Comment by zeckalpha
13 hours ago
How much fertilizer does the Iowan farmer need to add to their field to achieve that? How many years can they maintain that yield without eroding the soil?
13 hours ago
How much fertilizer does the Iowan farmer need to add to their field to achieve that? How many years can they maintain that yield without eroding the soil?
Who cares? Fertilizer is nitrogen that literally comes out of the air. Erosion is vastly overstated by permaculture enthusiasts and can be mitigated vy changes to tillage and irrigation. Erosion in the Midwest clocks in at about 0.04 mm per year, but there's plenty of new soil deposition around the Mississippi. It's a manageable issue.
this is extremely wrong, but anyway back to my day because there is just too much wrong in this to respond to each wrong phrase
Extremely wrong how? There's a great an well sourced section in Vaclav Smil's How to Feed the World about this very topic. I also cited a specific erosion figure. But I guess that doesn't matter.
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How many years can they maintain that without petroleum inputs?
Ammonia can be generated through electrolysis as feed-stock for Haber-Bosch to get nitrogen, so literally forever. The reason we use petroleum is because it's currently cheaper than solar PV electrolysis.