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In a discovery that has repercussions for everything from domestic agricultural policy to global food security and the plans to mitigate climate change, researchers at the University of Massachusetts recently announced that the rate of soil erosion in the Midwestern US is 10 to 1,000 times greater than pre-agricultural erosion rates. These newly discovered pre-agricultural rates, which reflect the rate at which soils form, are orders of magnitude lower than the upper allowable limit of erosion set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The study, which appears in the journal Geology, makes use of a rare element, beryllium-10, or 10Be, that occurs when stars in the Milky Way explode and send high-energy particles, called cosmic rays, rocketing toward Earth. When this galactic shrapnel slams into the Earth's crust, it splits oxygen in the soil apart, leaving tiny trace amounts of 10Be, which can be used to precisely determine average erosion rates over the span of thousands to millions of years.
[...] The numbers are not encouraging. "Our median pre-agricultural erosion rate across all the sites we sampled is 0.04 mm per year," says Larsen. Any modern-day erosion rate higher than that number means that soil is disappearing faster than it is accumulating.
Unfortunately, the USDA's current limit for erosion is 1 mm per year—twenty-five times greater than the average rate Larsen's team found. And some sites are experiencing far greater erosion, disappearing at 1,000 times the natural rate. This means that the USDA's current guidelines will inevitably lead to rapid loss of topsoil.
[...] Yet, there's no reason to despair. "There are agricultural practices, such as no-till farming, that we know how to do and we know greatly reduce erosion," says Quarrier. "The key is to reduce our current erosion rates to natural levels," adds Larsen.
Journal Reference:
Caroline L. Quarrier, Jeffrey S. Kwang, Brendon J. Quirk, et al.; Pre-agricultural soil erosion rates in the midwestern United States. Geology 2022;; 51 (1): 44–48. doi: https://doi.org/10.1130/G50667.1
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 23 2023, @02:34AM (4 children)
Economic pressure depends on your net costs. For example, if I take farmland I own and just leave it fallow, the only costs I have are taxes and opportunity costs. If I use a slightly less cost effective method, I'm operating at a small loss compared to the norm. Someone like Gates, who starts with a lot of assets, can afford a lot of this sort of economic pressure for a long time. Sure, without something providing replacement cash flow (that is, opposite economic pressure) he could eventually run out, but I think it'd be at least decades and that's assuming he doesn't have cash flow to keep going.
Now, if he were shorting Bitcoin or Microsoft, that could generate a lot more economic pressure in the short term since the potential forced-play liabilities can swamp even Gates's level of assets.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 23 2023, @02:51AM (3 children)
>Someone like Gates, who starts with a lot of assets, can afford a lot of this sort of economic pressure for a long time.
Depends on how leveraged those investments are, and how many other, different things Melinda wants to do in the meantime.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 23 2023, @07:01AM (2 children)
Indeed. I can't read minds or accounting books from this far away, but it strikes me that if Gates is snapping up farmland for some tree hugging reason, it's probably not going to make sense to borrow a lot of money for it. Long term goals do terribly when they're highly leveraged.
Further, I'm reading that he owns merely 240k acres [theguardian.com] of farmland. If that genuinely makes him the owner of the most privately owned farmland, then nobody really is trying - since there is over 900 million acres [usda.gov] of farmland in the US!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 23 2023, @10:58AM (1 child)
You go ahead and live the idealized Billionaire's fantasy out in your mind. The very wealthy people I have known are mostly leveraged in their investments, perhaps not to risky levels, but enough to not allow them to let income producing property stand idle.
But, yeah, 240,000 acres probably isn't even $1B, in investment, he _could_ do whatever he wants with that, but it's a tiny slice of what is out there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 23 2023, @03:22PM
Would that include Bill? Because otherwise, you don't have relevant knowledge here.
My linked story confirms that (the land was valued at $690 million at the time of the story). My suspicion is that we'll find that something like ADM (Archer Daniels Midland Co), a huge agricultural products firm are probably the number one owner of private agricultural land, and even they probably don't hold a candle to federal owned land.