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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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).

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