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HelixDab2@lemm.ee 2 days agofertiliser is applied in tightly controlled doses based on aerial analysis
Gotta say, this should be a huge red flag for everyone. Soil quality is declining sharply, and fertilizers simply aren’t making up the difference. Switching to robots farming will almost certainly accelerate this.
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Under solutions, there, is written “compost” and “animal manure”. That’s fertiliser. Import-dependent agriculture is a whole another topic and I didn’t want to get into it, but long story short, no matter how good and natural your soil management is you can’t expect to export nutrients all the time and not develop a shortage. You can pull nitrogen out of the air, that’s nice, but you can’t do that with phosphate and minerals in general. Good news is that good water treatment plants will pull phosphate out of the waste water.
HelixDab2@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Unfortunately most commercial farms aren’t putting in what they’re taking out, even with the industrial fertilizers. Most of the industrial fertilizers are just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphates, often as a liquid. You are absolutely right that you can’t take and never return; that’s why in pre-industrial revolution times, people would rotate fields between crops, and lying fallow/being used for grazing (where sheep, cattle, etc. were leaving free fertilizer) You also ended up with fewer years where all your crops got wiped out by a single pest, because you weren’t farming just one thing. Efficiency in farming–esp. monoculture–is great for profits, not so great for the land itself.
Eh. High levels of phosphates end up running off fields into waterways, and then you get things like algae blooms. Waste water treatment plants will clean up runoff that goes into the sewers and storm drains, but it’s not really cleaning up entire rivers. IIRC, that used to be a much more significant problem; I remember water in rivers near where I grew up–which was all surrounded by farms–often had white, sludgy scum anywhere that the current was forming eddies. If I remember correctly the high levels of that white shit was due to worse regulations governing agricultural run-off.
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Yep systems that could automatically dose the fertiliser were not yet in widespread use. Farmers don’t want to over-fertilise for the simple reason that fertiliser costs money but before those systems were available it was all too easy to say “fuck it I’ll drown the field so that there’s enough everywhere”.
Not rotating crops seems to be a US thing, farmers over here never stopped doing that. There’s also EU-wide laws about having to either let land fall fallow, or plant cover crops or nitrogen fixers. You can, in principle, plant your nitrogen fixers year after year on one field and your cash crops on another, but only if you’re a complete idiot.