Broken Heartland

[holyoutlaw]

The Looming Collapse of Agriculture on the Great Plains

This article looks at some of the changes happening in the Great Plains, particularly over and around the Oglalla aquifer. Capital wants to turn the land into wind farms, so that’s what will happen. I think wind farms aren’t as scalable as once thought; a big enough concentration will slow down the wind.

Another possibility talked about in this article is rotational paddocking; moving herds of cows from paddock to paddock, making sure it’s grazed clean, and then allowing it time to regenerate. Helping this is allowing the prairie ecology to return, notably prairie dogs and their predators.

Organic farming is given a very brief over view in the beginning. More time is spend on perennial farming, adapting crop plants to prairie conditions by making them perennial (deeper roots, much less damage to the soil). But perennial crops is a good way to go, and returning the land back to a buffalo commons is good as well. To that end, the Nature Conservancy and other groups are buying large tracts of land, and restoring them to buffalo prairie.

It perplexes me that these farmers can see what’s happened to their land with decades of capital taking it over, and yet they resist government management. Soon enough, the agribusiness monoculture factory farms will be abandoned by capital, and then it will be the government’s business to restore land that is in worse shape than ever.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.