Drivel and nonsense, Farmers in America are the best stewards of the soil that the world has ever seen. Do they farm as much land as possible to receive the best return on investment possible...Yes.
But the hawks, coyotes and even eagles have returned to the heartland and made it difficult for an introduced bird (pheasant) to survive along with loss of habitat. (They seem to be unaffected by the chemicals, why is that?)
It has NOTHING to do with petrochemical companies or chemicals. Do you really believe growers who are smart enough to be early adopters of drone technology, and auto-steer tractors before the auto industry used it in cars are so dumb that they spray products that might harm their children and grandchildren on their fields.
Soil fertility is better than it has ever been and Roundup (which another poster brought up) has NEVER been found to cause any harm in any SCIENTIFIC study. If you don't believe it quote the study that says otherwise.
Pheasants thrive in the Dakotas that grow tremendous amounts of wheat and use chemicals...WHY? Its all about habitat.
Off the soapbox now.
I don't know what fantasy world that you find yourself living in, but claiming that farmers in the United States are the
best stewards of their land on the planet is just nonsense.
When I was a kid, living in Baltimore City, on weekend family drives in the 1960's that my father & mother would take us on out into Baltimore County, Harford County, Cecil County, Anne Arundel County, Howard County, Frederick County, Queen Anne's County, Kent County, Prince George's County, and Montgomery County, Maryland; the predominant smell in the springtime would be that of dairy cattle manure, and horse manure that was spread on fields for fertilization.
You could stop by any field one could choose, dig down only a couple of inches into the soil, and find loads of earthworms, as well as smell the richness of the soil's
life. It was, and still is to this very day, an unmistakable smell that I will to my dying day associate with nature's abundance, and
GOD'S incredible gift to us as humans.
That soil richness is gone, killed off by the chemical fertilizers, but more importantly, by the
vast array of
poisons that any modern farmer that farms using the Green Revolution method of farming
must utilize in order to have any chance of showing a profit at the end of his/her growing season.
I challenge
any farmer in the United States to morally justify drenching the plants that they grow for human consumption, and their soils, with chemical poisons, 100% of which can trace their lineage directly to
ZYKLON B, the poison discovered/invented as a result of the inhumane, nay should I say,
evil research conducted by Nazi Germany so that they could
murder millions of people.
Every single one of the hundreds of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and nematicides that are used on crops today have as their direct ancestor,
ZYKLON B. Period.
I challenge any honest modern petrochemical farmer in the United States, your so-called stewards of their lands, to provide the members of this forum with substantiated written evidence of the carbon content of their soils. With at least 2 independent lab tests not performed by a state land grant university. Who, as far as I am concerned, are now, and have been for decades in collusion with the petrochemical companies.
I challenge any honest petrochemical farmer in the United States, to provide the members of this forum with a real time video of them driving a spade/shovel into one of their highly treated fields, and prove to us that the soil has any earthworms in it.
Anyone that has spent
any time at all in recent decades knows that a honest petrochemical farmer in the United States simply
cannot provide the evidence that I have asked for. The reason is that synthetic chemical compounds in the form of N-P-K, or nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium are toxic to soil life.
The flip side of the petrochemical coin is that
any poison that is designed to kill a specific insect pest, plant disease, fungus, or weed competing with the cash crop;
cannot help but kill off thousands of other organisms that comprise a healthy soil.
Modern day soils are nothing but chemically sterile environments, where the soil is nothing more than a medium that holds the chemicals in place until they can perform whatever job it is that they were designed to do.
Last, but
not least, is that these so-called stewards of the land, by the use of incredibly poor farming practices, over the past 250 years, have allowed 90% of the topsoil that was present in North America before European settlers arrived on the continent; to be washed away into every major river system that drains into the Atlantic ocean, the Pacific ocean, each of the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence seaway, the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, and the Gulf of California.
The
only way to restore the depleted soil's is to sustainably farm such as Joel Salatin does on his family's Polyface Farms. Sustainable farming, with hooved animals on constantly rotated pasture, is the only quick way of growing soil any faster than the thousands of years that it took to create the Great Plains of North America, the savannahs of Africa, the steppes of Asia, and the pampas of South America.
Salatin is not the only farmer/rancher in the United States that has rebuilt soils that were completely depleted decades ago.
There aren't many of these revolutionary farmers/ranchers out there now, probably only a hundred, or so. But, to a man/woman, they have proven, documented evidence that mob grazing on rich, biodiverse pastures using portable electric fencing, and with rotations of cattle, hogs, chickens, ducks, geese, guinea hens, turkeys, sheep, and goats can create new soil at an unprecedented rate.
These mob grazing farmers/ranchers are the
true stewards of their lands,
not the petrochemical farmers. The wild animals that inhabit these farms/ranches are some of the largest, and
healthiest wild animals to be found in the United States.
