Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
pnas.org
pnas.org
That does not have to be an issue for the EU per se, as the EU is a net exporter of food in value, and potentially in calories as well.
And on the other hand, the revenue model tends to require this sort of practices, unless there’s room in (and you aim for) the more bougie distribution channels / outlets the hit is hard to absorb, especially the hit in reliability.
We're overproducing anyway, with massive environmental followup issues. Switching to less meat would free up a lot of grain production and help get nitrate runoff from all the poo used as fertilizer under control, but that's politically untenable and the markets would just adapt to import more Brazilian meat grown on burned-down rainforest farms.
This raises a number of problems:
- the poo and urine from the farm animals is way, way too much to distribute on the fields around these mega-farms, meaning it has to be transported across Europe. The worst offenders here are the Dutch, which have so much manure that it's impossible to spread out all of it in the country, and plans to close down farms have led to protests and riots [3].
- These farms themselves, as well as the slaughterhouses, are a blight on their neighborhoods - from personal experience, it's bad enough to live next to half a dozen cows, but large farms? These can be smelled many kilometres away.
- all these farm animals have to be fed insane amounts of food - depending on which study you believe and which animal you look at, 1kg of animal meat requires anything from 3 to 20kg of plant-based food (most often, grain).
The last point is where the meat is at: say, you cut down the demand for meat in half. For Germany, that would mean going from 7.6 million tons a year to 3.8 million tons - by the leverage effect anything between 12 to 38 million tons of grain production can be avoided, or to put it bluntly: out of the 43 million tons of grain produced in Germany in 2022 [5], you can avoid around 25%. Obviously the numbers are a bit off due to imported food and livestock, but the estimate is that, yes, in fact about half the grain produced in the country is food for livestock [6].
Even assuming that humans will eat a bit more grain to compensate for the calories they would have gotten by meat, it's still safe to assume that you could reduce total grain growth by at least 10% - enough to provide strips of greenery surrounding fields and to make them otherwise more friendly for animals. The reduction of manure production would lead to higher water quality in rivers and more aquatic life, and the space occupied by large stables can also be returned to nature for local environments.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/gefluegelmaester-in-d...
[2] https://www.boell.de/de/2016/01/13/mecklenburg-vorpommern-wo...
[3] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Nitrat-im-Grund...
[4] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgun...
[5] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Landw...
[6] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgun...
Edit: Regarding meat from Latin Amerca, where exactly do you think all the raw materials forbthe vegan, processed stuff in our super markets come from? Like imported meat, from burned down rain forest areas, ranging from Latin America to Asia.
I was up in scottish highlands recently and many hills are bold like someone just shaved them. Looks weired.
The only solution O see is to habe a global forestly fund, so developing countries can get paid but dont have to destroy forests.
That just incentivizes scammers and fraud, just like many of the "CO2 offset certificates" based on paying people not destroying forests they wouldn't have destroyed anyway [1].
[1] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2023-01/co2-certificates-frau...
CO2 market depends on assertations of intent, and on efficacy, both of which are easy to forge and hard to prove.
Forestry found is much simpler. Everyone put money into a pot, say. we hVe 100 billion dollars.
The. yoy get data from satellite, and calculate square miles of forest.
Then you divide the pot by square miles of forest.
Then countries det paid based on how many square miles are in their borders.
There is not potential for fraud - the calculation is sinple and idiotproof. You might debate if some marginal land is forest or not, but for 90% of it you can clearly see what it is from space.
You can also have debate about how muhch should be put into the pot, and by whom.
And on top of that come the corruption issues. Large amounts of foreign money flowing into poor(er) countries has historically always invited either said money being grifted away or redirected to other political budgets that have nothing to do with the purpose the money was originally earmarked for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...
[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/14/devastating-burning-seas...
Then they can't compete – yet.
It's not a predefined unavoidable destiny that is to go through, that is all about what policies are chose with which agenda in mind.
Unemployment didn't reach 0% anywhere last time I checked, and as it was already mentioned, no actor out there is playing without some public subsidiaries.
This is all political decisions. Local short term optimisation of plutocrate revenues is one possibility. Perennial national sustainability is an other one. These two agendas however probably don't overlap much.
If this method has equal land yields and less environmental impact but is highly labor intensive, perhaps there is scope for mechanization to make it competitive.
- switch to this better method of farming
- end the corporate oligarchy controlling food by having smaller farms
- shift people out of net negative “services” into farming
I don’t see the downfall of industrial farming as a bad thing — they’re a whole problem all on their own (including the recent push to take away family farms from the Dutch).
It's not the great leap forward, it's the small choking of those left behind.
Farms have indeed grew larger through consolidation (no one got expropriated - farming is now capital-intensive and economy of scale kicks in with larger farms - small owners either bought their neighbours and became big, sold or went bankrupt) but nearly all of them are still privately owned by people whose family history is in farming.
I find the nostalgia for small scale farming somewhat amusing personnaly. In my experience, it mostly comes from urban people doing white collar jobs. The reality of managing a small farm is not fun.
Livestock farming is the only activity which remains somewhat widespread on a small scale here and it's miserable. It's a buyer market. Farmers are being squeezed out as much as possible by their distributors.
Exactly, people removed from farming do not understand how predatory the market actually is towards them. And they go around tilting at windmills.
All I said was that we should change the standards around farming to stop providing legal support to mega farms (eg the current government policy that’s failing) and allow the natural outcome of more labor intensive farming to happen — which through shifting the incentives and existing legal framework, would have people shift back into farming.
The person I was responding to said more labor intensive farming would be bad — I pointed out that the market effect of that change would actually be positive in several ways.
Comparing a change to the legal framework which leads to a change in market dynamics that’s positive isn’t anything like the Great Leap Forward.
The natural outcome is that production is shifted to countries with laxer laws and cheaper cost of labour not that people shift back into farming. Farming is not economically viable on a small scale without subsidies in Europe.
Also, that’s what tariffs are for: food security is national security.
Finally, the Dutch farmers currently having their farms seized seemed to be doing fine — except for political interference in the name of environmentalism. Why is that intervention fine, but supporting small farmers rather than mega corporations not?
It's fine and might be a solution to the problem but purposefully orienting subsidies towards something and putting tariffs in place are as far removed from "the natural outcome" as you can get.
> Finally, the Dutch farmers currently having their farms seized seemed to be doing fine — except for political interference in the name of environmentalism. Why is that intervention fine, but supporting small farmers rather than mega corporations not?
I have trouble following your argument. Are you or are you not in favour of top down policies and mass expropriations by the State? If that's the case, see the original point about the Great Leap Forward. I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it too here.
What does this even mean?
Many varieties of crops are intellectual property, and small farms can't affprd them. The entire concept of intellectual property is unnatural and did not exisy untill recently.
Is it 'natural' to be allowed pollute as much as your want, and have waste running into rivers, or is it natural to be allowed absolutely zero pollution beyong the boundaries of your farm?
But the present situation is brought about by those very policies, where (eg) the Dutch government is seizing Dutch family farms as part of their Green Leap Forward — and you seem fine with that status quo. In fact, you’re out here saying we can’t change policy to protect family farms from such government intervention.
> Farming is not economically viable on a small scale without subsidies in Europe.
My point is that the collapse of small farms isn’t organic market forces, but government policy such as the Green Leap Forward expropriating them — and so it’s completely ridiculous to say we can’t change policy (eg, stop doing that) to help small farms.
Policy is the problem; why would changing it not be the solution?
Nobody mentioned expropriating. One can put down incentives that benefit the desired outcome in the same way we've been doing in many different scenarios.
Also I didn't see any call for some kind of localized mass mobilizations towards agriculture in the way the great leap forward might have seen with things like iron smelting & the like. Agricultures share of employment is sub 5% in most of the west. A quick look at a graph for the US makes me think sub 2%
If you push the industry towards these more sustainable tho more labour incentive practices chances are it'll be a slow change with an increase in workers in agriculture that isn't going to radically change society. It's not like half a century ago in the 60's the west was in some kind of agriculture dominant feudal age despite there being even 3-4 times as many workers in agriculture if not more depending on where you look.
And of course we're forgetting technology, options for a middleground, etc in all this.
Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...
We have to change the course, or it will be selected for us and we won't have a say in it.
The changes sounds reasonable enough but it sounds like it's take the government to force new farming methods on us, break up corporations, and force people to leave their current jobs and lives to work land elsewhere.
I buy from small family farms who use better methods — and you can too.
I also didn’t say anything about “break up corporations” nor “force people to leave their current jobs”; I only said that it’s fine if we make a pivot that’s more labor intensive… we can use people rather than robots.
Vote with your wallet for farms that use permaculture or similar; the market will naturally shift in response to the changed incentives and capable people will fill the void, through the personal pursuit of profits.
We could also, eg, preference small farms or permaculture in existing government subsidy programs.
I may very well have misunderstood your original message. I interested how change like breaking up the corporate oligarchies or shifting people from service jobs to farming could be made without massive government intervention.
The way I see it, our whole system is based on an economy that just doesn't line up at all with a farming-first type of approach. Major industries wouldn't be able to make that shift, modern conveniences would likely fall away, and the federal debt we keep piling higher and higher could never be paid.
Thst said, I have my own preconceived notions here and am genuinely curious what alternatives I've missed.
Any kind of regenerative practice in the current market situation needs to be competitive on a labor per output basis in the first place, not on the output per acre. Lightweight machines and robotics are part of the equation for sure, but will not be sufficient.
However, agriculture in Europe is already build on subsidizes and heavily regulated. So we have the tools, we just need to use them and defeat agro corps lobbying efforts. Not easy, considering a political party from an Agro PR firm won the elections in the Netherlands, and legitimized a toxic blend of corporate disinfo, conspiracy theories and populist violence.
Moving beyond the path of destruction seems as hopeless as ever.
I live in a rural place and the typical farmer here has mid to high seven figures invested in machines and implements and spends a lot of money on inputs, which in turn has contributed to farms getting bigger and bigger, which in turn requires more investment in mechanization, etc. On the other hand, we have founded a non-profit CSA market garden on 4.000m2 that can pay 1.5 people a decent salary. My personal impression is that for farming to become financially attractive to the practitioners again, we need to reduce size, reduce inputs, reduce capital expenditure and put quality and diversity back into focus.
I don't doubt that direct to consumer regenerative agriculture will never be 100% of the market, even in wealthy societies. But it still has tremendous potential to grow.
Some geeks here are coming up with sci-fi ideas of producing food in vertical farms, or underwater, why don't we start by simply using existing techniques?
Cutting back on industrial agriculture is sorely needed from an environmental standpoint, as well as reducing food waste. Solving starvation requires different solutions, such as improved distribution, as well as political stability.
Quite the opposite, exporting said surplus, besides accute deliveries to mitigate famine, can kill local farming. There is no way small, just a bit above subsistance farming can compete with the surplus of industrial farming in, e.g., Europe. Take chicken for example, in Europe we prefer chicken breasts and legs, the wings are a far, far third place. As a result, a lot ofbthe chicken left overs, legs, wings and so in, didn't have a market in Europe. It got expoeted to Africa, with a purchasing price of close to nothing since the meat sold in Europe already covered costs, overhead and profits. With shipping being close to nothing per chicken wing, the imported food was way cheaper than locally produced food, driving a bunch of local farmers out of busimess and into poverty. And reducing local food production, increasing the risk of local famine while increasing dependency on global food markets (not really a good thing neither....).
Same principle applies for donated clothes, only now local tailors, often women, are affected.
So no, cutting back on industrial over production is by no means taking part in genocide (!) (you couldn't aim lower than that, could you?).
And another side effect of subsidies is that it counteracts development aid sent to places that the EU competes with on farmed products. Instead of boosting their economies by importing stuff from those countries we kill their exports with subsidized local produce and then spend a lot on development aid. And fragile economies in Africa of course create all sorts of collateral issues including wars and refugees. All to protect local farmers so they can produce things like sugar beet so we can have subsidized local sugar production instead of just importing that from outside Europe.
This is also does in the face of free markets. If we keep process artificially low we won't see any explanation in production. That keeps prices high and sticks us in a loop where we need subsidies because prices are too high and can't reduce price because there's no market incentive.
European production costs around labour, regulations etc would be drastically undercut by foreign low cost markets and you would lose food sovereignty due to foreign imports.
Of course subsidies do introduce distortion but they are often simpler globally than tic for tat tariffs.
Say we subsidize corn because otherwise our corn industry would be decimated by cheap labor overseas. We successfully walled off one industry, but that cheaper foreign labor is still available for other production. Maybe workers that would be paid overseas to grow corn are instead paid to produce cheaper clothing that we can't compete with. We can't keep subsidizing one industry at a time in hopes of dodging a fundamental supply abstracts the other country has.
Tariffs can be an option there *if* imposed on all imports from one country. They have their own practical issues though, not least of all is enforcement. NATO made a huge deal about banning Russian oil when the war started but they still sell it just fine, often as crude oil to another country that refines it and still sells it to us anyway.
Though chemical fertilizer is likely a common weak point for food security with many countries. But this is not a new problem, the US pacific island grab in the 1800s to source Guano shows how regenerating soil macro nutrients has been a centuries old problem that countries have had grapple with.
To clarify, I don't recall if that was actually kep in country or the net import/export comparison, we may have been making enough to cover something like 90% but exporting that overseas.
Anyway, 100% agree fertilizer has been a problem for a long time. As long as we treat food production as an broken loop where farms are dependant on outside resources rather than building sustainable farming systems we'll always be stuck trying to steal someone else's nutrients in the form of fertilizer.
Edit: actually my mistake, that point was made in a separate thread. I think my point still stands though.
I'm happy to be wrong there though it's been a while now since I went down that rabbit hole!
I am not sure why people don't seem to understand this. If a nation ever finds itself dependent on a neighbour for water, food, electricity, oil etc, they are going to be in big trouble when it comes to any sort of negotiations.
The truth is that agricultural land is under tremendous pressure. It is far more lucrative to just build apartments or commercial real estate on farming land than it is to sustain agriculture. Subsidies are used to incentivize farmers to continue farming instead of disposing of their land.
Also, how self-sufficient are you really if your entire agricultural system is predicated on access to chemical fertilizers, which in turn is produced from natural gas of which you have to import close to 100%? The subsidy system is thoroughly dysfunctional and doesn't solve a real problem anymore, except by supporting existing economic structures.
Nations which don't have substantial access to food grown within their borders will place themselves at severe disadvantage when it comes to any sort of global negotiations.
Take the example of Qatar - when it was under sanction by many of the Arab countries, they could not import food.. and they were forced to get into agriculture and now agriculture thrives in Qatar even though the climate is not conducive.
https://thefarmermagazine.com.au/qatars-farmers-have-gone-fr...
I think a key takeaway from the pandemic is that you don’t want to be reliant of import from strategic ressources and food is priority number one.
European subsidies are mostly going to France which is a huge wheat producer.
Farming is an area where I can predict there are going to be a lot of tension in the EU between ecological ambition and the cold reality of having to feed everyone.
Just politics gets in the way as usual. But as the climate deniers power wanes it's a powerful tool ready to be used for good.
I agree we're raising far too many cattle, but just wanted to point out it's not very simple.
For IPCC it’s GHG mitigation and the vegan diet beats them all, while « all diets needs to provide full complement of nutritional quality, including micronutrients ».
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/4/2022/11/SRCC... (Page 488)
Edit : translate giec to ipcc
Protected lands of the Puerto Rican rain forest saw huge declines in insect and consequently birds and there is no farming there.
The explanation is simple. Heat waves are killing the bugs. They simply can't cope with 1 or 2 weeks of intense heat. You also see this with lizards and frogs.
Since they are low on the food chain this translates to bird declines, and other animal declines.
PS. I choose not to use "Climate Change" because it's too neutral and is the preferred term of the fossil fuel industry for a reason. I like "Global Warming" or "Climate Crisis" or "Climate Emergency" or "Climate Chaos". The problem is too serious to use neutral language.
Say I would really like to be part of pushing towards this in some way. Maybe through volunteering, by making a career adjustment (I'm full stack engineer) or going back to studying for a bit. What can I do?
Medium mode: Find a motivated young people that want to start a regenerative agricultural enterprise. Support them in some meaningful way. Agriculture will need to be changed from the bottom up to some important extend and that needs capital and other input. Access to land is expensive and farming involves a lot of bureaucracy both issues that you are probably well placed to support with.
Hard mode: Become a farmer! You don't need to cultivate 300 acres to be one. Find something (chickens, nut trees, bees, peaches, etc.) you are passionate about and that fits into your local context, spend a year or two to become an armchair expert, visit 10 other people already doing it and then get a bit of land and do it yourself. Depending on what you choose, a decent sized backyard can be a serious farming enterprise.
There is noticeable quantitative difference.
People 40+ and older remember from their childhood how car's windshield, lamps and grille were covered with dead insects every time you took long drive outside cites. Today you can drive small country roads for a day and get only small number of insects.
It used to be that you could walk in the garden and count easily 10-20 ladybugs eating aphid's from your planted flowers. My mother used fight aphids by spraying vinegar soap mix. Today the exact same spot with same flowers has no aphid problem and very few ladybugs.
It seems the main problem is that birds, the things bird eats, and for that matter other animals need a place to live, and there's really not a lot of places for them to live anymore when their habitat is turned from a natural environment, quite often forests, in to roads, cities, production of cereal, grass, vegetable etc.
We need to develop an agricultural system that can financially sustain itself within smaller structures, that incorporates edges and diversity, that utilizes ecological services instead of trying to suppress natural processes.
Can you elaborate? I don't see how this is superior to leaving it fallow?
I have a few acres fallow and am right next to a quaint organic farm and I do see quite a few more bees in my tall grass and wildflowers than I do in their grazed land...
Grazing, done correctly, is beneficial to the land too. E.g. grazing brings dungs to the land. The dungs give nutrients to both plants and insects. Stamping the land aerate the soil and exposes insect for birds, hence limiting pest. Birds spread seeds. Everything is in balance. Food is ultimately created from sunlight.
Industrial farming, on the other hand, simplifying heavily, is converting fossil fuels into food.
As a result, traditional Greek cuisine has lots of lamb and goat meat.
"Historically, Pag had more forested areas than it does today. The island used to be covered with oak and pine forests, but due to centuries of human activity, including grazing, deforestation, and the collection of firewood, much of the original forest cover has been reduced. Over time, the vegetation has adapted to the island's specific conditions, such as strong winds and limited freshwater sources."
The land is rocky to grow anything on exactly because of those lambs and goats. They don't give the land the change to reforest.
We tend to underestimate the damage that has already been done before we came here.
Are you suggesting that ruminants transport rocks to the site?
"including grazing, deforestation, and the collection of firewood"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316721412_Blame_it_...
"The authors analyze archaeological and ecological evidence to understand the relationship between human populations, goat herding, and land degradation. They argue that the widespread adoption of goat herding practices played a significant role in the process of desertification. Goats are known to be browsers, preferring to consume a variety of vegetation, including shrubs and trees. This selective feeding behavior, combined with the increasing human population and expansion of agricultural practices, led to the overgrazing of vegetation and subsequent soil erosion.
The paper highlights that the degradation of vegetation cover and loss of soil fertility had cascading effects on the ecosystem. Reduced vegetation cover resulted in increased exposure of soil to wind and water erosion, leading to the expansion of arid and desert regions. The loss of vegetation also had a detrimental impact on biodiversity, as many plant and animal species dependent on these ecosystems faced habitat destruction and population decline."
That means meat is going to be expensive and you'd rather eat avocado toast instead. Unless demand suddenly drops or we scale growing meat from a lab.
So long as affordable, healthy, accessible alternatives exist, of course.
You can't have real agriculture without manure.
Fossil guano is a finite, scarce and very expensive resource, and human manure is not so desirable as replacement by several reasons so, how do they expect to feed their green miracle exactly?.
How efficient is the conversion food-to-meat is irrelevant if you omit half of the products obtained. This food also will turn into leather, milk, workforce and manure, so the calculus is flawed from the start.
Per leathers: one, we don't have to completely eliminate cattle. Two, synthetics exist. Three, alternatives are being made/investigated [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dovecote [1] https://www.felsie.co.uk/ (and others, if you google around)
However, I think this is another example of something that is 'just too small to matter' in terms of feeding the world's population today. Often I see 'nice' stories about e.g. using human waste to fertilise fields, that quite frankly do not (usually) scale at all well. We (UK) use tractors to shovel and spread manure - 10s, 100s of tons of the stuff - a dovecote or 10 really isn't going to help, and certainly won't be economic.
It seems a bit like someone telling me I should use an abacus to increase my compute power - 'they were a good idea in the past, why aren't you using them now?'
We feed a lot of grains to aninals as feed. That food coupd be used to feed people. We could certainly downsize meat producting by 70% withiit any adverse impacts -most people eat way too mich meat
PS: There is some strange disbelief below, people think without manure cropping will bot work - this is plainly fanasyland - most of farmland never sees 'natural' fertiliser.
"A recent study by USDA, Economic Research Service identified opportunities for increasing the use of manure as a fertilizer. In 2020, farmers applied manure to less than 8 percent of the 240.9 million acres planted to seven major U.S. field crops."
In uk "In 2019, organic manure was applied to 26% of the area of tillage crops"
This is easilly accessible information.
If you reduce meat production, you'll hike up prices, likely pricing out those with autoimmune diseases that barely survive already. So technically you are true like in "you can still eat meat in theory", but in practice those folks won't be able. Now where is the good faith in that argument?
You're saying a lot of stuff and I'm going to need more evidence to be convinced as to your position. For what reason would meat prices increase if people ate less meat?
You are right that it can be done badly, as can many other things. I'd say you are actually arguing against badly regulated animal farming (especially since you mention the US), rather than animal farming per se.
You'd need to cite some sources for that. And explain where the millions of tons of animal manure go.
Here in Northern Europe 100% of manure from housed animals is used, either spread as manure or, increasingly, used for biomethane
That's the wrong statistics to look it - 100% of waste coffee is used. They already have it, good management will figure out a way to use it.
But you cannot make an argument that we have to keep drinking coffee because fertiliser industry will collapse without waste coffee.
There are thousands of studies about impacts of intensive animal faming on landscape, economy, health and society in general, they are all negative. This was settled like 40 years ago.
You said
> Only a small percentage of manure is reused as fertiliser because transporting it is expensive, and messy
That's straight up false, for Northern Europe anyway.
I think in my area they try to use manure to produce methane.
Source? Preferably reputable
Compost can help. I don't know how much that would scale in any case.
Is true that we can produce some fertilizers chemically, but we need to invest huge amounts of energy for this; After Wikipedia >1% of all the energy that we humans use in the planet is spent just to make ammonia, and many of this is used to make urea. If I'm not wrong we need also natural gas to feed the process, so this energy came basically from non renewables. Is part of the solution but not a miracle cure.
The problems that frequently lead to the argument for cutting meat consumption for ecological reasons are all actually concerns with industrialized meat production practices, not with meat production itself. We don't need to cut meat production, we need to change how we raise, process, and distribute the meat. Raise thousands of cows in concrete pens in a remote area will always require too many inputs and produce too many unwanted outputs because it's not part of a larger ecosystem.
Ruminants like cows and sheep play a vital role in managing pasture and creating fertilizer. Chickens play a vital role in pest management and creating compost. Chickens and hogs both play a role in making productive use of waste products, eating food scraps and garden waste that would otherwise be lost.
Heck, we couldn't even have egg and milk production at all without producing meat or culling animals along the way. Only 50% of eggs hatched are female, we have to do something with the males. And dairy cows will only produce milk for 6-12 months after giving birth, meaning there are calves that need to play a part in the system as well.
That doesn't even get to the challenges of trying to raise crops without animal byproducts. Where does all the fertilizer come from?
The entire model of industrial meat production is unsustainable by design. Animals can be raised as part of a larger system that includes growing most, if not all, if the animals' food on site. Having to plant massive fields of feed crops so they can be trucked across the country to industrial meat farms raising animals in crowded lots and concrete boxes is an insane approach.
Has the evidence improved recently? About 3 years ago there were a few papers, including a meta analysis (-ish), which were suggestive but also noted the lack of longitudinal studies, and their lack of geographical diversity (Germany and UK as I recall).
The consensus was that everyone was certain there was a serious issue, but it was nearly impossible to usefully (even broadly) characterise the issues.
There’s absolutely no lack of evidence. We know it’s real. We just haven’t catalogued that evidence very well.
That doesn’t look likely, but also not impossible. That’s why we need the study.
Also, predator-prey systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka–Volterra_equations) can have fairly large cycles with huge population swings. That makes verifying that there really is a decline not _that_ easy. You can’t just repeat an insect count done 30 years ago and compare the numbers.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-spla...
Yes e.g [0]. Neonicitinoids in particular are basically nerve agents for insects that we wantonly spread all over their habitat, and which turn out to not remain localised on crops, but spread through runoff, via pollinators, etc. As you might imagine if someone were to spread sub-LD50 concentrations of novichok all over the human environment, the widespread use of these componds dramatically affects insect behaviour and therefore survival rates.
> holistic grazing
Unfortunately this in particular turns out to be unsupported by various studies that have been done to try to validate the claims (e.g. [1] for a popular article with some useful links).
In general the debate between nature-integrated farming vs maximising yield in smaller areas is complex, and I don't think I know enough to summarise it in a HN comment. For example [2] claims that maximising yield, but in smaller areas, is a better overall strategy. But I suspect the outcomes depend on exactly which factors you include in the model (e.g. if you want high yield farms using artificial fertislisers to maintain that productivity, do you account for runoff into rivers that can then have a non-local environmental effect? Maybe studies do this but, not being an expert, it seems hard to model).
In any case, a great deal of the land used for farming is given over to pasture, or the production of livestock feed. [3] has a map for the UK, showing that about half of the total land area is used for beef and lamb production alone, plus a similar area of land overseas. This compares to about 8% of the UK that forms the urban environment. So clearly there's plenty of scope for improvement here, but it depends on the will to change; an understanding that the world has value even when it's not farmed, and that we should stop subsidising, and therefore encouraging, high land use, high carbon, diets.
[0] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-ento-... [1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-t... [2] https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/landsparing [3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-will-englands-national-food-s...
A prime example, the seed-dressing used to treat rapeseed and prevent cabbage-stem flea beetle from destroying the crop has been outlawed in the EU. Most farmers now won't grow rapeseed, because the risk of making a huge financial loss is too high. Result? We import rapeseed from countries which haven't outlawed the insecticide.
Do you have data to back that up? The only info I could find is along the lines of the article below.
https://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2022/06/16/eu-rapesee...
> EU rapeseed crop 2022 projected at five-year high
It's sprayed 10-20 times per season, the amount of poison it spreads to the nature is staggering.
In the EU? I think you just made that up
It is able to produce multiple times more and more qualitative (organic), for the same area than the national average mechanized production in France.
The pesticide industry and mega farmers want you to believe that what they are doing is to produce more food, but that does not stand the fact check of initiatives like permacultural ones.
[1] https://www.fermedubec.com/la-ferme/la-recherche/ (scroll to the "STUDY REPORTS (English versions)" if you do not speak French.
If we don't value back farming related work and allow people to invest a lot of there time and energy into sustainable practices we cannot have the amount of people required to do what is done at la ferme du bec at a much bigger scale.
Local food production may go a long way as it reduces the steps between the farm and the end consumer. That still may not be enough though, rewiring higher food prices regardless of how it's produced.
In one of the linked studied the result was that one person working 43 hours per week could profit €900-1600 per month. The same article mentions a minimum wage of €9.61/hour, so even on the high end the farmer is working all that time and owning the risk of a bad harvest to make less than minimum wage. They didn't mention any holdback on the crops to feed the farmer, so they might be separately paying for food out of that income. People just aren't going to do that in large numbers unless they have to.
The issue of centralized and complex food systems is also significant. As the supply chain becomes longer and more convoluted, the farmer often receives a diminishing share of the final price paid by consumers. This creates financial strain and makes it difficult for farmers to earn a sustainable income.
Promoting local food production can indeed help mitigate some of these challenges. By reducing the steps between the farm and the end consumer, local food systems can create opportunities for farmers to receive a more equitable share of the value generated. However, as you mentioned, even with local production, there may still be limitations in overcoming the underlying financial pressures.
The example you shared about the farmer's income compared to the minimum wage highlights the stark reality faced by many agricultural workers. Working long hours and taking on the risks associated with farming, while earning less than the minimum wage, is not a sustainable situation. It's important for society to recognize the immense value farmers provide and ensure fair compensation for their hard work.
To address these challenges, a comprehensive approach is needed. This includes supporting policies that promote sustainable agriculture, fostering local food systems, and advocating for fair pricing and compensation for farmers. Additionally, exploring alternative models such as community-supported agriculture and direct-to-consumer sales can help create a more viable and rewarding environment for farmers.
The requirements are ridiculous particularly with meat production. I can't sell cuts of meat unless the animal walks off the trailer at a state or federally regulated processing facility. Getting in line at the processor is not easy and though lead time isn't as bad as it SAS during the pandemic response, it can still require planning months ahead on exactly when you will process one animal.
Beyond that, there are very real animal welfare concerns if you ever look into how those facilities work. Animals walk of the trailer and spend their last hours extremely stressed, stuffed into concrete holding pens and chutes with other animals they don't know in a building that must smell unmistakably of death.
The meat is processed in very specific ways, including spraying it with bleach. There's no way around that, and may stamped USDA has been treated that way.
I do understand how we ended up with so many regulations and health concerns, but they are all byproducts of an over-centralized system that attempts to produce an entire country's worth of meat in one place and distribute it nationality so that every store shelf looks the same. Those regulations have grown so l large that is nearly unsustainable to attempt to raise meat on a smaller, more local scale.
So yeah, deforestation + pesticides = less birds, and will lead to a desertification of Europe in more than one sense. But even in the desert you can find here and there an oasis, a place full of life where birdsong is just as vigorous as ever. There are still many places across Europe where this is happening, many oases (plural?) that teem with life, and bring happiness to the heart. In fact, this is not so difficult to do, just bring back the trees and the biodiversity, then the insects will return, and when the insects are there, birds will return.
Build it and they will come.
It is high time we change our agricultural practices from destructive to regenerative. The techniques are already well known, and pioneering work in this field of regenerative practices have been going on for decades already - from Yeomans, Molisson, and Holmgren in Australia to Fukuoka in Japan and Goetsch in Brasil, the knowledge is there.
I live with my family on a small piece of land where we work to increase biodiversity and to reforest. Every year, birdsong gets louder and louder. I know it's possible and my garden is proof. Build it and they will come.
I think it would be interesting to look at how much biodiverse forests we have now compared to 100 years ago. I might be proven wrong.
In fact, almost all forests are exploited in some way or another. Some recently protected primal old growth will take a few centuries to recover.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
"The world has 1.11 billion ha of primary forest remaining.[when?] Combined, three countries (Brazil, Canada, and Russia) host more than half (61 percent) of the world's primary forest. The area of primary forest has decreased by 81 million ha since 1990, but the rate of loss more than halved in 2010–2020 compared with the previous decade."
You reap what you sow I guess
There’s a lot of corruption in farming.
Firstly, EU has some of the smallest average farm size in developed economies - below 50 hectares, USA is close to 500.
Secondly, the concerns around machines dominate farming. For exanple many studies have shown effectiveness of multicripping - growing severage different crips together. This will never take off, because muticropping fields are unharvestable - harvesters are specialised for grains, potatoes, etc. While they are hacesting one, they would damage / destroy another.
Machine have become much larger, more sophisticared and more expensive. So many farmers don't own all the machines, they rent them or pay someome to d perform a job on their fields.
Lastly, if you eant a decent existance, you need to generate enough revenue from your farm. Farms below 50cha can hardly support a family with the revenue they generate.
The only way to save small farms is for them to diversify income - I knew a few farmers that installed wind turbines, etc. However UK planning system makes it impossible to get permission for a win turbine. In the past 5 years there were like 2 permissions given for any time of wind turbine in all of UK
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
The industrial farming practices / propaganda making us reliant on overuse of poisons in our food chains makes us sick, is poisoing/destroying nature, destroying soil microbiomes, biodiversity, waters and air.
We have to find ways to farm without poisons, and teach farmers to use those methods - it won't be easy and it won't change with one law and it will take maybe decades, but the methods exists, it's possible and should be done.
The optimal for this would still be much less animal farming, and a massive shift in how and where it is done. But removing all animal products would be counter productive. (Perhaps this is what you meant by plant based though).
Sure, but also pesti/herbicides.
> without artificial fertiliser you need to have animals to produce fertiliser
Or compost / nitrogen fixing / companion plants.
> But removing all animal products would be counter productive
There are people practicing it for decades pretty well without animal inputs.
Syntropic agriculture (Ernst Götsch), natural farming (Masanobu Fukuoka), veganic farming, permaculture, hydroponics, animal-free biodynamic farming, etc.
It's not a necessity.
In case anyone else was skimming through to find over what time period this occurred.
Even now, living outside London, I rarely see flocks of birds, and if I do, nowhere near as large as I remember, and I don't think its observer bias either.
To clear mistletoe from that many trees is fairly expensive so owners usually don't do it, and we have alleys and alleys of trees full of mistletoe. Eventually the tree dies because of mistletoe parasitizing it.
Similar to the CO2 footprint, it's another way to individualize social issues and distract from large corporate sources of environmental destruction.
It is of course a good argument to consider the study generally valid on e.g. the British isles and North America where the cat was more recently introduced into the fauna.
They definitely do stalk feeders and add to the stressors already in place for bird species. More than one thing can contribute to the reduction of bird populations.
If you don't want to let your cat move freely, I suggest just not having one.
Have you known many people who own outdoor cats? It's a rare story that doesn't end with "then an asshole in a truck ran him down", "I think a coyote got him", "I think a hawk got him", "I never saw him again", "the neighborhood kids were chasing him with sticks", "found him nearly starved and bleeding", "lost a fight to a dog", or one of many other terrible ways to go. Every one of those is a true story from someone I know. The hawks, coyotes, and cars having happened to innumerable outdoor cats whose owners I've been acquainted with.
So, in my opinion, if you think a cat can only live a decent life outdoors, you shouldn't get one.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/14/cats-kil...
"A study published in April estimated that UK cats kill 160 to 270 million animals annually, a quarter of them birds. The real figure is likely to be even higher, as the study used the 2011 pet cat population of 9.5 million; it is now closer to 12 million, boosted by the pandemic pet craze"
The study didn't include animals that cats killed and abandoned in the wild, so it is likely higher still.
The UK’s largest bird charity, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), is not particularly concerned about the impact of cats on the British mainland. Instead it focuses on what it says is driving UK bird declines: global warming, intensive agriculture and expanding towns and cities leading to habitat and food loss. “While we know that cats do kill large numbers of birds in UK gardens, there’s no evidence this is affecting decline in the same way that these other issues are,” said a spokesperson.
But even taking the lower end of the estimate of the number killed by cats, 40 million birds each year is a felt loss. The RSPB may opine as they wish, but that's the data.
Anecdotally, my neighbour's cat is known to bring home as many as three birds on some weeks. I've seen them stalk my bird table using the bushes as cover. Data + eyewitness observation makes a compelling case.
Though 40 million dead birds sounds like a lot, in regions where wildlife had millenia to adapt to cats' existence – in continental Europe cats have existed for tenthousands of years – it’s not a significant issue.
And it's sad that so much time and energy is wasted on this discussion when people are still spraying their own backyards with pesticides and destroying "weeds", which are actually necessary for insects, and as result birds, to thrive.
The Audubon society lists domestic outdooor cats as one of the biggest threats to birds.
The issue in the report you linked isn’t cats living outside, the issue here is european flora and fauna existing at all in the US, where it doesn’t belong. This issue isn’t limited to cats, it even includes things like different species of lawn grass being invasive in regions it doesn’t belong.
The other issue is destruction of ecosystem in the EU, where cats are native and primarily used as scapegoat.
Both of these need entirely different solutions, but "don't let cats outside" is very oversimplified and just serves to divide people.
That, and if cats are our friends and we care about them, we should be sheltering them from the hostilities of an outdoor environment. I have had enough cats I knew in the past die from injuries from cars, or diseases/injuries they acquired outside to feel that it's just best to keep ours inside. We live rural, on 6 acres, and she loves it outside, naturally, but so do birds we love. Would she be "happier" outside? Maybe. But considering all trade-offs, I'll keep her pampered inside, and let the birds nest on my deck.
But like I said the food produced by land that is urbanized would have to be imported. But that is not a bad thing. It will be very good for developing nations.
Another question worth thinking about - what landscape pollutes the air/water/land more? is it farm land or the cities?
I'd hesitate to be flippant about the complexities and difficulties in the generation of food, and the market forces that it drives. And I'd certainly hesitate to claim that anyone has "better things to do".
And an admonishment against the hubris of just casually dropping deeply loaded positions like "Europe has more important things to worry about" than Africa or Ukraine. Hell even casual the separation of Ukraine as something outside of Europe.
If you took it as a personal attack, then perhaps it is just because a hit dog will holler.
We use massive amounts of land to grow monocultures because that's the cheapest way to produce food.
We're in a conundrum: more expensive food would cause mass suffering. OTOH, our current food production methods are destructive, and cause mass suffering.
A cheaper method to produce food that uses a lot less land and resources would be a game changer.
Enter precision fermentation:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/24/green-...
As along as it's not literally 100% of the population, which I highly doubt, there should be more then enough customers to get a foothold.
The chance of transformative change like that happening in the Netherlands anytime soon is 0%. BBB has won big in provincial politics and they will be able to stall or vote down any policy that isn't beneficial to the few big agro firms for the coming years.
https://demeter.net/biodynamics/biodiversity/
> 35% more birds and 23% more insects are found in organic farmland thanks to the creation of natural habitats and the absence of chemical and synthetic pesticides.
We, customers, vote with our shopping behavior.
Yes, those products are 100-200% more expensive in terms of money. But don't forget that there is a huge price to pesticide use that is not passed through to the customer.
It is teaming with life here: insects, birds and bats.
Mini nests/pigeonholes/etc could potentially be built into/under panels (though potential issues include predator access, + guano and other substances degrading equipment.)
And/or solar panels could 'migrate' over time, plugging themselves into their nearest hub once they have moved themselves to a fallow / poor soil area. Fixed solar would always be more efficient, but perhaps migrating solar could one day have a niche position in soil science / ag, and allow solar to be position closer to cities.
Anyway... all unlikely to be economical, I suppose.
Let's do that, and instead get rid of people. Cut exports, that's what everyone wants, right?
Elimination of bird predators like owls and hawks (caused by destruction of their environment and poisons by bad agriculture practices) leads to mice infestations.
Civilizations can only function if they don't destroy their ecosystems. We have enough warning examples in the past, let's hope we'll be smarter this time.
Don’t push ridiculous articles like this with zero factual evidence. What we put out to the world has real effects- especially dangerous rhetoric like this that incites the left side of the Bell curve into a frenzy.
If we were all to switch to eating only meat, then we could get rid of farming entirely and raise billions of cattle for food instead, which would be far better for human health and longevity, as well as being a far more environmentally-sustainable approach to food production.
I am in favor of using nuclear power to desalinate seawater in order to turn both the Sahara Desert and the Australian Desert into vast grasslands that can support billions of cattle, along with all the bugs and birds that such a regenerative approach would give rise to.
We really need to get humanity off of plant-based food.
Stories about wolves, bears, and now birds and insects, seem to presume that I feel some automatic emotional connection to them, or that there's some self-evident moral argument why they need to kept alive. I won't deny that they have some intrinsic value, but if there are competing interests and hidden costs, that value really needs to be put into perspective.