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.

        • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          10 days ago

          Oh sure, but I bet you . . . drive a car!?! Yyeeahh! So let’s all remember to thank those wonderful oil gas and coal giants who make our wonderful lifes so wonderful and totally didn’t kill the planet Chinese hoax ok thanks.

  • LustyArgonian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Gee, spoke about heavy metals being deposited in our fields via exhaust and tractor tires a while ago and was called stupid. It’s not stupid, tractors are bad for soil and should be replaced with drones.

    • shottymcb@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      Wow, I didn’t realize drones had gotten powerful enough to plow, seed, and harvest. That’s amazing, do you have any links to plowing drones? Sounds cool.

      • LustyArgonian@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        The entire point is to not plow ever. It’s bad to penetrate the soil.

        We have drones that can farm. I’m not going to list them all because it’s clear you lack any foundational knowledge and just need a summary, so here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_drone

        My own family uses drones in farming here in the US. Not for everything, yet, but gee, if our government would fund it, it would happen immediately. Idk how this is surprising.

      • FireRetardant@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        Suburban sprawl isn’t really profitable either, our system is flawed to let developers take the profits while the municipality cannot afford to maintain the neighborhood a few years down the line.

      • vikingr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 days 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
      0·
      9 days 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
        0·
        9 days ago

        Yes, it’s a riff on how everything is the millennials’ fault in the news the past decade or so.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Not many people have mentioned this so I guess I’ll bring it up:

    The two major factors negatively impacting sustainability of agriculture are

    • Ammonia (NH3) is mined as a way to enrich agriculture with Protein, more specifically the ammonia bonds with nitrogen allowing plant development, but it’s not exactly infinite. Synthetic Ammonia can be produced but is extremely emission heavy as it is often a petrochemical byproduct with the vast majority of Hydrogen (H) is produced from fossil fuels refining.

    • Modern Invasive Pests/Disease are commonly spread across continents. Lack of plant biodiversity leads to viral outbreaks called “blights” which can lower or even wipe out entire regions of crops. Invasive species most notably insects can plague regions for years without any natural predators. Globalization and Industrialization have created these hurdles, but the yield of such practices are absolutely necessary to feed the current human population.

    There are no solutions except reducing the human population. Which isn’t going to happen, because people are stupid animals and the people we’ve empowered all over the world are morons who cannot read the writing on the wall.

    • LustyArgonian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      This isn’t even true. The carrying capacity of earth for people hasn’t been met. We can absolutely engineer things to be both sustainable and livable at current populations. Rhetoric that advises we “depopulate” is borderline neo-fascism, the same stuff Christians say to bring on the apocalypse.

      James Cassidy at Oregon State University has his SOIL lecture series on YouTube. We have many ways to repair our soil and to improve farming. Killing people/ “depopulating” isn’t one of them. Shame on you.

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        I’m saying we need to have less kids and you’re saying that belief is christofascism, lmao

        Despite many noteworthy christofascists supporting population growth such as Elon Musk.

        Have fun engineering an entirely new way to supply food for over 7 Billion people that nobody has ever tried before. I look forward to your results. It’s a good thing you were taught by the world’s greatest minds over on fucking YouTube.

        • LustyArgonian@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          8 days ago

          Read again, he’s a soil scientist and professor at OSU that made his lecture available for free on YouTube.

          You didn’t say “less kids,” you said smaller population.

          And I can see how much of an appetite you have for learning things that aren’t “kill kill death death,” so yeah. Won’t waste more of my time explaining. You can’t even be bothered to understand that professors can post lectures online.

          • finitebanjo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            8 days ago

            And you, after watching a couple of lessons on YouTube, are here lecturing me despite knowing absolutely nothing of my qualifications. I retract nothing.

            “kill kill death death,”

            You’re the first person to mention killing or death in this entire thread.

    • bean@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

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

    • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netEnglish
      0·
      10 days 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.

      • Omgboom@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        conventional ag

        Industrial farming is incredibly harmful to the soil. There are other methods that are far less harmful and can actually be beneficial to soil health, the problem is they don’t scale well.

        There is a great YouTube channel called No-Till Growers that really goes into some cool farming methods that are much less destructive

        https://youtube.com/watch?v=hNyu4_RWGZo

      • rayyy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        conventional Ag is extremely tough on soils

        No shit. My daughter and husband bought a house built on the corner of a field in Ohio that was farmed for years. You couldn’t get a shovel into the ground there because it was like cement.

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 days 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.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    staples like bread, vegetables, and meat.

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