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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

"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!

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.

"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).

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.

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