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US Pays Farmers Billions To Save The Soil. But It's Blowing Away (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares an NPR report: Soil has been blowing away from the Great Plains ever since farmers first plowed up the prairie. It reached crisis levels during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when windblown soil turned day into night. In recent years, dust storms have returned, driven mainly by drought. But Shook -- and others -- say farmers are making the problem worse by taking land where grass used to grow and plowing it up, exposing vulnerable soil. This is where federal policy enters the picture. Most of that grassland was there in the first place because of a taxpayer-funded program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture rents land from farmers across the country and pays them to grow grass, trees and wildflowers in order to protect the soil and also provide habitat for wildlife. It's called the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP. Ten years ago, there was more land in the CRP than in the entire state of New York. In North Dakota, CRP land covered 5,000 square miles. But CRP agreements only last 10 years, and when farming got more profitable about a decade ago, farmers in North Dakota pulled more than half of that land out of the CRP to grow crops like corn and soybeans. Across the country, farmers decided not to re-enroll 15.8 million acres of farmland in the CRP when those contracts expired between 2007 and 2014.
Use the land to grow weed. You don't really have to plow it.
Then, some big multinational company will buy the land, and do the same thing, except on a larger scale.
Without the tax incentives, farmers will find something else grow.
. . . "grass", ya know, like the type that goes into "funny" cigarettes.
The farmers will make enough money with that, and won't need any taxpayer money.
Hey, and then the government can "tax the grass", and actually make money on the scheme.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Tilth is farmers' fault. There are zero-tilth agricultural methods. Clearing is suppliers' fault. They effectively force farmers to clear woods around their property that would slow winds because it also harbors animals that might shit on the lettuce, or what have you. Instead of doing due diligence and actually inspecting produce, they just want to be able to handle it like it's made of plastic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Cant we farm without the soil blowing away
Yes we can. The trick is to stop plowing. No-till is cheaper, less labor intensive, more profitable, and better for the soil. It also results in more carbon retained in the soil as humus. It is widely used, and adoption is growing.
"Family farms" and corporate-owned farms are the same according to that report, so long as a majority shareholder does some work or has a relative that does some work on the farm.
By that measure, nearly every multinational corporation is a family business.
You know fully well what people mean when they say "Family-farm" yet chose to ignore the contents of the report for a severely lacking headline summary that reinforces your biases. At least you could have read the report you linked to which shows that your claim, using terms as they are expected, is wrong.
Last year I visited a research farm near UC Davis. The fields were no-till, and rather than spraying the entire field with glyphosate, the used a targeted applicator and an optical sensor to recognize the weeds and put the herbicide directly onto the leaves. No glyphosate was wasted by spraying it onto the soil or the crop. This cut the need for herbicide by 95%, reducing the cost and the environmental impact. They hope to make the applicator so accurate that it can even be used with crops that have no glyphosate tolerance, since none of it will touch them.
In a few years, this technology will be common, and plowshares will be melted down to make, well, maybe swords or something.