A offshoot of “Romans salting the earth after the 3rd Punic War. Fact or Myth?” thread
My question is, is this a effective method of preventing agriculture in the ways that the Romans were said to use in (but didn’t)?
I can understand it killing growing crops for that season, but it would require massive amounts of salt, most likely on the order of how we salt roads today - a huge effort for such a early society. And that salt would be washed away by rain, so perhaps only effective for one season? Or would it persist for many seasons?
I was wondering about this just yesterday, actually. All the road salt we’ve got around here *has *to be killing stuff off- everything that travels on, or lives near, the roads is crusted white from all the road salt.
Nah. We always appreciate runner pat’s spam reports and they usually include the name of the spammer. Most of the time the spam reports just get deleted along with the spam, but in this case, since you commented on it I only removed the spammer’s name and not all of runner pat’s post.
And at what point in ancient history did salt become common enough to make it a reasonable product to till into the ground? (serious question)
Jiminy wouldn’t it take a massive amount of salt just to wreck a single acre? Who’s going to haul all that salt around on the off-chance they might run into an opportunity to do in someone’s farm? Seems a lot simpler just to slaughter all the locals and claim the land for one’s own.
Some guy called Cecil Adamsestimates 31 tons per acre will do the trick. Which google tells me is 0.0459136823 pounds per (square foot) which seems a lot more doable.