re: Why isn't Louisiana an agricultural powerhouse?

i grew up farming rice, a little crawfish and cane. The nutrients that were in the historic prairie soils have essentially been exported as commodities, and now these soils produce competitively only with the use of fossil fuel fertilizers. adjusting from hunter/gatherers to farmers leapt our culture into what it is today, but too much of this method requires "force" with support from technology - forced pest control, forced scaling using heavy machinery, forced irrigation, forced drainage by deepening our streams into nothing more than drainage ditches.

we can return the prairie biomes to rebuild soil, grow grass and harvest as various forms of protein, return our ditches to the ecosystem that is the stream, and add back a major component to the water budget - the ability to store moisture in the soil and soil's root systems. rice and crawfish pond soils where i grew up now are just pathetic sand flats when not flooded. also, what effect do the thousands of acres of ponded surface water in crawfish and rice ponds have on our rainfall cycles? all of this surface freshwater exposed to the sun's heat, easily evaporated to fall later as rain?

anyway rant on[off]. grow grass, harvest protein, hold moisture, eat beef