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To: TimSkalaBim
I mean, after several millennia, hasn’t agriculture pretty much established that it is “regenerative” and “sustainable” (to use that other annoying term)??

It's been 7,000 years since the dawn of agriculture in Fayum, Egypt and the answer is no. We really are depleting our soils of minerals, worldwide. Humans really haven't made an industry of rebuilding soils in detail, although it is happening in bits and pieces within competitive limits, but there are constraining limits to how we are going about it. You should see the scale of phosphate mining in North Africa (yes, the source is infested with globalist -think, but I don't have time right now to find a better one for you).

When one considers a farming community as operating within a chemical control boundary looking only at inputs and outputs, unless those minerals stay there feeding only that local community (recycling everything in poop), OR unless those minerals are mined somewhere and imported to restore them to soils, pretending that we can "regenerate" soils within a particular site is plainly silly. This is to say nothing of microbial organic matter, which IS regenerable, particularly with the proper use of animals.

Eventually, the minerals wind up washed out to sea. Underwater mining isn't cheap and does have its drawbacks we'll need to figure out how to mitigate. That's just reality.

28 posted on 01/05/2025 5:38:48 AM PST by Carry_Okie (The tree of liberty needs a rope.)
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To: Carry_Okie

“We really are depleting our soils of minerals, worldwide.”


That’s a myth.
99.999% of the biomass from agriculture is made of carbon and nitrogen taken from... the atmosphere, not from the soil. The rest of minerals, even if washed to the sea because of the human food chain, (a wild and unsubstantiated claim since the water cycle is the biggest mineral washing machine that could ever exist) is more than compensated by mineral deposition from wind erosion. The remains of every civilisation on earth are always found under several feet of soil, proof positive that the soils are completed, not depleted.

Ask the propagandists of the myth to cite which mineral is “depleted” and all they can come up is one or two dubious examples of trace minerals like selenium, based on anecdotal evidence.
And of course, they sweep under the rug any massive and incontrovertible evidence that contradicts their narrative, such as the yields increase year after year in all countries with modern and highly intensive agriculture while the use of fertilizers tend to DEcrease! In Europe for example, phosphorus fertilizer use per hectare has been divided by more than 3 (!) over the last 50 years, yet yields per hectare have more than doubled. The same trends are in the US and elsewhere. How do you explain this if the soils were depleted? Of course, you can’t, if you are a rational person.


76 posted on 01/05/2025 8:34:43 AM PST by miniTAX
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