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When Benson Wanjala started farming in his western Kenya village two and a half decades ago, his 10-acre farm could produce a bountiful harvest of 200 bags of maize. That has dwindled to 30.
Step 1 might be to not plant the same crop on the same land for two and a half decades straight.
Years ago I went to Kenya and Tanzania to asses some fields for trials of new cultivars my group was developing. There were a lot of issues with people seeing a yearly decrease in crop yield. But the major issue was actually the lack of crop rotation causing a buildup of disease in the soil which was weakening the plants each year.
I don't know this guy or his field. And, not carefully fertilizing fields can cause root burn for sure. But poor agricultural yield in Africa is definitely impacted by poor crop rotation.
Wasn't farming invented in Africa? Or at least the nearby Middle East. This has been a known issue for years.
I bet it's an issue with farmers needing money now, because of low crop prices. Crop prices are cyclical, so hopefully it works itself out without too much economic damage.
Soccer was invented in England. How's that going for them?
It would have been developed by humans all around the world at the same time. Technology and knowledge weren't the limiting factor--humans have always known that you can toss some seeds in the soil and a plant will come out. What was lacking was the climate--the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago and only after that was massive cultivation possible. It was after that where you see settlements and eventually cities appear.
It's more complex than this, but it's related to climatic change.
First, we're still in the ice age. We're just in an interglacial period.
During the glaciation, humans mainly hunted a few big game. It was an inhospitable environment.
When the glaciation ended, the climate became more stable, warmer, more clement. Rivers rised and became calmer, as the sea level rose.
Humans started diversifying and broadening what they ate. They collected much more plants, hunted more animal species, notably small game, fished much more. It was the mesolithic.
In zones that were particularly abundant in resources, probably at the edges of ecozones, it became possible and interesting to settle down somewhat, and defend this territory against outsiders. Owning resources allowed to invest time and labor into making things more productive. Domestication was part of that.
Not all regions are suitable, or have sufficient domesticable species. Some places took much longer than others to really get farming going, and most never did, until domesticates arrived there from somewhere else.
Hmm, it seemed to be a problem with subsistence crops too. We were working on black rot resistance in sukuma wiki which isn't a cash crop. We were working on resistance specifically because it reduced the need to rotate crops. People could grow it more continuously without risking yield loss.
The sort of work that is succeeding in parts of Africa, Pakistan, and India is setting up what they call food forests. Put some fruiting tree species in the center and surround throughout with fruiting and vegetable producing plants. This will form a more complex web of creatures that can live together and produce food for the people who take care of them. No fertilizers, no irrigation--just crops that are appropriate for the region. They can take years to get going, though, which is the hard part. Once they are going, it's just a question of tending to them.
You also can't really mechanise that, so forget about sending the kids to the city for high school. And it's pretty much guarenteed you need to fertilise at least a bit to get the same yield, just by conservation of mass of P and N, assuming you're harvesting from it.
Contrary to popular opinion, farming is not simple or easy, and there's actual reasons monoculture at scale is so popular.
They fucked something up, even if it's not that. You'll notice the soils of the US midwest are good as gold after a near-century of this shit.
That's not really their fault, though. Presumably nobody came and explained the best practices.
No the soils in the Midwest are not good.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7e1766e613384ea59aef9ff17ccbdc9c
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0341816224002716?via%3Dihub
Erosion and soil profile degradation from poor farming practices are a huge issue.
If you want to get "out into the weeds", yes there's still problems. Water usage is insanely unsustainable in some areas too, which is the real emergency. Until the water table dries up yields are continue to be great.
Looking at the first paper:
Results show that topsoil has declined by a rate of 2 mm per year over the past 150 years
So that's the timescale we're talking. The Kenyan policy started in 2008, so 2mm/year topsoil loss isn't the issue. I also wonder how this figure changed around the dustbowl period, when practices were much worse yet.
To prevent the future impacts of this unsustainable erosion, farmers can implement no-till practices such as using disc seeders or agricultural drills. Along with this, soil regenerative practices may be necessary to reduce erosion rates (Thaler, Kwang, Quirk, Quarrier, & Larsen, 2022). Many of these practices are already common and are currently used by 51 percent of soybean, cotton, corn, and wheat farmers in the United States (Gamillo, 2022). Despite this, there are political, social, and economic barriers to this issue (Thaler, Kwang, Quirk, Quarrier, & Larsen, 2022). Providing incentives around no-till farming is essential for reducing soil erosion. No-till farming is necessary for soil productivity, ecosystem services, and long-term sustainability (Thaler, Kwang, Quirk, Quarrier, & Larsen, 2022).
Fun fact, no-till uses even more chemicals. If you're not mechanically digging up weeds and pests you've got to kill them other ways.
This is what happened in North Korea. The widespread use of fertilizers to keep fields producing instead of leaving the soil to rest for a season or rotate crops to revitalize the earth caused the soil to become inhospitable to plants. That's the crux of the NK famine that started in the 90s.
Africa has history to learn from. Let's hope there is change.
No it's not what happened to North Korea at all. I have no clue where you got that from.
The collapse of the Soviet Union cutting off food, fuel, fertilizer, and technology support started it.
Then torrential rainfall and flooding destroyed that years crop and food storage in the main production regions. It also destroyed many of their hydroelectric dams and irrigation systems. Without support from the soviets they had no way to repair them.
However the main reason hundreds of thousands of not millions died was because of the governments unwillingness to open their borders for international aide/trade. The government deliberately starved their population.
I got it from here, but then followed it up with some googling of NK agriculture and recipes. NK farms push soil too far, use industrial farming methods at the expense of local wisdom, and have no respect for nature - causing them to look like frail idiots who can't sustain themselves without imports.
This sounds like a government program with good intentions but no actual understanding of what needed to be done.
First off both organic and conventional farming methods do acidify the soil. Contrary to what these farmers think organic/traditional farming does it much more rapidly.
Higher rainfall zones also naturally have more acidic soils. Traditionally cultures have temporarily overcome this by burning the vegetation (slash and burn).
If 70% of the soil in the country is acidic the government program should have been to subsidize lime application and soil testing first. Lime is much cheaper than fertilizer anyways and balancing out the pH makes all nutrients more available.
They could have then subsidized the appropriate usage of fertilizer based upon the test results. Blindly applying any type of fertilizer is a recipe for disaster. Fertilizers must be applied in balance for the crop, soil type, pH, and the nutrients.
Couldn't he just amend it with lime? I'm no farmer, but I know about that.
Soil with proper nutrients is also being depleted all over the world due to overfarming and monocolture farming.
What no one wants to accept is too many people on too little land. The earth is barely holding on.
The soil is on it's deathbed and we got a feeding tube keeping it going. Sure it will keep going. But at what cost.
Does "grapes of wrath" mean anything to you?
Not really, no. I have heard people mention it.
I think some children have read it in school as guided learning. But it doesn't seem to have much value because people never seem to have gained any knowledge from the book that they mention so I see no reason to read it. No argument or fact is ever generated from people reading the book and bring it up.
Largely I come across is when people mentioned they have read it and have some knowledge how to be critical of it as parroted by some education curriculum. But is seems more of a English project like when I read Shakespeare and was asked what the author meant, rather than something based on science or economics with ideas and knowledge to be learnt.
You don't think a book is worth reading because educators use it as a critical thinking tool?
You always appear to be have taken offense to having asking to be asked to think critically of Shakespeare and cannot see the value of those plays because of this offense.
Fascinating.
The analysis of the piece is the educational purpose not the piece itself. Just like as mentioned Shakespeare. Are you suggesting I should use Shakespeare as to understand modern politics?
Grapes of wrath means nothing to be because I haven't read it. If there is any important facts within it then they will stand alone.
Otherwise the argument for reading it is the same as the argument of "do your own research".
Provide something of note or don't bother. Reading a fiction book isn't my way of learning about the world and I don't think it should be yours.