Can American soil be brought back to life?
I recently took part in a course on doing farm work with horses. It was a large garden where all the farm work had been done exclusively with horses for about 10 years, after decades of using tractors. The tractors had turned the soil into hard, clumpy clay which yielded bad crops and required more and more fertilizers every year. In about a decade of using horses, manure and traditional methods, the topsoil had turned nice and soft and nutrient-rich. Not at all like the hard clay my grandparents' farm and the owners of the garden were more than happy with the results.<p>Working with horses was slow, hard and laborious work but it was a lot of fun! Much more fun than doing the same with tractors (which I also think is quite fun).<p>Unfortunately, going back to horses or oxen never going to be viable in a large scale. The recent trends in agriculture have been making machines larger and larger to reduce the amount of labor required, causing the soil to be packed even harder, requiring more tilling for the next crop.<p>Maybe autonomous farm equipment could reverse the trend, as machines could be made smaller without increasing the amount of human labor.