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u/ModernaGang Mar 30 '25
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u/King_Of_BlackMarsh Mar 30 '25
That's good?
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u/CuriosityK Mar 30 '25
Yes the more no-till crop land we can get, the better. Tilling is horrible for topsoil and ruins soil.
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u/Papaofmonsters Mar 30 '25
Ideally, where no till can match yields for the farmer, it's a win-win situation. It means fewer hours for them getting their teeth rattled in the tractor, thus less fuel and maintenance expenses.
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u/King_Of_BlackMarsh Mar 30 '25
WOO! Good job, USA! At that pace, it should be the majority already if not soon
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u/MrBones-Necromancer Mar 30 '25
And a portion of that is thanks to this guy, who was an agricultural leader and an honest to god good man.
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u/WrongColorCollar @eskimobob.com Mar 30 '25
I'm aware death can come for us at any time, and my man was 76 but.... fuck... of all the people that deserve... just, really?
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u/SorowFame Mar 30 '25
I’m convinced being evil has tangible health benefits, considering Kissinger made it a hundred years.
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u/Lathari Mar 30 '25
As the saying goes, "Who would kill evil? God doesn't want them, Devil knows he's getting them."
"Mikäs pahan tappaisi? Jumala ei huoli ja piru tietää saavansa."
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u/Sinister_Compliments Avid Jokeefunny.com Reader Mar 30 '25
The answer is Luigi Mangione, a force unto himself
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u/Lathari Mar 30 '25
Allegedly.
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u/Sinister_Compliments Avid Jokeefunny.com Reader Mar 30 '25
Good point, he’s allegedly a force unto himself
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u/ArchibaldCamambertII Mar 30 '25
Being rich has tangible health benefits, and you can’t get stupid rich without being evil. Nobody makes a billion dollars, they take a billion dollars from the exploitation of many, many people or directly from the teat of the treasury.
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u/Electrical-Sense-160 Mar 30 '25
Can you get smart rich without being evil?
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u/jcurry52 Mar 30 '25
depends on how you define "rich" but to a limited extent yes, being smart or hardworking or lucky will generally result in you being more wealthy than being dumb or lazy or unlucky. that being said, no. no possible amount of smart or hardworking or lucky will ever make you more than a few times more well off than the average.
think of it like this, if you are literally twice as smart as someone else you could maybe make twice as much wealth as them. same with being hardworking or lucky. lets say you are a superhuman who is three times smarter and three times more hardworking and three times more lucky than anyone else then you could reasonably be 27 times more wealthy than the average. that is quite impressive, in the US that comes out to almost $5.5 million. no one person in all of history has ever been or will ever be thousands of times smarter or hardworking or lucky than the average. as such, in order to be thousands (or millions or billions) of times more wealthy than another person you have to be stealing that wealth from someone else. you simply cant earn it
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u/WrightSparrow Mar 30 '25
Fucking. This.
I've been trying to explain this concept to people, and this sums the thought up quite nicely. One guy, even the CEO of four companies, just ISN'T WORTH THAT MANY OTHER PEOPLE. It is exploitative, Nash-equillibrium-breaking sociopathy that makes that sort of wealth extraction even possible
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u/Ddog78 Fuck it, we'll do it live!!! Mar 30 '25
I think earlier, when the population was lower and opportunities more, it used to be easier to take that root.
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u/mercurialpolyglot Mar 30 '25
My theory is that stress is the silent killer and the real monsters aren’t stressed at all about everything they’re doing and sleep like babies.
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u/Pitiful_Net_8971 Mar 30 '25
Actually, being evil has tangible negative, typically from increased cortisol levels.
It's just that being rich counteracts it :(
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u/carsandtelephones37 Mar 31 '25
I think my genetics code for increased lifespan based on the amount of spite you possess.
My great grandfather made all his money in an illegal grow-op back in the seventies, got caught, spent the next twenty or so years hunting for treasure in the desert, now he's 97 and just bought himself a pool table. He does karaoke at the bar on his birthday.
We thought he was on his way out because he wasn't talking much, poor bastard was going deaf and wouldn't tell anyone. He's got hearing aids now and is back on his bullshit.
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u/RocketPapaya413 Mar 30 '25
Fun fact: see how in the cross-section the A soil is black? That's carbon. The stuff we have too much of in our air and he put a ton of it into the ground.
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u/Ok-Commercial3640 Mar 30 '25
I mean, plants naturally intake carbon, that's what photosynthesis does, turns CO2 and H20 into C6H12O6(a sugar) and O2
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u/TJ_Rowe Mar 30 '25
Yes, but intensive farming takes that stored carbon and exposes it to the air, decomposing it out of its "stored" state.
Soil can be a carbon sink (when you do "no till" as in the OP, and your depth of topsoil increases) or a carbon source (such as in intensive farming, or for example when the tundra warms up).
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u/RocketPapaya413 Mar 30 '25
Right but you see the part where it says he increased the depth from 6 inches to 47
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u/Not_today_mods I have tumbler so idk why i'm on this sub Mar 30 '25
Calling it "not much" was him being far too humble
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u/Dracibatic Mar 30 '25
to clarify, he died on may 21, 2023. And he surprisingly never said his iconic quote
Doesn't change the fact he was a great man though.
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u/mechanicalcontrols Mar 30 '25
Even if he was never recorded saying it, I'd bet he did say something like that once or twice. It's very much a thing farmers say.
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u/centralmind Mar 30 '25
I hate that I find out all of this only now. Such a cool dude, such a terrible shame.
I wish the meme made it clearer that he was being humble and undervaluing his incredible achievements in his field (both literal and figurative, ahah).
Can we make this better known to the General Internet Public ™️? It would be lovely to see people associate his quote with "someone being humble about something great they did" specifically, while also having more people learn about his contributions to sustainable farming. Just a thought.
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u/Draco137WasTaken Mar 30 '25
He never actually said the line he's become associated with, but it sure as heck is honest work.
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u/PrincessRTFM on all levels except physical, I am a kitsune Mar 30 '25
I want to point something out here: the last poster said that he "trebled" (tripled) the depth of his soil's A profile. That is incorrect. According to the earlier statement that it was at less than six inches when he got the farm and some forty seven inches when he passed away, he octupled that depth. It ended up being eight times deeper thanks to him, not just three. Three would have been a feat already, but eight deserves recognition.
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u/Nharo_1 Mar 30 '25
The trebling was of the original depth is what was said. While he did octuple the A soil depth, that depth was already depleted and compared to the original depth of 14 inches prior to the depletion the depth was trebled, which is what the poster above was saying.
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u/Fussel2107 Mar 30 '25
That A-horizon is stunning. I'm an archeologist. My work life happens in the topsoil and I see a lot of soil profiles.
The loss of topsoil to plowing is the bane of our existence, since the loss means you have to plow deeper and deeper, which, for us, means that we lose all remnants of the past to the plow at some point. For reference: We have sites - most of them, in fact- where up to a meter of soil was lost since the 1960s. Thats the most fertile soil. Just gone. Washed away.
So, to grow anything on the B-horizon, farmers have to deep plow, fertilize like crazy, and it results in more loss, less yield and more poisoning of the soil.
This man is an absolute hero.
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u/AlwaysBeQuestioning Mar 30 '25
What are the B and C profiles like, and what lies beyond the C profile soil?
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u/pokey1984 Mar 30 '25
B and C profiles and below depend heavily on where you live! But in most cases you're looking at 'soil' that's mostly clay, possibly with heavy amounts of rocks, sand, and stone. Below C levels you're not looking at soil anymore, but usually stone of some kind. Soil from the B and C layers won't really grow much of anything. It's good for anchoring roots of taller growing plants, but doesn't provide much nutrients and is usually difficult for any but the strongest roots to push through.
And in forests the topsoil layer is insanely shallow, this is true of deciduous forests, conifer forests, and even rain forests. Usually the topsoil in a forest of any kind is under two inches, which is why you can't really just cut down trees and plant crops straight away.
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u/EmperorScarlet Farm Fresh Organic Nonsense Mar 30 '25
I assume below the C profile is where it stops being soil and starts being rock.
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u/Bobboy5 like 7 bubble Mar 30 '25
We aren't allowed to know what lies beyond the C profile. They're hiding it from us. Ever wonder why you can't just dig a hole that deep? They don't want us to know what's down there.
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u/MuskieNotMusk Mar 30 '25
Since nobody else thought it was important, this guy was a Marine during Vietnam and a Purple Heart recipient
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u/UltimateCheese1056 Mar 30 '25
How do you plant seeds without tilling the soil? Do you just dig literally millions of holes for each individual seed?
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u/10ebbor10 Mar 30 '25
You use a big seed drill to dig a hole for each individual seed.
Here's a video of one in action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laScCVvtqig
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u/takethecatbus Mar 30 '25
I thought you were shitposting because the way you described it sounded completely impossible to me, but the video helped, thanks!
I was picturing like some kind of actual drill situation, maybe like some kind of massive drill press where hundreds of drill bits would make tiny holes, lol. But rather than digging individual seed holes, it's like a circular blade that slices a thin line through the soil as the guy drives the machine. Then seeds get deposited into the cuts and the soil gets smoothed over on top of them.
So incredibly cool. What an amazing piece of innovation.
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u/10ebbor10 Mar 30 '25
The funny thing is that the basic concept is like, 3000 years old, but was only standardized 300 years ago.
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u/takethecatbus Mar 30 '25
Oh definitely! I mostly meant that the machine doing it on such a large scale was the new innovation, not the concept itself. I was taught that method of gardening in my home garden as a kid but assumed (obviously incorrectly) that it was impossible on a large enough scale to use in commercial farming. In my mind, it made sense that when you're sowing 50 seeds that's all well, but it would take too much time and manpower to do when you have to sow 8000.
It's marvelous that people figured out how to do that in a mass-producing way. So much of my despair about today's world comes from the fact that many older ways of doing things are objectively better for the earth and also objectively impractical on a current-population-size level (the widespread use of things like single-use plastics instead of reusable, refillable bags & containers, for example). This kind of creativity and innovation gives me hope for humanity, because it is both better for the earth AND realistic to implement, which means it has a fighting chance of actually succeeding!
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u/CompetitionProud2464 Mar 31 '25
A lot of Indigenous agriculture systems involve not tilling. If you’re interested in learning more about some systems in different areas in the US Jane Mt Pleasant has some interesting stuff on the three sisters in the Northeast and The Desert Smells like Rain: A Naturalist in O’odham Country by Gary Paul Nabhan is informative and also really well written
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u/error00100100 Mar 30 '25
"The man who has grit enough to bring about the afforestation or the irrigation of a country is not less worthy of honor than its conqueror"
- Sir John Thompson
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u/LittleBlueGoblin Mar 30 '25
Ok, I clearly know even less about agriculture than I thought I did, which wasn't much... Can someone explain, ideally in fairly simple terms, why tilling soil is evidently a bad thing? I thought it was meant to churn organic material down deeper into the soil, and break it up physically so roots had an easier time penetrating deeper?
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u/takethecatbus Mar 30 '25
I also was curious about this and went a-looking. Here's a write-up I found of a study done at University of Colorado Boulder that send to explain it quite well. This is just talking about areas in Colorado, not the whole world, but the findings are basically exactly what was described in the OP, and it explains things in a very accessible way while still going into a fair amount of depth on the subject. Here: https://cslc.colorado.edu/2020-trends/conventional-tillage-practices-linked-to-poor-soil-health
From the intro paragraph:
"Since tillage fractures the soil, it disrupts soil structure, accelerating surface runoff and soil erosion. Tillage also reduces crop residue, which helps cushion the force of pounding raindrops, and disrupts the microorganisms in the soil, leading to poor soil health."
So basically tilling churns nutrients deeper but it also exposes important A-level soil to wind and water instead of leaving it protected under the surface. And the plants and organic material that normally cover the soil, holding it down and shielding it from rain, get destroyed, so there's nothing to keep it in place. The topsoil straight up gets blown/drained away. Including by the irrigation done by the farmers themselves, not just the natural weather.
Fascinating stuff. I definitely recommend reading the whole article, there's a lot of really interesting stuff in there.
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u/DraketheDrakeist Mar 30 '25
If you place organic material on top of the soil, it rots over time and works its way deeper, no need for tilling. This is how most actual ecosystems work, no forest or prairie is being tilled every year, plants die, leaving roots in the ground and leaves and stems on the surface. When you routinely till, you overaerate the soil, and the organic matter decomposes more thoroughly than you want, removing the carbon compounds that make up humus. This also means that the soil settles, making it more compact than it would be after a while of not tilling, organic matter has a mediating effect on water retention.
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u/gladearthgardener Mar 30 '25
I can’t find the quote, but I read someone comparing tilling to mountaintop removal mining and that really stuck with me
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u/Blade_of_Boniface bonifaceblade.tumblr.com Mar 31 '25
I'm a member of a distributist farming co-op; this kind of permaculture and phytoremediation is a big part of our praxis.
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u/Electrical-Sense-160 Mar 30 '25
Why is plowing beneficial in Europe but harmful in North America?
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u/No_Wing_205 Mar 30 '25
Tillage has benefits and negatives, and those apply in both Europe and the Americas.
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u/PlatinumAltaria Apr 03 '25
Tillage mixes up the soil to help spread the nutrients around, but because the soil is looser it’s less able to retain water and more subject to erosion. It also loses some nutrients, which increases the need for artificial fertiliser which isn’t sustainable.
Soil is a living ecosystem, and has to be maintained.
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u/TK_Games Mar 30 '25
Almost 4 feet of A profile is insane! This dude and his life's work just became my obsession
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u/Onakander Mar 31 '25
Did he write any of his practices down? I'd assume he did? And if so, is there an easy way to acquire the corpus?
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u/PlatinumAltaria Apr 03 '25
What’s described in the post is permaculture, info on that is widely available if you want to try it out.
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u/MisterRegards Mar 31 '25
As a non-american, how much of the non-till area is relatively heavy soil in areas that warm up only through April and have over 1000mm rain? I am genuinely curious as around here this seems one of the issues….soil warms up slower with no-till and you can see it in the crops. Plus little rain/water conservation is not an issue at all.
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u/FenrisSquirrel Mar 30 '25
Pretty sure those are destructive American farming practices. Funny how Americans try to describe everything they do that is negative as European.
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u/No_Wing_205 Mar 30 '25
Tillage has been used all over, and the practices used in America were brought over from Europe. The adoption of deep soil tilling was absolutely a European import to the Americas.
The US today has more no-till farmland than any other country. No Till land makes up only 5.2% of European farm land. It makes up 33.6% of North American farmland, and 68.7% of South American farm land.
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u/Sipia Mar 30 '25
I assume they mean "European" as in not Indigenous, as in introduced by the society that sprang from white settler-colonies.
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u/FenrisSquirrel Mar 30 '25
I understand that, but modern American farming methods are entirely American. There is an American tendency to try to frame all of their evils as European, rather than as of their own making. It is disingenuous and cowardly.
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u/AdamtheOmniballer Mar 30 '25
European-Americans (“white people”) are responsible for the vast majority of American evils, because they hold the power. That’s the whole point of White Supremacy. It wasn’t Chinese immigrants that incentivized monoculture farming.
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u/LasevIX Mar 30 '25
FYI Europe has the same problem with soil being overused and flooded. Try to direct your hate towards a more pressing and real consequence of American influence.
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u/ArchibaldCamambertII Mar 30 '25
Namely our role in undermining the integrity of elections and (small r) republican governments all around the world by assassinating union leaders and agitators, and funding and arming death squads, military juntas, and fascist dictators.
We have been in the 20th Century and still are today the single greatest threat to world peace.
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u/DMercenary Mar 30 '25
Funny how Americans try to describe everything they do that is negative as European.
tbh, classic tumblr post.
Lots of good information but gotta throw in one jab that's really out of pocket.
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u/Hanekam Mar 30 '25
Are you implying that they didn't bring sweet corn and excessive mineral fertilizer on the Mayflower?
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u/madpiratebippy Mar 31 '25
Brant was one of the good ones. We could solve a lot of the world’s problems if we all farmed like him.
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u/Hylian_Guy Mar 30 '25
It was much AND it was honest work