There was just a paper released about a widely used pesticide that did not appear to actually increase yields.
If the question is, how does crop tonnage go up without water and fertilizer use, maybe the answer really is a computer helped people plan better and be less wasteful.
Or all the least efficient farmers were bankrupted out of the market.
Farmers haven't just been adding a bit more fertilizer and water every year, and it has been going on long before computers.
Many factors go into it: soil management with tilling practices and fertilizers, pest and weed management, improvements in irrigation and drainage, better harvesters which leave less on the ground, but very much most importantly, plant genetics.
Nice to believe and it is certainly what growers should be doing, but the evidence clearly indicates that they really aren't.
Nitrate levels in the Mississippi are directly correlated to nitrogen use in agriculture and in the upper Mississippi River and Missouri River, flow-normalized nitrate concentration and flux have increased steadily during 1980–2000 and is most measuring sites accelerated since 2000.[0]
At the two most downstream sites on the Mississippi River, increasing trends in flow-normalized nitrate concentration are a relatively new development and at least partly reflect increases occurring in the Missouri River and the upper Mississippi River.
Many believe this increase in nitrate concentration is directly responsible for the Gulf of Mexico dead zone – an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and other marine life – which for 2019 NOAA scientists are forecasting to be approximately 7,829 square miles or roughly the size of the land mass of Massachusetts.[1]
I don't see how Ausubel's conclusion on decreased fertilizer use squares with the measured reality on the ground (or the water) in this case.
[0]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2013/5169/pdf/sir20135169.pdf
[1]: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/noaa-forecasts-very-large...
When my father was in a university geology department in an Agriculturally intensive midwestern state in the 80's, he worked on a few projects with farmers related to water use. One thing he looked into (unrelated to the main research project) was the cost/benefit of ferilizer use. The gist of it was that he came up a curve representing the marginal value added of fertilizer, which started high, and eventually went negative. Past a certain point, less fertilizer was absorbed into the soil and more went directly to runoff/there was more than the plants could use, something like that, and thereafter the added cost outweighed the further crop gains. Most of the farmers in the area were going beyond that point to some extent, and could increase their profit by decreasing fertilizer use to some extent. He said the farmers he talked to were skeptical, but one tried it out on one of their fields that year, found it to be an improvement, and a number of farmers in the area reduced their fertilizer to some extent using the curve as a guidance. The fertilizer sellers would probably just have said that more fertilizers would lead lead to more productivity, which was true, but not presented the cost/benefit.
I don't know too much about farming/crop science, but could see there having been improvements in things like this as well as GMO's & selective breeding. At one point Iowa State University was one of the leading statistics department in the US, which I believe was in large part due to the applicibility of statistics to farming.
"Or all the least efficient farmers were bankrupted out of the market."
One of the trends in the Midwest over the last few decades has been the transition from a larger number of smaller farms to a smaller number of very large farms. Perhaps this is greater efficiency/mechanization/scale.
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