[dog77_1999]

There is already a solution to this.

It's called no-till farming. The seeds are GE modified to be strong enough to punch through the soil and take root. Nature does the airation with worms, ants, ect.

The bulk of no-till farming uses chemicals and such to kill weeds, but again GE seeds would solve this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming

[romanP]

BartSimpson wrote:

Global warming didn't exactly pan out as a disaster so the Chicken Littles are already fomenting the next "crisis".

I think you're just confusing bad movies with reality.

[romanP]

dog77_1999 wrote:

There is already a solution to this.

It's called no-till farming. The seeds are GE modified to be strong enough to punch through the soil and take root. Nature does the airation with worms, ants, ect.

The bulk of no-till farming uses chemicals and such to kill weeds, but again GE seeds would solve this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming

GE seeds tend to have a bad habit of being manufactured by companies like Monsanto, who will sue the pants off anyone whose field happens to come into contact with their patented seed if they didn't pay for it, nevermind that the wind blew the seed there.

There is also a lot of controversy about the effects GE seeds have once released into the wild, since they did not achieve their genetic traits through natural symbiosis and could quite likely wreak havoc on the ecosystems they're planted in, as is generally the case with any alien species that is introduced to a foreign habitat.

[sasquatch2]

Actually no-till farming does not have to involve GE seeds. The key is the planting equipment.

Cereals such as wheat, are planted with what resembles a cultivator with a whack of airtubes delivering the seeds behind the individual teeth.

No till corn/bean planters utilize a ripple coulter to break the surface and trash whippers to clear a path for the seed opener. Minimum tillage would be a more accurate term. Basically the machine prepares a seed bed only where the seed is planted.

Actually no till row crops usually involve less chemicals than conventional tillage. A seed bed is a weed bed and excellant weed control is done by banding the rows rather than a broadcast spray. Save $$$$ chemicals are expensive.

The handwringer make a big deal about GE seeds....sometime calling them "frankenfoods" and make up all manner of myths about them. What people don't understand they fear and what they fear they hate.

Basically GE seeds are not really inprinciple any different than varieties produced in the traditional way. Just faster. In the past, corn breeders, utilized breeding fields in Hawaii and Chile to cut the breeding time in half by getting two crops per year.

[ziggy]

sasquatch2 wrote:

Ziggy

Quote:

Once the soil is gone and just clay is there nothing can grow so no soil is ever put back unless in a severe dust storm.When stripping farmers fields I notice the fence lines all have twice the soil depth as the cultivated field, it's been undisturbed for many years so shows a good cross section of what happened(rudimentarily speaking). So farming takes a huge toll on the soil also

.

Actually fence lines do not reflect the original soil profile. The vegetation of the fence bottom catches a lot of wind driven loess(silt) and mechanical farming frequently "hills" fence bottoms up. The elevated fence bottom, enjoys excellent drainage and permits root penetration from the sides as well the top.

Got a neighbour, who makes a very good living stripping subdivisions. He uses pull scrapers and IH quads for speed---he parked the cats and was one of the first large scale adopters of Cat Challengers.

No till farming has been with us for sometime.

Much of the soil loss problem in the third world is linked to deforestation and bad husbandry.

In the amazon the soil is thin and not very fertile and prone to erosion. Rainforest soil being thick and fertile is a myth. Farming can produce soil faster than nature just by cropping. There is a rule of thumb---there is as much below ground as above. Crops like beans wear the soil out while wheat and corn replenish organic matter rapidly....the key factor is organic matter. Believe it or not a crop of winter wheat produces too much organic matter if you attempt to incorporate the straw. Water won't penetrate.......

The original prairie soil was very thin. Current cropping practice does not involve moldboard plows and the crop residue is chopped and spread to shelter the ground and prevent moisture loss.

Poor cultural practices such as summer fallow are a recipe for erosion. It dissipates the organic matter.

What you said about the fence lines makes sense,thats also where the farmers put all the rocks
We rented a challenger a few years ago and a pull behind scraper,with that and a d7 we stripped lots of leases and the recovery was so good that conoco phillips wanted that method used for all their builds.You had to have a good operator on it though.Any clay in the strippings would show up on an acid test and get you in big shit. Nice machine to run.

[sasquatch2]

Yeah rocks the size of refrigerators or LADAs.

The rules of thumb about scrappers....

Dozer pulls to haul 100 yds and no more....

Motor scrapers up to half a mile and loaders and dumptrucks beyond that....were shuffled with the faster rubber tracked machines.

Yeah! Tricky business stripping a coupla inches of F2. Hereabouts 9" to a ft. I was in a hole in IOWA where the F2 was 3 ft deep.

An associate, from Purdue, got clearance to go down in the hole while a mid-west missle silo was under construction. The F2 went down 90+ ft. That's a lot of dirt.

Here in Ontario, with only a 6" F2 over a gravelly F3 (subsoil) I have seen alfalfa roots down 6'.