Depleted soil leads to reduced yields, forcing farmers to rely on fertilizers that raise food production costs, consumer prices.

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.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    2 hours ago

    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.

    • Lag@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 hour ago

      And overall we may just need to accept some immediate productivity loss in order to ensure long term survival.

      I see a massive issue in this plan.

  • RBWells@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    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.

  • The_v@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    5 hours ago

    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.

    • TheFriar@lemm.eeEnglish
      10·
      3 hours ago

      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.

      • The_v@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        3 hours ago

        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.

    • lud@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      3 hours ago

      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.

      • The_v@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 hours ago

        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.

        • lud@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          3 hours ago

          Irrigated? That seems incredibly water intensive.

          FYI The equipment and technology already exist to do it as well.

          How do you farm crops like wheat and corn that way?

          • The_v@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 hour ago

            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.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    23·
    6 hours ago

    staples like bread, vegetables, and meat.

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

  • FinishingDutch@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    6 hours ago

    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.

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      We’re going to top out around 12 billion according to demographers. And this is not some theory. Most developed countries are already seeing slowing birth rates and in cases like Japan it’s quite far along.

      Given how inefficient and self-destructive most of our farming is, I’m quite optimistic that it’s possible to support 12 billion sustainably. I don’t like this talk of “too many people” because it leads us to generally devalue people. If we’re not actively planning for who to remove first then we’re at least shrugging when thousands die in a disaster.

      We don’t have to cheapen ourselves this way. We just have to live and work smarter.

    • OutlierBlue@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      5 hours ago

      Either we reduce our population in a controlled way, or nature is going to do it in a brutal one through famine, drought, and disease.

      • kautau@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        6 hours ago

        Or buy all the useless crap being consistently pumped out in virtually every industry

  • vikingr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    50·
    8 hours ago

    “Here’s how the millennials’ love of vegetables is destroying the planet”

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Not everything is class and inter generational warfare. This has been building for centuries. The Sumerians compromised their soil and this eventually erased them.

      • vikingr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        5 hours ago

        “Here’s why feudalism is the remedy for selfish, lazy millennials.”

        This is gonna happen, I guarantee it 😂.

        This damn country.

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Soil depletion killed the Sumerians. It’s older than billionaires. If we attribute every single problem to class inequality, eventually we’re going to be wrong, because there are other problems in the world. If you think billionaires have power over us, nature is vastly more powerful.

    • bean@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      7 hours ago

      Right?? My first thought was, another excuse to raise prices and shrinkflate even more. Because that’s the solution! 🤬

    • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netEnglish
      36·
      9 hours ago

      It’s no joke: conventional Ag is extremely tough on soils, and depletes soil organic matter, and reduces topsoil thickness though ploughing. Add on top of that contamination from various sources (not just Ag) and the picture is bleak.