Notices by Jon (spelled the cool way) (jonricha@hoosier.social)

@feld @mekkaokereke @donaldball It’s dumb that we lost our best topsoil, but Midwestern soil is still plenty good enough to grow food. Conventional agriculture is optimized to produce maximum profit per dollar input. We can produce massively more food per acre of land with other methods and other crops, and we can still do it in fairly poor soil, if each farmer is working a few acres rather than tens of thousands.

@donaldball @feld @mekkaokereke The Amish for example were getting good crops out of shit soil three centuries ago in France, with careful management. Plenty of other people groups have already solved this problem too, for various climate and soil types. Our economic system just isn’t set up to encourage it. It encouraged global commodity agriculture instead.

@donaldball @feld @mekkaokereke I’m not up on the technology you describe but I do know some thing about farming, and what you’re saying sounds pretty Silicon Valley fever dream to me. We don’t need new technologies to make our agriculture sustainable. We’ve had the necessary technologies for several centuries, we just don’t have the economic incentives to use them as global capitalism works.

@feld @donaldball @mekkaokereke We have a perfectly good planet with soil in which plants just naturally grow, you know? If we can find the collective will to use it sensibly, we don’t need giant hydroponic warehouses to grow our food, and if we can’t find that collective will, I doubt that there’s any technology that will save our asses.

@mekkaokereke @feld I don’t think the farmers are the villains here. They’re trying to keep their eyeballs above the waterline by growing whatever will pay the bills. Bad policy didn’t “bail the farmers out” from poor decisions; it drove, indeed pretty much forced, the decisions.