Today everything we build is getting bigger and bigger: buildings, airplanes, and even televisions. And of course, tractors and most vehicles have followed the same path. To put it in context: a current one is almost ten times heavier than it was in the 1960s. And although the change in size is usually justified (they gain more efficiency and last longer), there is a price to pay: the environmental one.
As these behemoths continue to grow in size, it is the ground that grieves the most. The extreme weight of vehicles is wreaking havoc on the interior of the earth under our feet.
The study. Fully loaded, a combine harvester can weigh up to 36 tons, when 50 years ago it would not have weighed four. The potential consequences are a reduction of a fifth of the world’s crops. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by several scientists details how much “compaction” these farm machines are causing.
Its impact is comparable to that caused by the sauropod dinosaurs that lived 66 million years ago on Earth.
What does this mean? Basically that the soils cannot support so much load before the enormous pressure causes them to compact. Soils support a lot of life in their ecosystems: from tiny airways to almost insignificant water channels that transport it to living plants and organisms. Therefore, all the weight exerted by gigantic vehicles causes them to crush and collapse those small spaces, reducing crop yields by up to 20%.
With no space to pass through, there is neither air nor water.
The tendency to magnify things. The study indicates that as the weight of the machinery increases, so does the size of the tires (although attempts are being made to adjust the contact area between the vehicle and the ground to reduce that pressure and prevent surfaces from sinking). As the authors argue, dinosaurs followed a similar procedure: increasing the size of their legs to help keep them from sinking into the ground.
This is what they call the “sauropod paradox”.. The dinosaurs and were so large that they would have caused significant damage to the subsoil, destroying the ecosystems that support plants and insects. The researchers intuit that, possibly, they walked through safe and compact spaces and made use of their long neck when they had to approach a less safe or humid area to collect food.
Also cars increase. As we told in this article in Magnet, car brands have been focused on selling us increasingly larger passenger cars for more than a decade. SUVs already occupy 23% of the market share in Spain and 36% in Europe. This means that, more and more frequently, the debate is revived about whether they have returned more hostile road safety on the roads.
According to this study by the Detroit Free Press and USA Today Network, SUVs increase between two and three times the mortality of pedestrians compared to other vehicles. A trend that can now be extrapolated to tractors. Although in his case the victims are not so much the pedestrians as the soils that support our crops.
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