U.S. Short-Sightedness Takes Aim At Soil

Oh yeah. This is smart: High corn prices encourages farmers to skip crop rotation

So, I'm a gardener. Not a commercial farmer. But I know that plants need nutrients. Certain plants take more of a certain kind of nutrient, and some plants (beans, for example) are really good at putting particular nutrient back in the soil. You can't do that if you're one trick pony. Like diets and genetics, nature works best with diversity. Without it, crop yields decrease and eventually, you get ecological collapse.

Source: Wikipedia

Remember the Dust Bowl? We didn't learn well enough from the Great Depression to keep our hands out of the credit card cookie jar, and we haven't learned well enough from the Dust Bowl to keep good soil husbandry tactics. Watch; in 20 years, we'll have another Dust Bowl. Texas is already on record as having one of the driest 12-month periods in its history (August-July 2010-11). With outdoor burns banned in most (251 of 254) counties in Texas, farmers are left without their most expedient method of weeding: burning the field. An overall benefit, really, because allowing the land to recover from harvesting naturally is much better than burning, which sucks all the nutrients back out.

Lower crop yields due to lack of crop rotation also encourages greater chemical use, in the form of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. These chemicals then drain into run-off, usually into the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River. Of course, just because they've been shipped out to see doesn't mean they stop doing damage. This article describes an area in the Gulf of Mexico called the "dead zone," an area of hypoxic (lacking oxygen) waters in which life cannot survive. That sentence deserves it's own paragraph.

An area of the seas that cannot support life due to a lack of oxygen has been created and made worse because of chemical fertilizers.

The same chemical fertilizers that farmers will now need because of decreasing crop yields because they weren't smart enough to ignore the siren call of profit and sacrificed their top soil.

You are almost already required to take a B-12 supplements if you live in the U.S. because of the degradation of the top soil. B-12 is only manufactured by bacteria, and I may be wrong on this, but bacteria don't seem to live very well under conditions of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.

So shall we review?

Farmers aren't rotating their crops because of record corn prices.
Not rotating their crops was one of the causes of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
The increased use of chemicals for agriculture will result in increased run-off into the Gulf of Mexico, causing environmental damage in the form of dead zones (or a massive dead zone, depending on who you ask).
The top soil is already so bad that people in the U.S. can't get the micronutrients they need because the source of the nutrient has been killed off by the chemicals used to ensure higher crop yields.

When we will stop pursuing wealth at the cost of everything we (should) love and cherish the most?