From many examples I have seen of farms that have switched to regenerative practices it takes about 3 years to bring the soil back to life. Some of those had been corn for generations. Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants. It doesn't matter if all the previously released minerals all washed away. As long as there is sand, silt, clay and living soil the minerals are available for plants.
> Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants.
Thank you. This is one of those super-underappreciated biological facts.
Industrial ag treats soil like it's a tank of fertility, and guess who sells the refills? Biologists know that healthy soil is a factory, making new fertility out of rock/air/rain/sun.
Aren’t those minerals depleted by higher and higher yield crops that are industrially farmed and then shipped all over (along with the water)? How does the regenerative practice add back an equivalent amount? Wouldn’t it need additives that are equal in mass to all the plants previously farmed?
Most of the matter in food comes from water H2O or Air CO2 + N2. Nitrogen fixing bacteria are literally getting that nitrogen from the air not the soil even if they live in the soil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_fixation
Modern agriculture uses fertilizer for extra nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K).
Plants also need a few trace minerals from soil but it’s a tiny fraction of their mass Iron, Calcium, etc and can also be added back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_flour
PS: There’s some really destructive agricultural like sod that’s literally shipping soil, but the premium pays to replace the soil.
It doesn't. After a few years, the scant resources (phosphates, magnesium, manganese) run out again.
Most small-scale regenerative ag farms are bringing in a lot of outside material to add those minerals back in.
My farmland hasn't been farmed for 50 years. If I clear an area and put a veggie bed in, I get 1 year of great yield, 1 year of "okay" yield, and then it becomes impossible to grow anything due to nutrient deficiencies.
> "If all the earth's crust was converted into bio-mass, what would be the limiting element?"
I think selenium would run out long before phosphorus.
The crust contains selenium at 0.05-0.09 ppm, but most plants require around 0.1-1 ppm. It's also one of the hardest nutrients to remediate because you can't just dump a bunch of selenium on the surface when 5-10 ppm starts to become toxic to lots of other organisms.
I was supplementing with selenium for various reasons, and it seemed clear that it's one of the minerals that used to be supplied via our diet, but is quite deficient now, due to exhaustion in the soil.
Selenium, along with taurine, is one of the supplements which genuinely drove my physicians vehemently crazy, so I doubled up, and ensured that they were the focal point of my daily regimen.
