@compost
The problem is not only loss of topsoil.
Some examples:
we hardly had any plums nor cherries the last couple of years. Why? When the trees are in full blossom a week of rain ruins everything (+ the fact that there are no bees with cold rainy weather anyway)
Onions bolt when temperatures fluctuate heavily. On top of that wetter springs make them rot away. Same kind of story for garlic. (professional growers in my region complain about this lot!)
The best bet for annuals is nowadays to sow as many times as possible a couple of weeks apart and hope that some batches will succeed.
The whole climate change problem related to food production is soooo much more complex and diverse than what most people realise.
It's not without reasons that I'm very pessimistic about the future.
@crash_course@compost In South Carolina for the last 5+ years, peaches have been blooming early (late January), and there's a decent chance of one more hard freeze after they bloom. Near total crop failures a couple of those years.
Our springs have gotten so soggy here the last few years, and it appears this is a long term change that's not going away, that I'm changing our tilled area over to all raised beds made with landscape blocks. I'm hoping this will solve several problems, including being able to greatly extend the growing season via thermal mass and plastic covers. But it's a drop in the bucket. In a suburban yard, we can't feed ourselves entirely. Our fruit trees have endured days on end of rain and late freezes to the point of uselessness for most of them. We did get some apples and pears. And while some neighbors also garden, nobody is taking the threat of crop failures seriously. They just can't believe it can happen in America.
The food shortages are going to be here way sooner than people realize, but they're under so much stress from other things they can't deal with it, I guess.
@compost
I've been thinking a lot lately about the family farm. 100 acres that have sat fallow since the 70s when my great grandma couldn't manage it any more. One of my older cousins holds the title and lives there since retirement but other than managing the timber isn't doing anything with it. I've half a mind to talk to him and see if we can organize some of the extended family to put some of it under cultivation again. 6a zone, 61 plant hardiness.
Home composting (& home growing) are both useful & important supplements, but for city dwellers especially, that's never going to be more than a supplement.
What curdles my milk is that we had a viable municiple composting system running for...I dunno, then, fifteen years that I know about? >
But people got so lazy about sorting their waste (in an area renowned for its env activism & innovation, ffs) that the composting just flat banned anything but food scraps and plant cuttings. Meaning all that work to train people to frex buy compostible disposable plates & whatnot—poof—wasted.
Worse, any loads that come in with more than a certain very low level of contamination get rerouted to the landfill. >
Which I'm sadly confident is a VERY high percentage.
Which is additionally depressing/infuriating, because this would to some not-small way to addressing the topsoil problems. (Obviously there are other major factors in play, but still.)
The problem really needs to be addressed on the production side. >
(Ask me about my idea for a product underwriting system and associated regulation that results in all products having "Nutrition Facts" equivalent labels laying out the carbon footprint of the product (including packaging & transport)'s production chain, whether its inputs are extracted, recycled, or upcycled, and where the matter of which it is comprised winds up at the end of its service life.)
This is a realm in which locality can have a mitigating effect, however. When the new restrictions came into effect, I was suddenly faced with the prospect of landfilling a third of the stuff that comes out of the guinea pig's cages (leaving aside the absolute pointlessness of using our condo complex's curbside because people apparently can't see the difference between the words "Compostables", "Recycling," & "Trash"). >
(Who me, angry & bitter why do you ask?). I did some desperate internet searching, and for a miracle, found the outfit Sharewaste.com, which aims to hook people who have "waste" they need to offload with people who can actually use that waste. (I'm not sure if they act only in the compost realm; I haven't thought to check.) >
Market gardeners like Jean-Martin Fortier have been made fun of most of their lives because they produce a massive amount of veggies on less than an acre. Simply because of a size competition standard where his neighbors farmed a lot more.
The truth is we can grow a lot of food with regenerative techniques. It is possible with compost to build quickly a topsoil that was not here before.
We have lost ourselves in chemical agriculture, we need to go back to biological agriculture.
@compost I agree with everything you say, and I religiously kept a compost bin for the 14 years that I had a tiny garden, but that area was at best 1% of an acre, and I used it to grow bee and butterfly friendly flowers.
That might be true, but for many, is not an option. And it is very annoying that so many farmers have been so resistant for so long to the need to take climate change seriously, given the consequences of so many unsustainable farming practices.
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