Comment Re:This solves nothing (Score 2) 233
Bad soil. Let's attack bad soil first.
Farmers have access to a lot of manure. Cow manure, sheep manure, goat shit, chicken shit, the like. They also have access to non-useful plant matter, although some of that goes to ethanol. Farmers will tend to plow manure into the land; good. Do that. Skip the petrol, do this more. We have a lot of regulations here about plowing "natural fertilizer" into the land: it all needs to be used at once in the beginning of the season; this is unsustainable because farmers will add more manure to the top of the land throughout the season, and don't know how much to use in the beginning. This is a real thing. We've had legislative arguments on it. The legislature wants to prevent run-off of cow-shit-based nitrogen sources into the bay here, because algae growth from fertilizer run-off is a real problem; unfortunately, they're encouraging farmers to use chemical nitrogen sources, which doesn't help.
So, drop the chemical fertilizers. Use more cow shit.
That sounds just great in a hippy-dippy communish sort of way... There are a lot of practical issues with it, however. The largest being specialization in the areas of farming. The farmers that grow a thousand acres of corn/soybeans are not the same farmers that have heards of cows/pigs. The cow/pig farms generally are not the farmers that have thousands of acres of crops. So, unlike Slashdot, there is just not enough shit to go around.. at least with the farmers that need it.
