I farmed for 10 years; my degree is in agriculture. I am in the middle of ethanol country. I don’t like ethanol; only because it is an artificially created market with tax subsidies and now the EPA mandate to use it. Let the market decide.
Farmers generally do good job of taking care of the soil here. When I farmed; I used no till farming when I could.
No surprise there.
I am in the middle of ethanol country.
My dad's family were among the founders of Pella, Iowa.
I don’t like ethanol; only because it is an artificially created market with tax subsidies and now the EPA mandate to use it. Let the market decide.
Agreed.
You have to understand that the work I do is on a scale of decades but the study in which I am engaged spans millennia. Currently, I am engaged in examining the desertification of North Africa and the Near East. Farming may be the culprit, not because of what it did to the soil but to how it drew nomadic people off the land and into settled life. In what was a mesic system at the time, vegetation management means everything in terms of maintaining the hydrocycle. It only takes one stupid fool messing with an alluvial soil to wreck an entire system over thousands of square miles, as the settler farmers along the Gila in Arizona soon learned.