A soil crisis in the offing? [View All]

For the past five plus years, the number of acres devoted to corn production has gone through the roof. Acreage that was once considered marginal, or that had been allowed to lie fallow in CRP and other such programs is now being brought back into corn production. All of this is due to the increasing use of corn to make ethanol, a gasoline additive that lowers your gas mileage, but makes vast profits for corporate farmers and other big corporate players such as ADM and Monsanto.

Now the latest twist is coming into play, namely cotton. Due to the ongoing war in Pakistan, along with the revolution in Egypt, the US is stepping in to make up for the shortfall in cotton production worldwide. The South, the traditional cotton producing area of the US, simply can't increase cotton production that much, due to the fact that four hundred years of ongoing cotton growing has worn out the soil, making much of it unfit for growing cotton, or any other crop for that matter.

So cotton production has turned to a region long associated with food production, the Midwest, Bread Basket to the world. In Missouri, cotton production has gone up ten percent in the past couple of years. In Kansas, where wheat is king, twenty thousand acres were devoted to cotton production last year, and more will be planted in cotton this year. Overall, cotton production in the US has risen twelve percent from 2009 to 2010.

This is not good news. The US is now putting an emphasis on planting crops that are simply unsustainable, and if this continues, will lead to a collapse of soil fertility. Corn and cotton both are quite hard on the soil. They suck nutrients out of the ground at a prodigious rate, leaving the soil exhausted. Worse yet, especially in the case of corn, farmers are foregoing their traditional crop rotation schedule, one that has traditionally, and successfully, been used to restore soil fertility. Instead, with the big money coming in from both corn and cotton, farmers are planting the same crop, in the same fields, year in, year out.

This simply isn't sustainable. It was due in large part to such practices that the Dust Bowl developed during the Twenties and Thirties. Cotton has been such a brutal crop in the South that there are acres and acres that are still unsuitable for growing anything a century and a half after they have been forced out of production.

If we continue to go down this road, our croplands are going to die. Dead, infertile, good for nothing more than weeds and fodder for goats. Our food supply will plummet and there will be food shortages that will ravage not just the US, but the world.

We have got to start petitioning the Obama administration to start implementing guidelines for crop rotation and how often a crop can be consecutively planted in the same field. We have got to stop this ethanol madness. And we have absolutely got to go back to sustainable agricultural practices, including traditional crop rotation. Otherwise, within a generation, our soil is going to be dead and we'll no longer be able to feed ourselves.