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Thomas Bunke's avatar

When discussing Black Earth and Agriculture, we should not leave out the importance for carbon-dioxide (and methane) related climate change. Ucrainians Black Earth has between 4% and 16% humus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem#cite_note-2) which make up for 40 to 160 tonnes of Carbon per acre in the first 10cm of soil. And this chernozem might go as deep as 3 m in Ucraine and Russia. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/chernozem). This means for 100mi acres between 4 bi or up to 480 bi tonnes of Carbon corresponding to between 15 bi and 1700 bi tonnes of CO2.This is half a years fossil emission (e.g. 2006) and 48 years of 2016 emissions (https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-year/). The deliberate use of extensive and conventional farming techniques may very likely release this carbon and contribute to the depletion of these valuable soils (along with phosphorus, potassium and ammonia depletion). Small scale agriculture usually has a smaller impact due to the use of classical mulching, green manure and no-tilling techniques (that might very well be net carbon sequestering), whereas large scale agriculture by use of herbicides and heavy machinery has soil depletion as inevitable consequence.

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DANIEL P. Tompkins's avatar

Sidebar on Ukraine's "legendary agricultural potential": I was stunned, looking into the archives of Seligman’s ambitious Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, to find the editors' alterations of the entry on Soviet agriculture by Lenin’s old foe Peter Struve, by 1932 living in exile in Paris. Active in the 1890s in trying to improve agriculture under the Czar, he'd written for years about ag and land tenure. His contribution, covering 800BC- 1932 CE, arrived in 1932, with Stalinist collectivization well under way, displaced peasants, starving in huge numbers or shipped in freight trains to factories. Struve's ms, concludes dismally:

"The real goal ... has not been reached... a decrease in domestic agricultural production ..., without at the same time promoting ... export ...a terrific famine, on a scale exceeding anything Russia has ever experienced." This grim indictment of Stalin’s agricultural policy never appeared in print. As the Encyclopaedia archives reveal, the New York editors replaced Struve’s text, referring instead to Walter Duranty’s cheery NYT fiction, 'Peasants Rejoice Over Stalin Order.'

Who altered Struve’s text? We cannot tell. The Encyclopaedia’s archives include fact-checking data but yield nothing conclusive. The list of fifteen assistant editors for this volume included Lewis Corey, Louis Hacker, Max Lerner, Herbert Solow and Bernhard Stern, all interested in Marx one way or another: Solow was to play a pivotal role in bringing Whittaker Chambers in from the cold. Corey, under the name Fraina, had been a founding member of the Communist Party of the United States, as he revealed to his surprised associate editor Alvin Johnson, whose response -- another surprise -- was not to fire him. Johnson records this moment in his memoir.

Someone re-stalinized Struve's text. I found no indication that Struve ever heard of or complained about this, but all part of putting a smiley face on Ukrainian suffering.

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