Soil in Midwestern US is eroding 10 to 1k times faster than it forms
Good documentary about this issue on Netflix: Kiss the Ground (2020)<p><a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999" rel="nofollow">https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999</a><p>It has some striking pictures of two farm fields side by side.<p>One supports diverse plant life and produces nutrient-rich food.  The plant roots prevent erosion, and retain water.  The soil is rich and black.  It's "regenerative".<p>The other has brown, dry, dead soil.  It's tilled and irrigated and sprayed with chemicals.  It grows a single crop, a monoculture.<p>Multiply that by a hundred years and thousands of consolidating mega farms all over the world, and you have a huge amount of erosion<p>---<p>This problem has been well understood for decades (and by other civilizations for centuries), but is repressed / conveniently ignored by a wealthy, government-subsidized food industry<p>Here's a 2012 documentary about a 1994 project in China to restore degraded / desertified land, and it shows how poor entire states become when the soil is poor (which I suppose is not unlike the American midwest!)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ</a><p><a href="https://rethink.earth/turning-desert-to-fertile-farmland-on-the-loess-plateau/" rel="nofollow">https://rethink.earth/turning-desert-to-fertile-farmland-on-...</a><p>Chinese land has supported agriculture way longer than American land, and they have way more people, so they have these problems sooner<p>The US is going to get there