Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[aeden]

Six feet to less than six inches was the USDA observation for well over the last 100 years.
The last actual map was at the Chicago Museum of natural History for a snapshot reference.
The micro measurements are available.
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default ... -Earth.pdf
Our local sample are increasing in composition, but it matters nothing in scope of the current weather patterns.
All bets are off since the Tongo event and objective views ignored from the delusional Lysenko swamp cult.

https://www.instituteforenergyresearch. ... Final-.pdf
The barking mad seals of the beltway are now group think reprobates and just deflection modules to predictive programming.
https://www2.illinois.gov/dnr/WaterReso ... ation.aspx
Back in the Forums I left a file on the usages from the basin when Chicago killed the lower segment of lake Michigan and
the epidemics of water diseases wiping the zone clean from yellow fever also.

viewtopic.php?p=30397#p30397
Sat Apr 09, 2016 3:41 pm

Menken said that all election campaigns soon become an “advance auction sale of stolen goods”.
The recent march through the intuitions is basically complete. GOP does not exist.

I think people who own their homes and have grand-kids are beginning to wonder if Biden's administration are going to bring actual physical war with Russia and China into the streets of the towns that they live in.
They may wonder if it is not the intention of this administration to have their towns and cities bombed.

[Tom Mazanec]

The stuff I've posted in the past couple pages might be compared to Swiss cheese. It's not rigorous. Not enough thought was put into it. It lacks clarity and some pieces of the puzzle. There are obvious holes in it. That refers to my own thoughts, not those of others. Yet, at the same time, it provides enough information to be a starting point for assessing how serious the situation is and that it's not The Fall of Rome II or The 1930s II - there are problems that likely will matter that go beyond that.

Number one being that, as collapse begins, the nuclear powers will be strongly impelled to turn the planet into cold radioactive cinder.

[Tom Mazanec]

Also check recent YouTube videos featuring Eliezer Yudkowsky on the peril artificial general intelligence poses for humanity (he always worried about this, but when he tried GPT-4 he went from 'in a few decades' to 'in a matter of months').

[Higgenbotham]

I looked for a comprehensive post about topsoil and didn't find one, so will have to fill in that hole also.

Six feet to less than six inches was the USDA observation for well over the last 100 years.

There were 3 separate items related to this that came to mind when waking up.

The first is how much topsoil the natural ecosystem generates. For the Midwestern grasslands before the white settlers arrived, it was something on the order of 1 inch of topsoil per 1,000 years. A look at google shows that general rule has been modified to 1 inch per 100 to 1,000 years. There are probably ways it can be done faster through interventions. I don't know that much about the subject, but I know it takes a very long time to generate an inch of topsoil.

The second is that several times I've seen a middle aged woman standing in a grocery store saying something like, "Oh, it's organic!" as if a product labelled organic is going to keep her and her family adequately fed and healthy.

Finally, my sister and I are in possession of family records from both sides of the family who were original settlers from Europe who got title to farmland in the Midwest. One of my distant cousins put together a booklet of the family history from before their arrival from Europe to the present. Once they arrived in America, they typically lived into the 80s and 90s with a few even living into their 100s.

So I'll start with that and hopefully get back to how that fits into the bigger picture soon.

[aeden]

The estimate of annual loss is nearly double the rate of erosion the USDA considers sustainable.
I stated in 2019 and we know the rate close enough so it will be saved as an outlier measurement.
Like you hopefully you own dirt also to fill the freezer as we do also with real food.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-ne ... 180979936/

Your numbers on increasing top level would be close enough and are if asked the Elders on what it is against what we got locally for nonchem
farmers who know what is already here.
I seen a picture from Iowa when a f5 removed all dirt to bed gravel a mile wide and countless mile long. It was estimated over 5 to 6 feet
topsoil just gone. I will try to find that location and map from the imaging if I can to actual replacement. It was not much later than
that when the climate nuts started popping off and we followed the money to the actual agenda Rosa nailed down on the still captivated
mostly senseless bish public. Toms link looked interesting on the AI predictive program we all know it rather is. It did save me time on some
pine script for Lorentzian classification algorithm sweeps models.

[Higgenbotham]

The estimate of annual loss is nearly double the rate of erosion the USDA considers sustainable.

That's probably pretty close and I think averaged over the past 150 years it's significantly more than double.

In addition to volume, the other part of that is how many nutrients are left in the soil versus what it was when the settlers arrived. My point in saying how long my ancestors were living once they left Europe and settled on the former grasslands of the Midwest is they were getting better nutrition. My father was born on the farm in 1933 and lived to the lower end of the range, passing from flu at 83 (3 years before covid). His father lived to 88 and his mother to 91. His grandparents lived into their 90s.

My guess is about half or a little less of the nutrients are left on average. If the housewife is eating organic she is still getting half. If she is buying the questionable organic from California dairies that barely meet standards, she may be getting grain fed in addition. It can still be labeled organic. I made some compost from the remains of organic fruits and vegetables. It was OK but not that good. Foxfarm Ocean Forest or just the soil from a local wooded area outperformed it by a lot.

Before my daughter was born, I spent a few months eating an adequate diet. To do that, it was necessary to eat 12 fruits and vegetables per day and exercise a lot of burn off the excess food. Without the exercise, it wouldn't have been possible to eat that much. Some of my hair turned from gray back to its natural color and it also thickened, so my body had enough nutrients. Probably, and I can only guess, 4-6 servings would have yielded the same nutrition 150 years ago.

[aeden]

We covered that aspect from the Canadian study noted here H.

Wed Dec 02, 2015 8:30 am
A Kushi Institute analysis of nutrient data from 1975 to 1997 found that average calcium levels in 12 fresh vegetables dropped 27 percent; iron levels 37 percent; vitamin A levels 21 percent, and vitamin C levels 30 percent. A similar study of British nutrient data from 1930 to 1980, published in the British Food Journal,found that in 20 vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19 percent; iron 22 percent; and potassium 14 percent. Yet another study concluded that one would have to eat eight oranges today to derive the same amount of Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one. The only thing that keeps expanding is leftist stupidity.

viewtopic.php?p=29195#p29195
After two tours some of us still know who and why we sent our very own to end a sliver of madness.

[Higgenbotham]

DECOUPLING MORE APPARENT THAN REAL

Let us now aggregate the global data set. We then identify two regimes, with a slight improvement in energy efficiency starting in the late 1990s, but no "strong decoupling".

Insofar as this evolution appears at the time when China is entering the global market on a massive scale, the following interpretation can be proposed: to analyze the relationship between GDP and energy, one must consider economically autonomous entities, or take international trade into account. Only under these conditions can the same transformations of matter be accounted for, both in the calculation of their energy consumption and in their contributions to GDP.

Since the 2000s, a number of activities that are essential to the functioning of societies and that consume a lot of energy have been relocated, particularly to China. The "decoupling" in rich countries is more apparent than real, and is mainly the result of their "partial deindustrialization".

A linear relationship between GDP and energy consumption seems to be well confirmed by the aggregated global data, with a slightly increasing slope, corresponding to a long-term improvement in energy efficiency.

https://www.umontpellier.fr/en/articles ... n-denergie

Energy consumption per capita is tightly correlated with GDP. On Gail's graph, the plateau in fossil fuel consumption per capita is positively offset by increases in non fossil fuel energy use and productivity and negatively offset by decreases in EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) as it requires more and more energy investment to produce the same amount of oil.

It's likely we are heading into the decline phase of Gail's graph now. Based on a decade plus of plateau, we have been given a preview of what that will look like in some areas like, for example, brief stock market crashes and brief supply chain disruptions.

Any decline in fossil fuel production will cause these brief problems to intensify and new problems to show up. One of those new problems will be in the area of food production. At a minimum, even with a smooth decline in fossil fuel consumption, it will mean less fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides, less irrigation, even where aquifers haven't run dry, and more reliance on depleted topsoil to strengthen and sustain the crops. That likely means crop yields per capita will fall faster than fossil fuel consumption per capita.

[Higgenbotham]

We covered that aspect from the Canadian study noted here H.

Wed Dec 02, 2015 8:30 am
A Kushi Institute analysis of nutrient data from 1975 to 1997 found that average calcium levels in 12 fresh vegetables dropped 27 percent; iron levels 37 percent; vitamin A levels 21 percent, and vitamin C levels 30 percent. A similar study of British nutrient data from 1930 to 1980, published in the British Food Journal,found that in 20 vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19 percent; iron 22 percent; and potassium 14 percent. Yet another study concluded that one would have to eat eight oranges today to derive the same amount of Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one. The only thing that keeps expanding is leftist stupidity.

viewtopic.php?p=29195#p29195
After two tours some of us still know who and why we sent our very own to end a sliver of madness.

I thought we had somewhere. Thanks for finding it. Given those numbers probably the sum total from 1880 or thereabouts to 2023 exceeds the 50% guess (for nutrient reduction) I made.

[Higgenbotham]

According to Dr Kristine Nichols, a soil microbiologist and regenerative agriculture expert, of the 900 million arable acres in the U.S., only about 1.5% is being farmed regeneratively.

Iowa soil, for instance, was once among the most fertile on the planet, but is now rapidly being depleted. The average topsoil depth has decreased from around 14-18 inches at the beginning of the 20th century, to 6-8 inches by the year 2000.

https://www.reuters.com/business/sustai ... 022-09-14/

What the article doesn't say or at least I didn't see any numbers is regenerative farming will reduce yields a lot. There's not a way out of this box at this point.