Needlenose

Depleted versus rich topsoil

There have been a series of interesting articles recently regarding the future of agriculture, and it’s not what you’d think.  In fact some future trends seem rather ancient.

First let’s start with the key problem.  Today’s methods, let’s call them 2.0, aren’t sustainable.  Current methods cause major erosion and lead to loss of topsoil and exhaustion of the land.  And topsoil recovery is a slow process, growing maybe as fast as 3cm/year in wet conditions and significantly more slowly in arid conditions.

Key nutrients are lost as well due to our ‘flooding’ irrigation techniques combined with radically modified urban and suburban land use that speeds runoff water along with key nutrients towards the ocean, rather than capturing them on land.  One such ingredient is phosphorus.  Worried about ‘peak oil?”  Well you can live without oil, but the food we eat needs phosphorus, and scientists are already talking about hitting peak phosphorus in 25-75 years unless we take steps to recapture it.

Potassium, another key ingredient, is a bit more plentiful but current irrigation practices leach that from soil as well.  Ironically land’s loss is the ocean’s loss as well, as injecting large amounts of these plant nutrients leads to fish-killing algal blooms – in large amounts these are awful pollutants.

So where does agriculture need to go?  Back to the Future.  One interesting trend is ‘no-till’ agriculture.  Before there was tilling, our distant proto-urban ancestors used a pointed stick to dig a hole in the ground to plant a seed.  The benefit here is that if you don’t breakup the sod, you don’t get erosion and you don’t lose most of your key nutrients to runoff.  Read the linked article, there is a bit more tech (and less effort) involved in today’s no-till than poking holes in the ground with a pointy-stick.

The other trend, while also ‘old school’ requires a bit more high tech to achieve reasonably high yields – moving towards perennial crops and away from annual crops.  Most of our current foodstuffs are annuals as is all our cereals.  However, some cereals have perennial variants that scientists are breeding or tinkering with (thus the high tech), to bring yields up to levels closer to annual crops.

This is a complementary trend to the no-till as growing a perennial is essentially a no-till operation.  It has the added benefit though of enhancing soil nutrients throw nitrogen-fixing and further stabilizing the topsoil through complicated root structures.

You know as a kid I believed the sci-fi depictions of us eating goo from tubes and robots tending hydroponic farms, but with peak oil, peak phosphorus and all the other problems that agriculture and industry 2.0 have left us with, I’m figuring the farms of the future would be far more familiar to a time-traveling denizen of Çatal Höyük than a U.S. farm from the 1960s.

Juan Cole discusses some of the fall-out from the latest blast in Mess-o-potamia.  Given that the blast wounded some members of the Iraqi parliament, Hadi al-Ameri, a member of parliament rightly asks:

“We’ve heard a lot of brouhaha about successes on the security front,” he said. “Where are these successes?”

Good question.  Seems like things are heading South again, with increasingly brazen attacks reminiscent of the Groundhog Days of ’04 and ’05.

In the same post, Juan Cole discusses how affairs between the Kurds and the rest of Iraq are heating up around the flashpoint Kirkuk.  Those of you who aren’t afflicted with American Amnesia might remember how we called Kirkuk out as a flashpoint way back when, and how the Kurds have been continuously working to reclaim demographics and control on the ground in this oil-rich city.

I guess with Obama shifting his focus on our other failing occupation, and with our gradual troop removal the Petreus plan to stabilize the Iraqi Civil War is slowly and painfully coming off, like a band-aid on a hairy leg.

Mythbusters use golfball effect to boost fuel efficiency

Every time Congress considers boosting vehicle fuel efficiency via CAFE standards, the auto industry lobbyists descend on the Capitol to bleat about how higher mileage targets will bankrupt the industry.

I was watching a recent episode of Mythbusters where they ‘dimpled’ a car to see if the dimples would improve the laminar flow and reduce drag like they do on a golfball.

In spite of adding 800 lbs to the weight of the pictured sedan (car was coated in clay rather than denting the metal to get dimples), they were able to increase cruising fuel efficiency 11% !!  Could you imagine what the auto industry could achieve by throwing some skilled engineers and designers on this?   Hell, if they’d just produce cars with an actual streamlined design (rather than what people think is streamlined), they’d greatly increase fuel efficiency.

Scientists are beginning to suspect that world reptile populations could be as threatened as those of amphibians - uncertainty due to lack of tracking.  Of course it is bad, with all orders disappearing across the board.  And the news comes with the inevitable tag line:

“…extinction rates of animal species are much higher than had been predicted only a few years ago.”

President Obama and Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki at the White House yesterday (via the Associated Press).