Philadelphia Mountain Biking Association - Forums

I'm always skeptical of the latest global environment concerns, but here's one MTB riders may be concerned about, so I pass it along.

The lowdown on dirt: It's disappearing
Disappearing dirt rivals global warming as an environmental threat
By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/348200_dirt22.html)

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/348200_dirt22.html

great article Jess. Shocking news! The human virus is ruining another aspect of the earth that is vital to our survival! Anyway, we gotta work on runoff in the Wiss and save the dirt. Did I tell you all that I LOVE dirt? Well, now you know...  :-*

DIRT LOVERS BEWARE! Save the dirt! Just think, if everyone in and around the Wiss could take one shovel of dirt and move it up the hill, we'd have our trails back!   :-\

Dirt rules, save the dirt, we can help !

Interesting read.  My dad's a big wheat farmer back in western Kansas and he just switched over to no-till farming.  We used to work the ground up every year and plant wheat right back into it because wheat grows so well out there.  Now, my dad rotates soy beans, wheat, and milo so there is always something in the ground.  His yeilds probably aren't as good but the beans put Nitrogen back in the soil so he has to use less fertilizer and not working the ground saves probably $50,000 a year in fuel costs.  Overall it's working pretty well.  Now they just need more rain so he can raise corn and get in on the rediculous corn prices!

thanks Dustin, that's some interesting stuff. Things I would not really think about or know much about. Hopefully the mega-farmers will figure this out and put the dirt health (which is good for human sustainability) before maximizing profits by squeezing every penny from the crops and soil. Sheesh, where is the government when you need it?  ???

One interesting thing that the government does do is they have a CRP program.  I don't know what the acronym stands for but basically farmers can get a yearly per acre payment to plant land to grass and not touch it for 15 years.  My dad also put some of the worse land into that.  You can cut the grass occasionally to feed the cattle so it actually is a pretty good way to keep both sides happy and save soil erosion.

Yeah, my family runs a farm in Delaware.  Grew up on it, worked at a farm equipment dealer.....can run about any tractor there is, all the way back to the really old ones.    ;D

CRP probably stands for something boring like "crop rotation program".....I'm sure with grain prices through the roof there will be certain political pressure to cut back on it.   Add to that the retarded (IMO) ethanol stuff and you have a pretty misguided incentive to over plant....and especially over plant corn which is hard on the soil anyway.

I'd imagine we are going to see a backlash on the ethanol thing.  With food prices getting jacked up, people will probably start to think it isn't a great idea to use food for gasoline.

Chuck, we might want to use you to run some machinery at our TMDs!!! :-)

Can do, I did run the gator around for a while at the FOW TMD on the 12th.

I was driving giant tractors around on the roads before I could legally drive a car.

I had my Farmers license too.  We had a John Deere 4010.

We used to have a JD 4440.  It took me like 14hrs to work an 80 acre patch.  The interesting thing about the ethanol and corn is that it takes so much fuel to produce the corn, haul it to an ethanol plant, actually convert it to ethanol, and finally then haul it to the refineries to mix with fuel that some studies have shown you don't actually net much fuel savings.  It just makes everyone feel nice and warm about themselves.

Energy Returned On Energy Invested - the downfall of many of the alternative energies I suppose.  This one just has the side affect of messing directly with our food supply.   :-\  That said it also has helped farmers make a bit more since energy costs have gone up, which is good for the small farms especially.

Mostly IH or Case IH on the farm.  I worked for a Case IH dealer through high school and got to mess with almost everything, which made a fairly boring and nasty job kinda interesting....that and delivering parts all over when I finally got my license.

I'd have to agree. It's not that just more people are planting corn, it's is so prevalent and so many hundreds of thousands of acres being devoted to it that virtually nothing else lives in the fields where it grows; no birds, no rodents, no insects. Farms are intensive, and more often now fields are circular. If ever you fly cross country you'll look down and see giant crop circles; not not from the aliens, but giant round fields. No tractors or nothing, just a device  like a giant spoke radiating out from a center cog, that waters, plants, tills, and probably even harvests the crop. Unfortunately the ethanol and bio diesel are like much of the green movement; political correctness wrapped with pseudo science.

It's how this
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=devon,+uk&ie=UTF8&ll=50.78833,-3.353963&spn=0.01853,0.039911&t=h&z=15&om=0

becomes
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=40.428002,-101.928749&spn=0.089249,0.159645&t=h&z=13&om=0
and
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=39.288874,-101.903343&spn=0.090743,0.159645&t=h&z=13&om=0

well, not quite, but probably a lot more harm than good is happening across the world because of ethanol.

(I'm not sure how accurate any of this is; all the above I've gleaned from the media and travel, and is just my opinion)

Those circles are center pivot irrigation systems.  They use em around here but plant the whole field anyway cause we get enough rain.  West plains and other dry spots they only plant under the center pivot as they don't get rain to sustain the crop beyond the reach of the irrigation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation

Still need tractors and combines though....

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=19734&ie=UTF8&ll=39.39533,-75.719919&spn=0.005422,0.011694&t=h&z=17&om=0  center pivot local = uniatowski farm.  Its the thin spoke pointing NW.

Ethanol produces more formaldahyde than gasoline which some experts speculate will cause more lung related illnesses.  ENERGY!  We Needs It!

http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/apr/science/ee_ethanol.html

One time I tried to grow a chia pet but it died.

Tom that is friggin hilarious! I am worried about the cactus I gave you. But you would have to try and kill that thing. Anyway, check out this pic I took yesterday right in the good old Wissahickon Valley. This is the stream down Gorgas lane and the hillside and all the soil is literally washing away. They are doing a major project to try and fix it, but I'm not sure if it will work... THis is depressing...

wow, you can see both the tree in the foreground and the one on the other side are done for.

Chuck, thanks for the info on the irrigation system; it's not as sinister as I make it out I'm sure.

Isn't there farming machinery that's now guided if not totally automated by gps?

I was fortunate to spend my childhood holidays (vacations) in Devon, UK: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2196/2076380368_e16fbdc2d9_b.jpg

Yeah, they have gps guided stuff now.  Still needs an operator on board.  The idea is that you can plant the field using a tractor guided by gps, that way it is super accurate and doesn't overlap or leave gaps in the planting.  Other uses is recording how much yield you get from specific areas of the field when harvesting...this is then mapped and helps figure out what areas of the field need help (fertilizer), in tandem with area specific soil testing.   Then using these maps when applying the fertilizer to put down area specific amounts.  This saves fertilizer but also helps from over use, which can run off and damage the watershed.

This stuff is really neat but it sounds super expensive.  Do smaller family owned operations have the capital to afford these systems?  More importantly do they have access to education which will enable the to effectively leverage these products?

Apparently so.  Some of the systems have been around for a while and are widely in use.  The auto guide stuff is newer, so I don't know about it much.

My family uses the gps to do yield mapping when harvesting for example.  Then hires a fertilizer company to do soil test and get the fertilizer where it is needed.

Most of it is pretty simple and a lot of the farmers seem to have a really good understanding of how everything works anyway.

Talk about old school, I've many a day on a '39 Model A poppin Johnny and a Model B too. 

Karl 

ps - I prefer skid steers (Case over Bobcat)

Skid steer wheelies rule!   ;D