a rising headcount of livestock that is fed with imported feed that is at least in part from slash-and-burn farming or from depopulating the oceans. If those animals consume more than the local yields could supply, the farming is still unsustainable despite local soils not depleting.
I'm not saying that there are no improvements (three certainly are), but that they might be much smaller than we think.