[necovek]

While I see people worry about the nutrient content in the resulting food, I wonder more about the nutrient content of the soil after a few years of such products. While we fertilize the soil, the mention of "longer and deeper roots" means that such plants will take out more from the ground, making ground less usable for future farming. Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not naturally grow this big (they'd kill themselves off in a few generations).

Sure, rotation of cultures is already common in farming, but this implies we'd move further away from organic farming rather than closer to it with the need to re-fertilize the soil to an even bigger extent (and deeper).

Or, it would make us move to other currently unexploited land, thus worsening the global situation we are in.

Basically, there is a potential in this, but I was never under the impression that any part of human population is starving because of us being unable to produce enough food (rather, it's waste and inequality, to name the likely top two).

[foxyv]

Deeper roots tend to make for healthier soil. This is why dandelions are such a boon for someone with poor soil. Their deep roots break up poorly aerated soil allowing aerobic bacteria to produce nutrients for plants.

Modern farmers are keenly aware of soil quality and spend a lot of time and money to keep their farms running at top efficiency. The thing that worries me the most about modern farming is the use of petrochemicals for fuel and fertilizers as well as runoff into water sources.

[RosanaAnaDana]

>Modern farmers are keenly aware of soil quality and spend a lot of time and money to keep their farms running at top efficiency.

You sure about that? When I was ARS, sure there were 3-4 farmers I met who took SOC and and soil health seriously; individuals who wanted to think about their soil as an ecosystem and grow their soils as they did their crops. Then there were the other 96-97 farmers you would meet who could give two wiffs of stinky piss about doing anything other than extracting as much value off their land as quickly as possible. This was typically done with high degrees of tillage, large quantities of fertilizer, and significant doses of herbicide. If there SOC levels dropped below 5%, they would just buy in lime and lime the shit out of the fields. Rinse, wash hands, repeat.

Its purely anecdotal, but the *vast* majority of farmers I had the opportunity were not good farmers and not interested in any kind of longer term relationship with their soils. Most seems like they were trying to extract maybe 5-15 more years of growth out of their soils before they were completely depleted of SOC and basically not usable as farm-able land. We're talking about a region that prior to cultivation had SOC levels in the 30-40s; most of the soils there now are down at below 10%, many as low as 5%, which is borderline being able to grow anything at all.

[titzer]

This is an unfortunate consequence of a long chain of economic transformation. My family was all farmers, a nearly unbroken chain reaching back at least 300 years into western Germany. My father went into the business world, but hated it and tried to return to farming in the mid 1980s, at which point economies of scale had already transformed the market so that the 200 acres of corn and soybeans the family had raised for generations no longer could support his full income. He borrowed money, bought another farm, couldn't even afford the equipment to harvest my grandparents' farm, had to contract out to the burgeoning Wagners who were farming thousands of acres. In the end, he had to give up the idea of farming and became basically a day trader by the mid 1990s. He was nostalgic about the old farm and it was tragic that his entire world was upended by enormous macroeconomic forces that pushed him into dry tech-driven commodity futures trading, about the exact opposite of what was bred into his genes.

I can see why farmers are extracting every bit of profit from the soil that they absolutely can. The machine demands it of them. Farms are huge operations nowadays, and from what I can tell, small family-owned and run corn and beans farms are half a century in the past at this point. The soil is just one more casualty of growthism.

[shawn-butler]

>> Its purely anecdotal, but the vast majority of farmers I had the opportunity were not good farmers

It is purely anecdotal. It greatly depends on the location and the generational age of the farmer the extent to which they are concerned with soil conservation. Cultural practices in farming tend to have wide adoption swings, (neighbors see what their neighbors are doing, etc) Entire counties will be using conventional methods and within a few seasons swap to lower disturbance methods.

Conservation tillage practices—including no-till, strip-till, and mulch-till—vary widely across crops and regions[0]:

• Conservation tillage was used on roughly 70 percent of soybean (2012), 65 percent of corn (2016), 67 percent of wheat (2017), and 40 percent of cotton (2015) acres.

• The share of total conservation tillage that is no-till also varied from 67 percent (45 percent of total acreage) in wheat (2017) and 56 percent (40 percent of total acreage) in soybeans (2012) to 44 percent (18 percent of total acreage) in cotton (2015) and 42 percent (27 percent of total acreage) in corn (2016).

• For individual crops, the rate of no-till varies by region. The likelihood of no-till corn, for example, is relatively high in the Northern Great Plains (50 percent of conservation tillage in corn, 34 percent of total corn acreage), Prairie Gateway (69 percent of conservation tillage, 49 percent of corn), and the South (the Eastern Uplands, Southern Seaboard, and Mississippi Portal combined) (67 percent of conservation tillage, 53 percent of corn).

• Almost 50 percent of corn, soybean, wheat, and cotton acreage was in no-till or strip-till at some time over a 4-year period (including the survey and 3 previous years), but only about 20 percent of these acres were in no-till or strip-till all 4 years.

I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive.

[0]: Tillage Intensity and Conservation Cropping in the United States, USDA 2018

[bluGill]

> I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive.

It could be right. The smaller the farmer the less likely they are to realize how much the investment in better farming is worth it. The very large farmers have the numbers showing the investment is worth it, they control a lot of land, but are only a minority of farmers.

I'm still with you that > 90% is a bad estimate, but it isn't as bad as you make it out.

[shawn-butler]

I provided actual numbers of conservation tillage adoption that are highly correlated. I don't know what else to provide you besides actual data to correct the bias in your understanding.

The 20+ year trend in farm size is unmistakeable across the signficant economic classes, btw. Farms are increasing in size and the number of farms is decreasing.

[necovek]

You can both be right: you are talking about acreage, they are talking about (numbers of) farmers.

[bluGill]

> You sure about that? When I was ARS, sure there were 3-4 farmers I met who took SOC and and soil health seriously; individuals who wanted to think about their soil as an ecosystem and grow their soils as they did their crops.

In the long run farmers are care about soil health make more money than those that don't. The rule of thumb is it takes 7 years before no-til is more profitable than conventional tillage. Once you get no-till going though it uses a lot less fuel (pulling a plow through soil uses a lot of energy).

Farmers have also caught onto the fact that modern computers and equipment allow you to see what parts of the field you doing what. When you sell the farm they will make it worth while to build up your soil as farms that yield better are worth more than farms that yield poorly.

In the end you are right - far too many farmers are not caring for their soil as they should. All the big ones are though as they have figured out the long term investment is worth it.

[cmrdporcupine]

Don't have you tell you this, and not disagreeing with you.. but ... Farming is mining. It's extractive. Every bit of plant matter we ship off our farms in the form of food is carbon and nitrogen that is no longer in our soils. I concur most farmers don't give a crap. But even the ones who do, it just slows it down, doesn't stop it.

We run a little market garden. I follow all sorts of agronomy feeds and information and then read and watch what other growers are doing. Even the most "regenerative" and "ecological" growers don't seem to get it... There's no free lunch. I've read analysis which points out that there is not even enough manure produced on the planet to fertilize our farm fields without chemical additions, and don't even think about compost, it's not even close... and all the soil retention and cover cropping one does will only slow down, not reverse, top soil loss. If you're not losing carbon in your soils, it's because you're bringing it in from somewhere else, and it's lost there.

So many permaculture types trying to imply that what works for them in their backyard city gardens works on a large scale. It does not. I learned the hard way.

I see "no till" market garden growers whose solution is basically to dump 100 cubic yards of compost on their beds each year and plant into that instead of tilling. This is the Richard Perkins etc. method, and it's intellectual dishonesty. All that compost comes from somewhere and that place now in turn has a carbon deficit.

At least, this is all the case until we can find a way to efficiently extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into solid soil ammendment. Trees and cover crops can't do it fast enough.

[7952]

I think most carbon in plants comes from CO2 in the air.

[simonh]

As does the nitrogen, this is basic biology. Post is tosh. We’ve been farming in Europe for 10,000 years and still going strong. Soil regeneration is not rocket science.

[cmrdporcupine]

Most plants can't take nitrogen from the air. Only nitrogen fixing legumes do that, and only with the assistance of bacteria in the soil biome.

[clomond]

Abundant renewable energy, driven by decreases in costs of solar, wind and energy storage could be used with no other inputs but energy* via the Haber process + electrolysis.

I suppose I don’t know the chemical compound that constitute “solid soil amendment” though. If it includes functionally free nitrogen/ammonia and proper management of land or equipment, is this still not possible?

[webinvest]

Soil Organic Carbon levels? Don’t most plants get most or all of their carbon (and mass) from carbon dioxide in the air during respiration?

[foxyv]

They do both. Usually though, soil organic matter which contains the most SOC ensures food for bacteria and fungi which make healthy soil. Plants, much like humans, require microbiota to survive and stay healthy. You are not just feeding plants, but also the bacteria and fungi that prevent disease and help produce nutrients.

In addition, plain sand and clay is very poor at retaining nutrients and moisture. Organic matter tends to soak up nutrients like a sponge. This is why media based hydroponics uses porous material like volcanic rock and pumice.

[imtringued]

That's what we get from the "grow as fast as possible today" mentality. People aren't thinking about how to maximize economic output. That is probably the biggest failing of capitalism. People think maximum growth is the same thing as maximum output.

[jeffbee]

Recently read the book "Running Out" about aquifers in western Kansas. Takeaway was that the overwhelming majority of farmers were explicitly targeting emptying the aquifer within their lifetimes.

Unclear what they expect to happen next.

[omegaworks]

Bailouts. Every American farmer relies on the generous crop insurance policies maintained by our government.

[mauzy]

While the statement implying that modern farmers are good Shepard's of soil quality is... debatable at best and I'd argue mostly false it is certainly true that, as a rule, deeper / larger root structures benefit soil rather than diminishing. Especially within the same family of crops deeper roots will always result in a healthier soil than shallow.

[foxyv]

I don't remember saying they are good shepherds. Just keenly aware. The usual solution is to dump many tons of petrochemical based fertilizers and amendments into their soil which washes off into local waterways.

[yosito]

Presumably if you have more productive crops, the ratio of petrochemicals to food output improves.

[dwiel]

Why assume that more output doesn't come with more input? It doesn't seem presumable to me one way or the other.

[bluGill]

> Why assume that more output doesn't come with more input? It doesn't seem presumable to me one way or the other.

It isn't. There is such a thing as too much. Inputs that wash off in the rain is wasted money. Inputs beyond what the plant needs are best sit around (or wash off - see above), but sometimes will make the plant grow taller instead of grow more food - or worse will kill the plant from too much.

There is a lot of room though. Today we can target small areas of land with different amounts of each input. 100 years ago you tried to give each field the same amount of every input since you didn't know what it really needed, and didn't have the ability to do anything about it even if you did.

[beauzero]

Also why daikon radishes are used as a "cover crop" that and for nematode reduction.

[bullfightonmars]

This is not how plants work. The increased biomass comes from carbon in the air.

There is already more than enough nutrients in the ground or applied as fertilizer. In fact most of the nutrients from fertilizer are lost and wash away.

This will allow plants to capture more applied ferilizer. Mostly though these plants will be pulling more carbon from the atmosphere.

[idroveatrain]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

So there are at least 3 studies performed by different teams in this article that indicates you're incorrect in your assertions as applied in practice.

[tynpeddler]

That article is ... confused. Donald Davis, the main source for most of the article, suggests that a lack of selection towards nutritious crops as the cause of lower nutrition, while the article itself claims that the cause is poorer soil quality. Noticeably, neither of these points support the argument that engineered crops are any worse for the soil than past crops.

Also, the article suggests that the studies themselves are comparing current data to data generated 20-50 years earlier. Comparing two modern day experiments to each other can be quite difficult, as even small differences can have huge ramifications in the results, even if the protocols are supposedly the same (I personally saw this play a few times in grad school). For example, quality differences in the filter paper used can result in a much higher retention of mass in one experiment compared to another. Without a body of research measuring the comparability of the compared results (please link if you find it), the comparisons cited in the article are not very convincing.

Actually, if you can find the original studies cited in the article, I'd love to see them. The ideal way of measuring this would be to take a heritage strain, and grow it along side a modern strain the the same soil. That would at least help figure out if modern crops really have selected against nutrition.

[idroveatrain]

Conjecture with me for a moment, friend: if given fruit X yields 100% nutrient fruits, is then selected for volume, and in the increase of size, the proportion of nutrients declines it follows, to me, that the increased volume is creating a diluting effect. To me it seems as if any increase of proportion in volume had ought to scale right alongside the proportion of nutrient values, unless that compromises the organism. This is the framework I'll be working from.

Several factors come immediately to mind, is the plant reaching a threshold wherein micronutrients are at "unity" and so uptake is reduced and thus reaches a plateau (or saturation), and so distribution into fruit is proportionally diminished as volume increases? Is there some natural law that is prohibitive, something like the square-cube law? Or are the plants locally depleting the nutrients, and then relying on natural diffusion? Is there a "long-range dependency" that is opaque? All else failing, I would suggest that it's highly probable that the nutrient disparities that are evident in these studies could reflect that maintenance of the proportion of nutrients to that of volume might leave the plants fated to death, and so our selection process is predetermined to either volume or nutrient content. Which begs the question, at what intersection do we find the highest degree of efficacy in selecting foodstuffs?

Given a plant that could expand both volume and nutrient proportionally, what would the result be? I'd conjecture rapid depletion of locally available nutrients, up to the point where diffusion and natural deposition becomes an ineffectual mode of conveyance and demands manual upkeep else the organism would be given to death.

Perhaps I'm presumptuous, I don't mind being so, I'll have to ask you to forgive me for my ignorance. I only ask for your participation in this discussion as it seems you're privileged to have a mind much more discerning and honed in this craft than mine own.

[hadlock]

Plants are ~70-90% water, and of the dry mass, 70-95% is carbon, the structure of the plant which is extracted from the air (splitting the C from the O2).... the remaining nutrients are from the soil + dissolved in rain water, although plants do absorb a limited amount of nutrients through their leaves via dust etc.

[babatuba]

I'm sorry what!? This is how everything works. If you force something to use more ingredients/nutrients/whatever at a faster pace, you will deplete something else in the ecosystem faster than previously.

Plants or otherwise: when you force the balance to tilt one way, you have to be extremely careful not to reach a breaking point.

Just want to add that I think the technology could be really beneficial though. For instance, if you planted less high-yield potatoes in smaller area than previously, you could then afford space for alternate crops and then move potatoes to a different location and counter balance with other crops the next season. This could possibly allow for increased production while still preserving nutrients, increasing overall yield efficiency.

[HPsquared]

What matters is the ratio of soil depletion to food production. If the plants produce 50% more food, you don't need to plant as many of them. This might end up actually reducing the environmental footprint.

[idiotsecant]

In practice, this is not how it would work out - the farming entity is incentivized to produce the maximum profit - if you can make 50% more food and sell it for the same price, you will just make 50% more food. Even if you can make 50% more food and sell it for 80% of the price per unit you will still do that because it means more profit.

[bluGill]

You missed something important: demand is not elastic like that ( to some extent people will switch from beans to meat, but eventually you have enough to eat and won't buy more at any price). Thus as farming gets more productive someplace needs to stop growing food. We can allow a bit to go to waste, but eventually someone is going to realize that the price they can get for their crop isn't worth the cost for putting it in the ground and stop farming. Not sell out to a different farmer because no other farmer will invest in that land.

The above happens all the time. It doesn't happen on the most productive land, it happens on the marginal land.

[b112]

There have been loads of reports about how crops have fewer nutrients already.

And, for example, there are many trace elements which are not replenished with standard fertilizer.

Selenium is an example here, I think it is the Danish?, which have a law now, forcing it to be added to fertilizer.

Bacteria don't make elements.... although I suppose they could free them from rocks...

[smolder]

The last such report I saw pinned lower micronutrient density not on the quality of soils, but on higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, leading to quicker growth of the plants. Plants in lower concentrations grew more slowly but had relatively more micronutrients for the same mass.

[bamboozled]

Is it good for humans to eat more fertiliser, pesticides etc ?

[bullfightonmars]

You don’t eat fertilizer in your food. It is applied to the ground before the plants fruit. It is also water soluble and quickly washes away.

Pesticides aee higly dependent on crop and really have nothing to do with this conversation.

[bamboozled]

The parent said the plants will absorb more fertilisers

[CyanBird]

This is like asking if the vitamins that you give to a chicken as a chick will poison you when you eat it as adult, I am not talking of hormones or growth agents, just literal common vitamins

You don't eat "the vitamins" you eat the chicken, you don't eat the fertilizer, you eat the plant

[8note]

If you feed mercury to the chicken as a chixk, then eat it as an adult, do you get the mercury?

[josephcsible]

Life can create, modify, and break chemical bonds, but can't create, modify, or destroy elements. Vitamins can get metabolized into other compounds but mercury stays mercury.

[robbedpeter]

This thread reads like a Monty Python sketch.

Because... fertilizer is mercury!

[thomasweiser]

The initial varieties into which the researchers introduced the FTO gene do not appear to be modern high-performance crops though. They didn't have yields that were already optimized by breeding, so they were easier to get impressive performance gains from. What FTO can achieve in the performance-optimized varieties that farmers grow today remains to be seen in further experiments.

Source: https://heise.de/-6180853 (German)

[criley2]

>Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not naturally grow this big (they'd kill themselves off in a few generations).

The undomesticated cultivars which evolved over time evolved to work in their niche. Potatoes largely come from the Andes in Peru/Chile, where the soil is thin, rocky and the terrain is very mountainous.

So potatoes evolved to develop in poor quality mountainous soil.

What we do as humans in domesticating these cultivars is important because we grow potatoes in very different situations, and we develop new potato cultivar that are adapted to our new environments.

So you see, it's not "an evolutionary reason plants don't grow big", it's "they evolved to fill a niche". When we change the niche, we change the pressures on them, and we create an opportunity for us to adapt the new plant even better.

I don't think there is as much worry about fertilizer as you think. When growing crops we are long past the time when you rely on natural fertilizer. Nearly every atom in those plants that isn't Carbon was added to the soil explicitly to grow that plant. So, to grow bigger potato, you will need more fertilizer.

With regards to climate, being able to grow more rice per acre is valuable because climate change will destroy breadbasket regions and likely reduce total land available to agriculture. Thus maintaining total output levels against decreasing land total will be important.

[DubiousPusher]

> Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not naturally grow this big (they'd kill themselves off in a few generations).

I don't know that this is solid reasoning. Certainly there is some limit eventually imposed by soil nutrient content but there could also be other reasons plants don't grow large fruit. A big one being that plants which grow their fruit to spread seeds reach efficiency when there is enough fruit to attract a spreading organism and no more.

In fact, basically all the plants we consume were already unusually large even before the green revolution. Humans had selected or hybridized the popular cultivars to an extreme already.

Again, I'm not saying it's impossible that this size of plant crosses some threshold for the soil, it's just not safe to assume it does either.

[lugged]

I really wonder sometimes how much is human selection on purpose and how much is human selection by simply finding the bigger crops easier to forage.

Guessing it's a bit of both.

[BiteCode_dev]

Not to mention we don't need it. We don't have a problem with producing food, but with distributing it.

The result here would be only more profit for some players, it's not going to help with world hunger. It's not going to take prices down (potatoes/rice price is not a blocker, but margin is nice). But it certainly will have a systemic cost that we will all share for a gain we will not.

Problems we do have but that they are making worst:

- poorer and poorer soils;

- big companies making it hard for small player to even exist;

- weak nutritional content of our food;

- food chain dependency on a few players;

[pharke]

If this process is simple to scale then we absolutely do need it. There is little chance of us fixing our food waste problem and increasing the efficiency of foreign aid in a timely manner. If more and larger crops could be grown on even more marginal land closer to where people desperately need the food then it is a solution we should use. I'm assuming that we'd aim for making these modified plants easily available to any farmer that wishes to grow them.

[BiteCode_dev]

> If more and larger crops could be grown on even more marginal land closer to where people desperately need the food then it is a solution we should use.

That's not going to happen. People that desperately need the food don't have a problem of not growing enough rice or potatoes because of the nature of the crop. It's not why they are hungry. It's any other reason, politics, weather, logistics, economics, you name it.

The only things this will do is allow some company to patent this, and then sell it under restricted conditions that will be unfavorable to those who are hungry.

Yield increase is not really a winner if you have no water, if you are at war, if you don't have money/land, or if corporations own your society.

We reached a state in humanity development where any improvement in agricultural yield for basic food is not only unnecessary, but will lead to more problems than solution.

[db48x]

I agree that patents on this are likely to stifle most of the advantages, but not that this would create more problems than solutions.

For one thing, it greatly changes the calculus of a Mars mission. A long–term Mars mission needs food, and growing that food on Mars seems like an obvious choice at first glance. But reliably growing food on Mars requires some fairly sophisticated technology: LED lighting, fine automatic control of atmospheric gasses (otherwise the O₂ from the plants would rapidly become a huge fire risk), similar for the water, refrigeration, and an extra large power plant to run it all. Up until now it looked like it would be cheaper to make regular shipments of food and water from Earth to Mars than it would be to make regular shipments of spare parts to keep all of that machinery working. A 50% increase in calories per square foot means that you only need 67% as much machinery, and therefore only 67% as many spare parts.

Even if this created no other benefits, which I find hard to believe, it would be worth it just for a successful Mars mission.

[BiteCode_dev]

Oh sure, I don't say to toss the tech on the trash. I'm just saying it won't solve world food current problems.

Although I'm skeptical for mars, bigger plants will deplete their substrate very fast, it could be a limiter.

[baybal2]

> Yield increase is not really a winner if you have no water, if you are at war, if you don't have money/land, or if corporations own your society.

Very much true. We eliminate the global hunger if we can eliminate food wastage in US supermarkets alone.

US supermarkets literally throw away enough food to feed all of famine struck countries, and probably even twice.

> We reached a state in humanity development where any improvement in agricultural yield for basic food is not only unnecessary, but will lead to more problems than solution.

I push for an idea of unification of the world under a single global democratic government.

The solution to the global problems, must be global.

[tehjoker]

Foreign aid isn't the problem. It's the problem of the market pushing out local production and making countries entirely dependent on imports from hypercapitalist countries. What countries need is industrial and technical support to be more self-sufficient with aid filling the gap rather than replacing their entire economy.

This means trade barriers, tech-transfer, and not bombing the shit out of places.

[baybal2]

> - weak nutritional content of our food;

Today we have the most nutritious foods in history. Don't make things up.

Today's potatoes are 4-6 times bigger than 19th century ones. Tomatoes 3-5 times. Most fruits, got just enormous.

Even "watery" leafy greens are actually getting more meatier, and starchy, and with more folates as everybody seem to be crazy about them.

[ben_w]

“The plants are bigger” isn’t evidence either pro or con, nutrition is about what’s in the plants rather than their raw mass — they might be more nutritious, or less, or even both at the same time because the balance of proteins, sugars, fats, vitamins, and minerals shifted.

[baybal2]

I doubt there is any difference

[postingawayonhn]

It would be great if we could produce the same amount of food on less land. Low quality land can be returned to nature.

[BiteCode_dev]

Unless human nature has changed last week, this is not going to be used to use less land, only to produce more on the same land.

We are already overproducing food, that doesn't prevent us to try to produce more.

[postingawayonhn]

There has to be demand for that produce. The market ultimately decideds how much food we need to grow.

Where I'm from (New Zealand) there are various schemes in place to encourage farmers to retire low productivity land and fence/plant buffer zones around waterways.

[necovek]

Humans are pretty good at creating excessive demand (it's what lots of marketing is about).

With food: "oh, this apple has scratch marks from insects, throw it in the bin" — this is just one of them. "Best before" dates in the past results in lot of untasted food go to waste too. Etc.

[BiteCode_dev]

Again, we are already producing more than the demand, we just don't distribute it to all the demand.

The market, at this point, has produced concentration of power and hasn't sold distribution problem.

Creating something that can produce even more is not gonna help.

[sjwalter]

The thing is, the nutrient content of the resulting food plays close to zero role in the creation and marketing of food. Consumers, broadly, shop on looks, and even the health-conscious consumers who eat raw, whole, organic foods might be eating nice-looking, nutrient-sparse water, and won't know anything's amiss. Health problems experienced due to this issue are unlikely to be identified as dietary issues by such consumers.

Whole Foods is stocked full of these nice-on-the-outside fruits and veggies, e.g., Driscoll's large, deep-red strawberries that lack any and all flavour and whose cross-section is mostly white, tasteless flesh.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

> Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not naturally grow this big (they'd kill themselves off in a few generations).

We're very far away from the wild versions of crops at this point. Evolutionary arguments here seem pretty odd to me, most of these crops have had huge selective pressure towards whatever people value, not necessarily what is good for them in isolation, without the pressure from people most crop yields would drop dramatically. They are much higher than what is optimal without selective pressure from people.

[maxFlow]

Agree. It's a complex topic, I think we should move away from "nature knows best" type of arguments. I would add, these selective pressures are not just from mankind, but potentialy from any other living thing. The "natural state" is more random than natural.

[tehjoker]

Yet monocultures of plants are still able to deplete soil. With the sharp reduction coming in fossil fuels (which help make fertilizer), we may be seeing the end of crops that can only grow on life support in the next few decades.

[ravenstine]

It makes me wonder if we aren't using human waste properly.

I'm being serious.

We don't absorb all of the nutrients and calories that we consume, partly because we are overnourished (our bodies might spontaneously combust if we utilized every single calorie we ate), so there's plenty of leftovers in our feces. Does it ever get recycled for use in agriculture in "developed" nations? (I can't think of a word for that which isn't now a faux pas)

[edflsafoiewq]

Yes it does.

> Biosolids are solid organic matter recovered from a sewage treatment process and used as fertilizer. [...] In the United States, as of 2013 about 55% of sewage solids are turned into fertilizer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosolids

[ravenstine]

I guess I was using the wrong keyword. That's pretty amazing!

[overcast]

Milorganite does just that! Comes from the Milwaukee sewage treatment.

[phonethrowaway]

humanure is a thing

[bluGill]

IT very much is. Just be careful, it is also full of harmful bacteria that you shouldn't eat. It is very useful fertilizer but needs to be properly cared for or you could poison whole cities.

[baybal2]

> It makes me wonder if we aren't using human waste properly. I'm being serious.

Such "Organic Farming" been taking lives of millions from communicable diseases every year in South Asia in China until the advent of synthetic fertilisers.

[searine]

> the nutrient content of the soil

All farmers of all types already have to replenish the nutrient content, specifically NPK, because they are depleted by farming. This has always been true. There is almost an unlimited amount of N in the atmosphere. P and K are currently mined, but many farmers are getting more efficient at using manure which are renewable resources for these. Micronutrients are small enough that it's almost a non-issue. In other words, there is no nutrient crisis for farming.

>Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not naturally grow this big (they'd kill themselves off in a few generations).

This is teleological thinking. Don't add reason to evolution. There are many very very large plants that have done well. There are many small plants that do well. Their survival strategy all depends on the resources and stresses in the environment.

In the case of a domesticated plant, there really is no limit because humans can provide all the necessary resources. It is just a matter of pushing the plants genetics towards higher yield, which is something we have done for thousands of years.

>but this implies we'd move further away from organic farming

Organic farming is a marketing term to appeal to upper class shoppers. It simply trades inputs. It trades technology for higher labor costs to create a similar product.

>Or, it would make us move to other currently unexploited land, thus worsening the global situation we are in.

Why would increasing the yield of current farmland cause people to have to create more? Higher yield means doing more with less.

>I was never under the impression that any part of human population is starving

The solution to hunger isn't to make food more expensive by limiting our ability to produce. One of the greatest things America ever did was make food cheap. It led to the obesity epidemic, but I'd rather have fat people than hungry people. The way forward is to continue to use all the technology we have to increase farming efficiency

[dekhn]

Generally, the longest term productive areas continually replenish the soil with nutrients due to upstream/uphill prior volcanic activity. So, for example, the Willamette Valley will probably be fertile longer than the center of the US.

[ArchD]

If the concern is minerals, aren't there rocks in the soil that as they get broken down over time will release minerals?

As for non-mineral things like nitrogen, isn't the soil supposed to have an ecosystem that replenishes these things? In healthy soil, there are bacteria, fungus, earthworms, ants etc to make the soil conducive for plant growth.

Nature doesn't add artificial chemicals for fertilizer yet left to its own devices, plants thrive in natural soil. The activity of growing plants per se doesn't deplete soil. Maybe it's the use of pesticides and herbicides that kills the soil by killing the things living in it.

[bluGill]

> As for non-mineral things like nitrogen, isn't the soil supposed to have an ecosystem that replenishes these things?

Iowa farmers grow corn for money, and Soybeans to replenish the nitrogen. They have discovered enough uses for the "waste" soybeans that sometimes it is worth more than corn, but the original reason soybeans were planted was for the cheap nitrogen.

[Retric]

In nature biomass ends up in roughly the same places so this balances out, with crops farmers are removing significant biomass from farmland. The use of fertilizer is in part a consequence of specific plants depleting soil.

Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen which represents the bulk of organic mater is available from air and water, but phosphorus for example gets depleted. Nitrogen fertilizer is something of a special case as extracting it from the atmosphere takes a lot of energy. However, nitrogen fixing bacteria will return it to soil if given time to do so.

The specifics of course get more complicated, sod for example is physically removing layers of soil.

[UncleOxidant]

> While we fertilize the soil

For the most part farmers only add 3 macro nutrients when they fertilize: N,P,K. As you suggest there are many micro nutrients that are likely being depleted because they're not being replaced.

[bluGill]

Farmers are starting to put in Sulfur. It isn't common, and not a lot is needed, but some farmers need to. As acid rain goes goes down more and more will. (I'm always amused to see there is a downside of eliminating acid rain - still worth doing)

[furstenheim]

> There's an evolutionary reason why plants do not naturally grow this big.

That could be said of current crops. They are the result of years of artificial selection

[foolinaround]

I agree with you in general... yes, waste and distribution should be high in focus... but this would also help?

But could we then grow crops in concentrated places without need for deforestation?

We may let some of the fields lay fallow for a couple of years, and alternate?

Could we transport less because local farms produce more, bringing in carbon and cost savings?

[lugged]

No dig market gardens and jadam techniques are spreading. I'm not really that worried about stuff like this.

[JTbane]

>I wonder more about the nutrient content of the soil after a few years of such products.

Sadly I don't think anyone cares about that. You can encourage the use of organic fertilizers all you want and they will still dump unsustainable mined phosphates on the fields

[wombat-man]

well, if we're growing more consumable biomass per acre or whatever, we can do something else with land we would have otherwise dedicated to producing the same amount of potatoes.

Not an expert, but read the Omnivore's dilemma which kinda runs through how modern farming works on a high level. Basically you figure out what the chemical building blocks are for what you're trying to grow, and fertilize the soil with that. The plant then pulls that out to actually construct the corn or whatever it is you're trying to grow.

Of course it might not be as delicious and nutritious as what you might be able to grow at home or at a well managed organic farm, but the goal is quantity here.

[eloff]

Or a glass half full way to look at this is 50% more yield means less land area needed to produce the same amount of food. Typically also longer roots improve soil quality. There are always tradeoffs, but this looks amazingly positive.

[kingkawn]

There are many crops that have been modified over time to be unsustainable without human intervention. Most grains, tomato cages, etc. as long as we know what the new needs are we can supplement and adjust.

[grey-area]

No cultivated species is the result of natural selection, they have been selected for centuries, sometimes millennia, by humans for the things we value.

For the most extreme example see seedless grapes.

[thret]

Peas famously have been cultivated from a single mutation that does not burst when ripe. They can't reproduce without human intervention.

[quakeguy]

Even when birds or small mammals eat and digest the seeds?

[bluGill]

Peas are the seeds.

There are some plans that need an animal to digest the seed covering, but not all plants have that as part of their reproduction cycle. (I'm not sure what pea's natural cycle was)

[quakeguy]

Thank you for clarifying this.

[thret]

To be clear my knowledge of this topic is limited to that found in 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond. I haven't checked his sources.