The over-use of pesticides such as 2,4D and the use of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer is a reason i chose college over farming on the family farm. The anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, injected into the ground behind moldboard plows, kills all the soil invertebrates that are the critical link in the soil formation process of the organic portion of the soil horizon. But damn, the economic incentive is there for them to do just that. As the growing season for corn and soybeans has moved northward, it has been possible to pay for farmland in as little as two years of the incredible bounty. While the southern and central plains suffered through drought, the harvest of corn and soybeans hit records in minnesota and north dakota. The land prices lagged a bit, and fortunes were made. Particularly if one was over the Bakken Formation.
That article kind of oversimplifies some things, such as neglecting to report one of the few benefits of the no-till type of chemical farming, which is that the soil is not laid bare every year, reducing wind erosion of the topsoil a la the dust bowl. Plowing turns the weed and weedseeds under in the traditional organic way, but it costs a layer of topsoil to the weather, summed up in the Universal Soil Loss Equation.
Proper rotational farming is not being practiced much any more, as too much trust is being put into genetic engineering of pest-resistant strains that need to be constantly adjusted (and make keeping one's own seed for the next crop impractical, and probably in violation of patents) but one must keep in mind that soybeans are nitrogen fixing legumes, and thus are actually a good alternate crop for the nutrient-annihilating corn.
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