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.
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.
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.
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.