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Comment by veddox | Hacker News Reader

I reference this paper in almost every science-communication talk I give as an ecologist.

It was not a new result by any means, we've had a whole range of other studies showing the same over the last three decades [1]. But it was still a very important study, simply for the sheer amount of data they collated: analysing 170 species trends across four decades across Europe is quite a feat!

Taken together, it really drives home the message that modern agricultural practices are shredding the environment, but also that there is a lot of nuance behind biodiversity declines that we need to look into further, and that offer hope for improvement.

[1] e.g. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959270919000480, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-45854-0, https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12585,https://doi.org/10.1111/c..., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2011.05.006, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1474-919X.2004.00375.x

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In the US there has been significant cutbacks in USDA programs like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) that paid farmers to keep certain pieces of land fallow and to plant native plants and grasses to provide food and habitat for wildlife. These programs were popular with small farmers and ranchers as it gave them some guaranteed income each year, and allowed them to follow good practices like rotating crops etc. Many of these programs were created after the dust bowl to provided incentives for better land management practices. We've been seeing reduced investments in these kinds of programs over the last couple of decades with the most recent farm bill in 2023 being one of the worse cuts yet:

https://www.eenews.net/articles/conservation-cuts-sink-in-as...

Does utility scale solar drive out native species (I am not a biologist or ecologist)? If not, tying up ag land with 20-30 year solar PPAs while preserving habitat (assuming a favorable layout of equipment) seems like a funding source. 43 million acres of US farmland is used for ethanol production, for example.

It's not quite a conservation easement, but agrivoltaics might be a possible path to conserving this land versus development or factory cash crop production. Farmers get the income they need, the impact to the land is minimal (panels, racking, and wires can be stripped at anytime), etc.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/03/10/solarfood-in-ethanol-...

"Of the ~92 million acres of corn planted in the US each year, roughly 40 million acres (1.6% of the nation’s land) are primarily used to feed cars and raise the octane of gasoline. If this land were repurposed with solar power, it could provide around three and a half times the electricity needs of the United States, equivalent to nearly eight times the energy that would be needed to power all of the nation’s passenger vehicles were they electrified.

However, if we were to transition this 40 million acres are of fuel to solar+food (agrivoltaics) – we could still meet 100% of our electricity needs, and power a nationwide fleet of electric vehicles."

https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/northeast/topic/agrivo...

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/potential-agrivol...

https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/agrivolt...

https://www.planning.org/blog/9253223/visual-guide-to-agrivo...

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2022.9320...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0364-5

The impact on land is not small, you need quite a lot of concrete to anchor panels supports to the ground.

Also I wonder how the soil will evolve under solar panels, with less light hitting it. Probably better than when farmed, but worse than leaving it alone.

> Also I wonder how the soil will evolve under solar panels, with less light hitting it.

It depends on the native ecosystem, but not as bad as you might fear. In places with dense grasses (some prairie grasses?) or heavy forests, the topsoil doesn’t get much light.

(Deforestation has encouraged the development of algal blooms and other fungal/microbial growth in streams that were previously sheltered from light, contributing to ecosystem failure and other environmental issues.)

But in dense grasslands and heavy forests the soil benefits from the sun, in that as the grasses and trees go through their lifecycles they reintroduce nutrients to the soil in the form of falling leaves/needles and death and decomposition. Grasslands and dense forests are also teaming with life, big and small, that nurture the environment. Is there really any doubt that if we cover massive swaths of land in solar panels the soil will become useless? I have not seen more than a few firsthand, but the earth under the large solar complexes I have seen is mud or dust.

Very fair rebuttal; I concede the point!

> Is there really any doubt that if we cover massive swaths of land in solar panels the soil will become useless?

To me it is obvious that the soil under solar panels will be extremely healthy and useful, which is evidenced by the abundance of growth underneath all the solar farms in Minnesota fields. But perhaps you think the answer is the other way? Where have you seen only mud under solar panels? How did they build them such that nothing grows? And mud is far far better than current monocrop farming.

Oregon and Washington.

Concrete is rarely used nowadays (at least in Germany).

Usually the metal profiles are just rammed into the ground, if the ground is too loose they are screwed in and gabions are used if they just need some weight. If none of those are possible then concrete is used.

This is also the case in the US.

Thank you for your work as an ecologist!

I was really struck on a recent trip to Minnesota. Flew into the MSP airport, got the rental car and drove out to a smaller city. At first, we thought 'what nice countryside'. Then as the drive went on for hundreds of miles of nothing but plowed fields, with hardly even a shrub-row between fields, it became nightmare-ish — literally wondering "Where could any creature live in this wasteland?", and nevermind the pesticides & herbicides. And then considering that such habitat destruction visible from an airliner can often extend horizon-to-horizon from 36,000 ft altitude, it is horrifying.

Industrial farming may be "efficient" by some parameters, but it really is destructive, and also evidently responsible for the obesity epidemic.

Something's gotta give.

Check out the new Netflix documentary series "You are what you eat - A twin experiment". It's quite informative and comprehensive, plus do a few new studies / experiments on identical twins.

Garbage propaganda. I already know their conclusion by the title and it's a documentary style shilling of vegan food. The only interesting thing is how they dress their lies against serious studies.

This comment is indistinguishable from the one you would write if you simply didn't like the result of the experiment.

You don't need to tell me you're vegan, yours is indistinguishable from someone who likes the propaganda.

Merit why it and other fake diet documentaries like super size me are legitimate. They are all grifters and propaganda, from the full carnivore to the full vegetables, most of them are vegan and vegans are commonly known to die of malnutrition.

> the vegan influencers are commonly known to die of malnutrition.

Can you provide some backing for this statement? A quick search shows a ton of news articles about one specific influencer who died last August, but I didn't find much that suggested a trend as you indicate.

Sorry let me amend my statement, I am against a diet that promotes malnutrition which is caused by influencers that don't know about nutrition. Deaths are commonly attributed to vegans from this propaganda, and they are common not a trend of influencers but a trend in general. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/ve...

Anyone who promotes this unhealthy propaganda should be treated with suspicion. The mockumentary propaganda was shot in the style of a documentary funded by vegan companies. So surprised by what we saw though fake science.

You put "but a trend in general" in front of your link, which describes one specific event.

Your arguments might land better if you put out some evidence of a trend. So far you've implied a trend among vegan influencers, abandonded that point when it was pointed out that one data point isn't much of a trend, moved the goalposts to say it's a trend among the general population of vegan people, and then linked an article with a single data point. There's plenty of isolated examples of non-vegans starving their children to death, so an isolated example of a vegan starving their child is not particularly useful or informative.

For the record, I fucking love steak, I'm not coming at this from the vegan perspective. I do have a pet peeve against overly broad statements, though.

Vegans having malnutrition is more common than it is not. This vegan killed their child giving them vegan food. This is what is happening on a broad scale. The mother being careful had fed them a diet that's killed them. You didn't read the article; she starved him by carefully feeding him vegan food.

Again, non-vegans neglect the hell out of their children all the time. This person clearly criminally neglected their child, and was arrested and convicted.

You're not showing a trend with your evidence, but you are showing your prejudices with how you present the evidence you are bringing.

(late reply because lol, lmao if you comment on HN when not working)

Forcing your children to eat only vegetables is not neglect it's abuse and causes death.

If it was on a broad scale then surely it would be easy for you to provide some evidence after being asked nicely 3 separate times?

Not influencers, but I personally know a couple vegans who have brittle bones and one who is going blind (albeit she is in her 60s I think). Also these are vegans who cook almost everything from scratch and probably could qualify for a PHD in nutrition based on the amount of research they are continually doing.

The reality is you can have a somewhat healthy diet for a single generation on a vegan diet, if you source ingredients from all over the world and basically stretch the variety of plants you eat to the maximum, but if you lived 100 years ago you would have quickly become severely malnourished. And we don't yet know what the impact will be over multiple generations.

Jainism has existed for a lot longer than that, and they’re doing just fine.

Which isn't vegan in any way.

I watched a bit of that in passing while my wife was watching, even in the few minutes I watched, it spent more time cheer-leading for veganism than anything that sounded like an "experiment" or providing useful information to someone who hasn't already bought into veganism already.

This sort of farming is not new to the area, and it has been that way since European immigrants settled in Minnesota. This land was nearly all plains, so the trees you see around farm houses are actually European settler additions.

There has been a drastic increase in wildlife since I was a child there in the 90s, however. Whatever is happening over all with regulations, it's definitely improving.

But I have never, not once, understood the people that think that farming, be it industrial, organic industrial, or artisanal hard-labor small scale, is somehow environmentally positive. A lot of people who don't understand farming think that just buying organic produce is somehow healthy for the ecosystem. But any form of mono-crop farming destroys the existing ecosystem, organic or round-up drenched.

Solar farms are far better for the ecosystem.

"A lot of people who don't understand farming think that just buying organic produce is somehow healthy for the ecosystem"

Yes it is. Not using industrial pesticides and herbicides is already a huge deal. And not using them actually requires a different approach to mono-crop farming. E.g. planting shrubs to attract birds, who will then help control pests. And in general, smaller fields and more diverse.

Do you have any studies, review papers, or other evidence of this?

There is no increase of organic farming on these fields in Minnesota, yet wildlife is coming back. Other interventions around habitat preservation and restoration, and decreased runoff, seem far more crucial. Even organic farms use fertilizer, the runoff of which is far bigger contributor to ecosystem destruction than pesticides, at least according to everything I have seen. Algeal blooms and water ecosystem destruction are caused by excess nutrients, not from death by pesticides, for example.

I would love to see soemthing new that I have not yet been able to find with regards to this evidence!

"There is no increase of organic farming on these fields in Minnesota"

I was not speaking about Minnesota, but the isolated claim denying that "buying organic produce is somehow healthy for the ecosystem".

Buying organic rises demand for organic farming - and organic farming is better for diversity (do you need papers about this?) - but obviously only where the farms are located and not in the supermarket. And if the land you mean has no organic farming yet still increases wildlife, well, there are of course also many things conventional farming can do different (just using a different or less of herbicide/pesticide can have drastic effects).

I think that there is plenty of evidence that all pesticides kill animals, and that some in particular can do serious damage on humans. I can't see why this should be controversial at all. The less we'll need to use to obtain our goals, the better.

Of course there are other million ways to harm birds. Don't make me start talking about Malta or Lebanon hunters. Maltese poachers kill or capture up to 200,000 migratory wild birds every year

And is much worse. The ciphers of illegal hunting are sobbing. Between 11 and 36 millions! of migratory birds could be killed on the entire Mediterranean each year: raptors, storks, falcons, herons, anything with feathers, protected or not

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

... but the problem here are the farms, sure.

> Even organic farms use fertilizer, the runoff of which is far bigger contributor to ecosystem destruction than pesticides

So it is a tie? Organic farms use fertilizers, bad. Other farms use fertilizers, equally bad.

The difference is that hedges and nature tolerated around organic farms acts as a buffer in part eating part of this effluent. This may not apply necessarily in other farms.

Some forms of farming may be marginally less apocalyptic in their effects on the ecosystem, but that is not even close to having a positive effect. Aside from the dubious requirements needed to obtain the "organic" label, "organic" has long been recognized as a buzzword used by well-meaning, misinformed people who, understandably, would like to feel good about the produce they eat.

There have been numerous cases of fraud and corruption in relation to the "organic" label in the US. Perhaps it is different in the EU.

"There have been numerous cases of fraud and corruption in relation to the "organic" label in the US. Perhaps it is different in the EU."

Well, I actually only know about the situation in the EU and there surely is and was also fraud - but overall it is working. Organic farmland is way more diverse and alive compared to the conventional counterparts.

LOL - this is amazingly biased and fact-free assertion here!

The Organic standard in the USA is a crown-jewel of US food production. Yes of course there is cheating, like there is cheating on pesticide reporting and dozens of other things. I find it really off-kilter to loudly decry the entire Organic Standard effort in short terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Foods_Production_Act_o...

Organic farms still use pesticides and herbicides, they're just organic ones, like Nicotine.

Of course solar farms don’t produce the food we require, which leads to mass starvation, which I guess ends up being good for the ecosystem eventually - but the wars and damage caused before then wouldn’t be.

Or we could go for less economically efficient methods, which would mean more expensive food.

There is an over abundance of farming on the great plains, and nearly none of it goes to feeding humans. It's corn, soybeans, and sugar beets in Minnesota. A lot of it is used for industrial purposes, for creating ethanol for vehicle fuel, and for feeding livestock.

If we took even a fraction of the fields that are used for ethanol and did solar farms instead, we could power our entire transportation energy needs. It's hard to overstate the inefficiency of using farm fields for ethanol. We just have such a huge over abundance of farmland that this inefficiency doesn't really matter.

Honestly, it would be best to pay farmers to restore a lot of farmland back to plains, instead of subsidizing such huge amounts of overproduction of inedible crops and sugar.

Do you prefer drilling for oil over ethanol? it isn't overproduction if it is being utilized for livestock or fuel. Nobody (besides maybe Jeremey Clarkson) is out there farming for fun.

> Do you prefer drilling for oil over ethanol?

This comes off as a rhetorical question, but to me it's not obvious that burning ethanol derived from corn supported by fertilizer made from fossil fuels is less detrimental for the environment than burning fossil fuels directly. I expect there are many sets of criteria that make one or the other worse.

At least, the efficiency of ethanol vs gasoline seems to be a controversial topic, as I can find lots of studies and opinion pieces favoring each position. If anyone could help shed some light I'd appreciate it.

Ethanol contains only about 67% of the available energy of gasoline on a gallon-gallon basis [0]. So mixing ethanol gasoline into gasoline will result in a noticeable loss of mile-per-gallon efficiency.

Agree that both are effectively releasing CO2 from either deep in the earth or from the soil, so replacing them with solar power generation on the fields would be a net plus, and probably a greater energy density. We could also use the new-ish practice of installing vertical solar panels between tractor rows of crops, which doesn't reduce the solar yield too much and allows both 'crops' to yield something.

That said, returning a lot to natural ecosystem may be necessary to our survival.

[0] https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/properties

A lot of people are out there farming for the subsidies, however.

I dont know whether ethanol or oil extraction is worse for the environment, but solar panels instead of corn for ethanol seems like a huge win.

The insect apocalypse is even more pronounced. In the 1980s and 1990s, you couldn't drive through Minnesota without your windshield being absolutely covered in bugs. I remember driving through the state & being forced to pull over to literally scrape the bugs off the windshield. That just doesn't seem to exist today...

Worse, the food produced by Big Ag from such practices borders on poison.

My wife suffers inflammation when eating most any food from the grocery store, with the exception of raw organic ingredients that we can prepare ourselves.

Most people do not react at a noticable level, but she has autoimmune issues that make her sensitive to trace amounts of pesticides, preservatives, cooking oils, and more. After only a few bites, her hands will swell up and prevent her from removing her rings. Sickness follows if she doesn’t take heed.

We cannot go out to eat anywhere that uses an inexpensive oil; she reacts to most popular varieties. She cannot even eat simple table sugar beyond a bite or two.

Without exception, the common denominators are those ingredients produced at industrial scales.

What do you think are the causes? I heard the us has more mold in their food normally.

I think there's another common denominator as well...

Have you tried taking her to a doctor?

This sounds like an immense burden and impact on quality of life for which modern medicine has likely already found a solution.

Yeah, no.

My wife has some similar autoimmune issues (thankfully less severe than GP), and these have stumped the best doctors in the world that we can find. The trips to Minnesota were to go to Mayo Clinic in Rochester for these issues.

Yes it is a burden and impact on quality of life, and No, there is no good solution yet. I wish there would be, but it's not there.

And yes, the food supply is poisoned by these monoculture and industrial food practices. While most of us are not poisoned to this degree, all of us are some. We started a garden and my diet has definitely changed, and I notice all kinds of subtle improvements. So, avoiding any kind of processed food, almost anything with a long artificial shelf life (this means using really good olive oil and no shelf mayonnaise or oils found in most products; Omega-3 vs -6), will be to your long-term benefit, and you'll feel better.

We need to feed people. Globally 8 billion now and probably a peak at 10 billion.

Ultimately there is no magic recipe to ease our pressures on the environment: more people means more resources needed.

What do you think is going to cause a peak to occur? Will it be a plateau or a decline? If decline, will be be slow or sharp. Sharp as in our attempts to sustain 10 billion people leads to total collapse of the environment causing the planet to be much less habitable? Putting a number seems arbitrary even if you do use the word probably in your statement.

I am simply using the well-known UN population forecast here...

These people have deluded themselves into thinking the guy at the farmers market that shows up with 12 ears of 'organic' corn on the back of his cute old pickup truck is somehow going to feed the world en masse.

Organic food is a scam enjoyed by rich people whose emotions are granted more relevancy than practical thinking. It is not sustainable large-scale. People would go hungry and die.

> and also evidently responsible for the obesity epidemic.

Where does this connection come from? I've never heard of this linking of industrialized farming to obesity. I've definitely heard of the linking of processed food to obesity, but farming techniques is one that I'm definitely going to need to see some supporting evidence for this claim.

Industrial farming is the required feedstock for industrial food production, which is optimized primarily for shelf life and near-addictiveness.

The "you can't eat just one" advert line is a real goal of the food developers. The requirement for long shelf life causes inclusion of unhealthy chemicals,e.g., high amounts of Omega-6 oils (linked to cardio issues, inflammation, etc.) instead of Omega-3s, which should have a far higher ratio vs Omega-6s in a healthy diet.

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