https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/57-billion-tons-of-top-soil-have-eroded-in-the-midwest-in-the-last-160-years-180979936/

This is hard to even get your head around. But let me make it a bit more simple. The loss of one ton of soil over one acre is the thickness of one sheet of paper. NRCS says it is okay to lose 5 tons an acre, 5 sheets of paper. Most farms are losing 10.

So a 1000 acre farm is losing

5,000 - 10,000 TONS OF SOIL a year.

50,000 - 100,000 TONS OF SOIL a decade

250,000 - 1,000,000 TONS OF SOIL over 50 years of a farmers work life

This is what he hopes he can leave behind to his son and we have been doing it about 200 years now. Now if you want a heart attack continue reading.

Quality top soil is about 50 dollars a cubic yard, the average weight is 1.3 tons per cubic yard.

So the loss to the 1,000 acre farm, "doing it right", losing only 5 sheets of paper thick of soil across the farm is 190,000 dollars per year. That means over a farmers 50 year working life we are looking at a loss (not adjusting for inflation) of 9.5 million dollars of value.

Where as the average farm is losing 380K per thousand acres per year, and 19 million per1,000 acres per an avg farmers working life. And we wonder why a farmer today need 10x the land to support a family vs. 50 years ago?

And all this in one of the toughest businesses to survive in on the planet and the one that FEEDS THE ENTIRE PLANET.

Worse almost none of this has to happen, we know exactly how to stop it, build the soil instead of losing it. But we are refusing to do it. People even in NRCS are starting to wake up but we are moving way to slow. Worse if famers switch to methods like cover crops, no till, etc. they make more money almost instantly, while growing higher quality food and reducing pesticides and herbicide to almsot nothing over about 5 years of conversion.

All the young people shrieking about climate change should be taught about this, and the solutions we have to it.

This is THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUE OF OUR LIFE TIME. And it just so happens we could remove 100% of human added carbon from the atmosphere over the last 100 years, by simply building the organic content of our farm soils to 2%.

I am wondering if we can actually get that message to all these well meaning young people, turn them on their own masters and get them calling for an actual workable solution that will improve life for all vs degrade it?

The environmental lunacy is being driven by for profit and for control interests. Turning the youth into a mob that understands nothing about what they are calling for. It would seem turning the mob is the best strategy.