Increasingly heavy farm equipment is crushing fertile soils
Fat tires may keep giant combines from sinking into the field, but their tremendous weight still squeezes the life out of the soil deep down—potentially reducing crop yields across a lot of the planet.
If you start talking with Thomas Keller or Dani Or about farm machinery, sooner or later the conversation will turn to dinosaurs. Why would two experts in the biology and structure of soils segue from tractors and combines to extinct behemoths? Because today’s farm vehicles, they explain in a recent paper, have become nearly as heavy as the largest animals that ever stomped the Earth—and the sheer weight is crushing one of the world’s most precious resources: fertile soil.
“It's not rocket science,” says Or, who splits his time between the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich. “For over a century, we have had a persistent increase in the size
