Did it occur to you that, like ordinary consumer products, industrial products also oversell their efficacy?
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.
Corn yields have been going up a bit more than 1.5 bushels per acre since hybrid breeding started in the 1930's going from a steady ~25 bu/acre to >170/acre today.
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.
>> Farmers haven't just been adding a bit more fertilizer and water every year,
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.
You are assuming farms are the only or current main source of nitrates just because there is a correlation. Overtreated lawns and golf courses could have taken up the slack of farming usage for one. The other sectors need to be factored in for nitrate content.
Parent didn’t say it was the only source just said that rates correlated.
The fluctuation year to year may be due better growing seasons so farmers use more, but potentially so do golf courses and lawns. The usage of the others may definitely be drivers as well but agricultural use is correlated
"There was just a paper released about a widely used pesticide that did not appear to actually increase yields."
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.
If nothing else a large farm gains more from efficiency. $10/acre when you have 80 acres is $800. If you have 3,000 acres that is $30,000 - which means you can afford to pay for more efficiency.
I can give some credence to the claim. I work for TeeJet a subset of Spray Systems and we design and manufacture application technology for the AG industry:
"At TeeJet Technologies our single focus is on application technology. Our company and our products have been part of agricultural applications since the first crop protection products came onto the market in the 1940's. Our control systems date back to some of the earliest in-field uses of electronics in agriculture. This experience in the fields of spraying, fertilizing, and seeding means nobody is better suited to provide quality products and technical solutions for your business."
Glyphosate, with GMO crops or without, means you don't need to till your land. It's enabled a huge fraction of productive acreage to become no-till or low-till, which preserves soil nutrients, aids soil water absorption, reduces agricultural runoff, improves cover-cropping, and more.
There are a variety of farming practices that contribute to the efficiency of agriculture, but no-till is absolutely central. The late 90s through early oughts saw big increases in no-till acreage, up to ~20% of all land by 2002, precisely when fertilizer inputs started to decline. It sits between 40-50% now.
A hypothetical example is drones going through a field and manually picking out weeds, increasing yield with the same amount of resources. Similarly you can get fine grained ‘crop analytics’ through drones scanning the field and acting in response.
I don't have any figures citations since my knowledge comes from when I used to hang out on Precision Agriculture forums, but it's common and getting more so. As drones get less expensive, it's easy to sit in your den and fly over the fields looking for the areas where you should go out and spray some more, or drive over in your UTV and take a closer look at that "weird spot" on the "back 80."
Farmers are very aware of the benefits of technology (why else would you spend half a million $ on a combine?) and will take it up if they see a benefit.
Re-reading the post, it seems that he and I might be talking about different things. I'm referring to farmers using remote controlled drones with cameras to check the state of their crops/fields without having to drive over hundreds of acres. That's an actual thing and is quite common.
OP seems to be talking about some kind of automated drone weeding (or just phrased what he meant poorly).
Very large scale, just not in the exact form GP is describing; instead, farmers drop stationary internet-connected sensors all over their fields, their sampling equipment GPS-tags results from every core sample, and tractors have computer-controlled equipment to feed location and quantity information to chemical dispensers.
I am not at all denying the benefits of technology, or that companies are working in it, but I am skeptical of how widespread it is right now. Therefore, I would want to see some numbers to verify such a claim.
What about an increase in organic farming? Certified organic crops sell for higher prices, and all the big shops I see in California sell a lot of that. I'm under the impression that organic farms don't use petroleum derived fertilizers.
Technological advances in agriculture would presumably explain it, many of which are probably computer driven (precision agriculture, data-driven agriculture being two examples).
