There are also quite convincing studies that show even worse declines for insect populations, again mostly due to industrialized farming techniques and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The standard approach in the EU to work against this really worrying trend is to a) bring more and more land under some form of protection and remove it from agricultural production and b) increase the share of eco-farming, i.e. conventional farming without the chemistry. The problem: both approaches drastically reduce agricultural productivity. We really need a push towards regenerative agricultural practices (agroforestry, holistic grazing, etc.) that can deliver high yields while also improving CO2 sequestration and habitat creation.
There are some counter intuitive economical things going on as well. A lot of bad farming practices are heavily subsidized. For example a lot of Spanish land is not exploited. But to claim the subsidies, farmers still work the land, which leads to a lot of top soil erosion for no good reason whatsoever. In the same way a lot of dairy production is misaligned with actual demand. And you get weird surpluses of things like milk and butter. Wine is another example where subsidies lead to over production.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 ».
We subsidize agriculture to maintain food self-sufficiency. Otherwise, things could get very nasty around here during the next global famine. During a famine, you can't just outbid poor countries and buy out their food, as their governments will ban food exports and there will be not food to buy, regardless of price.
If the only way that agriculture can sustain itself in i.e. Germany is by subsidies covering 50% of farmers' incomes and all of their profits, then the way we do agriculture/food is fundamentally wrong.
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.
Across the world agriculture is subsidised.. even in poorer countries, because the cost of doing agriculture is very high. Farmers are moving to other jobs, selling their farmlands etc.. this will put huge pressure on food supplies and so the govts figured that there has to be some incentive to keep people in agriculture.
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.
I'd assume food stores could be made to last long enough to enact some kind of rationing, and thus lack of chemical fertilizers will have a less profound effect. The point isn't that we would have to sustain ourselves as before, but to be able to sustain on some kind of level.
It’s really not. Without subsidies, farms could not exist; we simply don’t pay enough for produce to keep them running. You could argue that subsidies are to keep the public onside. If you were the party who removed subsidies (and increased food prices by 50%), it would be political suicide.
I've never quite followed the math on this argument for subsidies. Government subsidies are still payed by us, the money is funneled through taxes and government budgets but it's not like a subsidy appears out of thin air.
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.
Free market is the reason you need the subsidies, otherwise import tariffs.
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.
I'm not so sure if subsidizing a handful of industries avoids the problem of cost imbalances when trading globally.
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.
I doubt it's expected to be holistic, and there's not much point tariffing a commodity you don't have a viable alternative locally such as oil; Autarky is unlikely to viable in the long run.
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.
At one point not too long ago the US was producing up to 90% of our own oil supply, is that not the case anymore or am I misremembering that all together?
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.
I think the point being made here is that it may be worth walling off the agriculture industry specifically due to a country’s desire to maintain food security. A worldwide clothing shortage is not as big of a concern, which may be a reason you don’t see the same strategy applied there.
Edit: actually my mistake, that point was made in a separate thread. I think my point still stands though.
It's a fair point for sure. Wish I had links handy and I'll see if they can find solid references. My understanding is that a huge proportion of us crop production is in three or four crops and that most f that production is traded internationally. Meaning, we produce plenty of corn and a few others but we export that and still import a big chunk of my ur actual food supply (or at least the raw materials processed into our food supply).
I'm happy to be wrong there though it's been a while now since I went down that rabbit hole!
To be clear, I'm not arguing for subsidies; just that if they stopped completely and the prices paid by supermarkets / consumers didn't increase, the farms would go out of business.
Not just that. If you don't have farming going on - and it often requires subsidies to keep it going - even Netherlands have subsidised agriculture, your food security will just disappear.
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.
I'm sorry but it seems that it's global warming that is causing insect declines as the primary driver, not farming practices (though farming practices do play a role of course).
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.
"Climate Chaos" is certainly apt - things are becoming verifiably hotter but also more unpredictable and volatile. I was a proponent of using 'climate change' fairly exclusively but this comment has helped reframe that, thank you.
That is simply not true! Use of mechanical farming and fertilizers/pesticides can be beaten in productivity by permacultural practices. One example in France that has been followed by researches (and has produced several papers [1]) is the Ferme du Bec.
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.
The real challenge here is that people simply don't want to farm anymore. We built ourselves a vicious cycle with mechanization and chemicals that allowed farms to produce more per acre, leading to fewer people farming and further dependence on oil and chemicals. Even worse, food systems are so centralized and complex that there's very little left to even pay the farmer by the time the rest of the supply chain makes it's cut.
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.
You raise some crucial points regarding the challenges faced by farmers and the complexities of the modern food system. The mechanization and chemical-intensive practices that have boosted productivity per acre have inadvertently contributed to a decline in the number of people engaged in farming. This has led to increased dependence on external resources such as oil and chemicals, further entrenching the cycle.
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.
One big hurdle to jump will be the need for fundamental change in government regulations for food production.
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.
The real underlying issue here is that good farming practices require hands.
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.
In the US currently industrial and smaller scale farms use heavy amounts of effectively slave labor / indentured servants with fake/stolen papers, bussed to unknown remote locations, company housing and company towns with local sheriff in kahoots with the owners, routine ICE raids to force compliance and break up organizing. We’re quite far from kindness to labor. Many modern liberal countries like SKorea, Italy have similar. Our most democratic nation states run on slave labor.
I've heard that permacultural practices can compete in terms of output, it's just harder to industrialize. I wonder if improvements in robotics could make this sort of approach more feasible, or if it really is comparatively productive in any case
Joel Salatin and Richard Perkins (among many many others) have done great work by applying permaculture principles to farm scale. The ”movement” is called regenerative agriculture but you can also find lots of bullshit under that term (ie. Monsanto has used that term in their marketing)
While I have a lot of time for those people (Gabe Brown is well worth adding to that list). I fear that for the most part those people are successful by selling the dream of better quality produce to people with the disposable income to afford to buy it, mostly direct to consumer. I suspect there isn't enough space in this market place for every farmer.
There is certainly more space available than is currently being filled. I.e. I have lived in more than a dozen places around the EU and Africa and have never had access to one of these types of farmers, despite being heavily inclined to buy from them.
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.
direct to consumer seems like a huge growth field to me actually, there's much less need for a middle man (grocer) now that everyone can buy and sell via their preferred marketplace app.
This is framing premises so that only this conclusion appear relevant.
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.
Many of the practices proposed to reduce the impact on the environment are nonstarters because of low land yields (and indeed might actually be worse on the environment because you need to convert more land to farmland).
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.
I don't think the problem is in output-per-acre (really, increase in yield per acre is shockingly low in the past 50 years), but rather in the amount of labor required. That, plus the inertia of vested interests codified as bureacratic regulation and protected by lobbyists. Essentially: intensive agriculture uses monocultures, extremely large machines and herbicides/fertilizers/pesticides in order to reduce or displace labor costs, which dominate. And it still can't really exist without heavy subsidies.
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.
There are some interesting approaches to regenerative agriculture that somewhat sidestep the problem of labour cost. I.e. Mark Shepard runs a 46ha farm in US mid west that he says has been profitable basically from year one. Very small degree of mechanization (basically a tractor and some implements) and no use of chemical fertilizers or any other inputs (pesticides, herbicides, irrigation). They basically cut out a huge share of conventional farming's cost structure to be able to compensate for increased labour costs.
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.
- 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).
How might this be implemented without ceasing am even more powerful government along the way?
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.
Already on that path too, we buy most of our food from local farms as well.
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.
How does this relate to the great leap forward?
I don't think he's arguing that thre be some kind of mass mobilization towards agriculture (as opposed to metals smelting or the like)
This is why the West has such ossified systems. If you propose any systemic change, people dont actually evaluate the suggestion on it's merits. They just go China/communism!
The proposition is to expropriate landowners (sorry the “corporate oligarchy”), force people to move to farming and rationalise production methods with a top-down approach. The comparaison to the Great Leap Forward is not far fetched. I think it’s legitimate to point to disastrous precedent when people suggest things.
No it wasn’t - you’re putting words in my mouth to justify a poor comparison.
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.
> 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 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.
Mega farms already receive subsidies — why is that fine, but subsidizing a less damaging method not?
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?
> Mega farms already receive subsidies — why is that fine, but subsidizing a less damaging method 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.
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?
> removed from "the natural outcome" as you can get.
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?
didn't know that. Are they massive by European standards (significantly above 75 acres)? I'm sure they're small by American standards given the size of the landmass...
Was that what was proposed or is that just the least charitable interpretation one can think of?
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.
Rural landowners who didn't had a marketable crop/produce (wine) already got expropriated, and their land already incorporate 'rationalized' ag. I know of 6 person in my mother's village who killed themselves between the 80s and late 90s, because of 'revolver' credits (aptly renamed), and tbf the rest of their family (4 different families) got it worse imho, until the state swoopt in and forgave the debt. I think only one independent farmer still exist in the area, his wife work at the local post office/bank, so they probably were more difficult targets.
It's not the great leap forward, it's the small choking of those left behind.
No idea where you are from but I'm French and my family has owned a farming equipment dealership for close to 50 years. I haven't seen this mass incorporation you speak of.
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.
> 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.
This goes against so many basic principles of human dietary needs and sustainable agricultural practices.
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?
All those animals need to eat. Most crop farming is done to feed livestock rather than humans. That's a lot of wasted land use which could be habitat for wild ecosystems if we just cut down our meat consumption.
Is love to see us move to a different style of meat production, but very much too the same goals you mention.
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.
Yes, animal husbandry is an integrated part of food production, but there is merit to the suggestion of _reducing_ meat consumption; most of the world has increased meat consumption per capita quite a lot the last 20 years and going back to 2000 levels might not be a bad idea in the case of a lot of richer countries.
Something like 85% of livestock feeds are byproduct of something that would be grown anyway. E.g like when they make coconut milk/ fibre for humans, they take the coconut leftovers and grind it down for cattle. That byproduct exists regardless of livestock eating it.
"Pasture farming on marginal land is part of the solution"
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...
Pag in Croatia too ... it's called "island of paski cheese" iirc ... it's mostly rocky desert with patches of grass and herds of islands and goats, but leave the island and suddenly the landscape is green and lush.
"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.
Ruminants deplete the vegetation on the land, leading to erosion caused by wind and water, which gradually erodes the top layer of soil, leaving behind only large rocks.
There are ruminants in plenty of other places without the land becoming inhospitable to most plants, though, so that's not a sufficient explanation (although I can clearly see how it contributes).
"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."
Dairy is important for human nutrition because it has an excellent level of production of valuable proteins per acres and that can be done on marginal land that can't really be used for anything else anyway. You could get those proteins from soy, but that would have to be done on farm land, with fertilizer, irrigation and so on. How are those bees going to fare there? And that's assuming grazing is entirely hostile to bees, which it's arguably not that much considering how it doesn't require pesticides. You know, the thing that kills insects.
Lands are not equal. They all have different conditions. Some land for example can't grow food but is good for grazing.
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.
Meat being more expensive would reduce consumption, but that probably isn’t a bad thing in terms of health outcomes. Many people eat too much meat anyway.
So long as affordable, healthy, accessible alternatives exist, of course.
The big plot hole in this master plan that many people apparently can't see or accept. If we remove the production of meat, this will severely harm the production of vegetables. They are connected.
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.
Dovecots [0] have been used for (likely) millenia. And, because of migration, the birds can ultimately bring nutrients in from disparate locations - as opposed to purely localally grazing livestock.
Per leathers: one, we don't have to completely eliminate cattle. Two, synthetics exist. Three, alternatives are being made/investigated [1].
I have learned something new today (re manure from dovecotes).
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?'
Most soil fertiliser today comes from fossil fuel. This was the whole Haber Bosch breakthrough. If we give up artificial fertiliser and need to use animal manure, that would not justify the unsustainable scale of livestock we have today. There are also alternative sustainable nutrient sources like compost and seaweed. I don't know how much manure can be replaced with alternatives but I don't think your point lets us conclude that we absolutely need a meat industry like the one that exists currently.
Seaweed has salt. I you put salt in a soil you will ruin it for agriculture. In the first years there are a few salt tolerant vegetables that you can still culture. After a while the accumulated salt will be just too much even for asparagus.
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.
Most fresh manure can destroy the soil. Specially those from birds. Is advisable to dilute it or store it for some months before the use. This will remove many possible problems also with chemicals. Not all, but a lot of them.
This is plainly not accurate - manure from most aninals, especially pig farms, is a hazardous easte to dispose of. Only a small percentage of manure is reused as fertiliser because transporting it is expensive, and messy. Often it needs to be processed before it can be used safely. You can gooogle 'industrial farm US' and see pictures of ani als standing knee deep in their own poop. Also it is illegal to take photos of factory farms in some states.
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"
> manure from most aninals, especially pig farms, is a hazardous easte to dispose of. Only a small percentage of manure is reused as fertiliser because transporting it is expensive, and messy
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
> Here in Northern Europe 100% of manure from housed animals is used,
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.
None of our animals' waste is any hazard to you, unless you slip on it!
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.
Maybe 1 a year. And this is only emitted in dangerous quantities when the manure is being stirred prior to being removed from storage. So somewhat tangential to original point.
Is this an argument made in good faith? The commentator said reduce meat consumption and that most people ate too much. They didn't say "ban it for everyone, let the autoimmune suffer"
I purposefully chose an extreme example to put it onto the radar of everyone pushing veganism everywhere. Also if you really study sustainability, you see that reducing meat production doesn't lead to better sustainability anyway.
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?
This is theoretical and not the case in practice. Meat companies are an Oligarchy in The United States which is the largest world meat producer. There are four massive meat companies and if they existed at the onset of anti-trust they would have been broken up long ago. The miracle of the market to competitively decide on a price relies on competitive market environments which do not exist in the largest meat market in the world, The US.
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?
How about this modus ponens chain: "eating less meat" -> "lowering meat production" -> "hiking up meat prices" -> "autoimmune sufferers unable to buy meat" -> "autoimmune sacrificed"
Do you realize it's not just about meat but also about the excessive farming practices used to produce vegetables? Animals naturally fertilize the earth.
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.
I think, and I have to admit I don't have any current numbers on that, that Europe is actually producing more food than we currently need. So cutting backnon industrial agriculture, ranging from grains to meat, so covering all sorts of foodstuffs, can only be a good thing, for people, the environment and animals.
And yet a billion people in this world are starving... Cutting back on industrial agriculture means participating in a genocide, basically.
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?
This is incorrect. If all food we produce world wide was distributed equally everywhere not a single person would starve. However it isn't distributed anywhere close to equally. In many societies food is instead wasted in large amounts.
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.
Distribution is hard, though. Will reducing food even in countries where it is wasted solve distribution any better, or will it just hurt the people at the bottom of the distribution chain more?
Global food production is a, and I oversimplify a lot here, more of a distribution problem than it is a capacity problem. Certain countries cutting back on theor surplus has zero impact on the starving regions of the world, because as things stand now those surpluses aren't exported there anyway.
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?).
But wouldnt it lower the price of chicken in those places, providing more people w access to good calories although hurting the local farmers? Couldnt this be solved by a country putting up tariffs or banning importing such chicken? If they didn't do that what was their reason?
Why didn't they put tariffs in place? Well, how many governments, and people in power, did you ever hear of that worried about the poor and common folks? There are a lot of people profitting from these things, including the social conciousness of us in the developed world. And those interests, combined with a ton of money and close to no oversight, result in a system that just doesn't care about what happens to the average people.
> increase the share of eco-farming, i.e. conventional farming without the chemistry. The problem: both approaches drastically reduce agricultural productivity.
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.
> push towards regenerative agricultural practices
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?
Easy mode: If you are in the US, try looking up the Savannah Institute. They do some fantastic work to develop and research regenerative agricultural practices and they can use your money :-)
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.
I had to learn about this from Clarkson of all people. He seems to genuinely be involved in what he's doing and Clarkson's Farm is a great show as well!
I'd recommend "Harry's Farm" on Youtube as well. He's in a similar situation, where realistically he's not financially-dependant on the farm any more (made money elsewhere), but has great insight into the day-to-day running of one.
> The problem: both approaches drastically reduce agricultural productivity.
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.
Please, stop this fake news of meat growing in burned-down rainforest farms. Most of the cattle in brazil is raised on biomes that were never rainforests to start, no matter what the lie the NYT told you.
Free-ranged cattle are also usually raised in regions that are very marginal in arable land. And in fact, bovines filled an ecological niche in the "Pantanal" region that was once occupied by native herbivores, extinguished centuries ago by human occupation. Eliminating them now would just mean more fires in the dry season.
Many sources, spanning many years, and both private (such as newspapers or NGOs) as well as governmental (e.g. the UN), have found that an overwhelming percentage of razed rainforest in Brazil was used for cattle farming [1][2], with a large part of the remainder going to large-scale soy farms, and a tiny bit for small-scale subsistence farming.
The bizarre thing is that Scottish (and Irish) people largely see barren moonscape as "natural". I never encountered such hatred for trees before I moved to Ireland. I drove through the Sperrins on Sunday and while the rolling hills are pretty they would be a lot prettier with native broadleaf forest...
> 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].
I am aware of CO2 market being a scam, this is very diffetent to what I propposed.
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.
The problem: illegal farming and logging will always be more profitable than whatever the West can manage to pay countries like Brazil - not to mention it isn't sure how much the West can reasonably hand out in payments given the multiple crises straining our budgets, or how much isolationist politicians like Trump want to pay out / if they are even interested in climate and nature protection.
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.
Without looking at details, I agree we produce too much. Of everything, not just meat.
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.
Is switching from meat to more grains better for birds? I strongly doubt that. Converting fields to planting fields is going to kill a lot more small mammals, birds, insects and so on?
It is better, because switching from meat to grains results in less area needed for planting grains, since we don't need to feed the animals anymore. Most grains that we farm today are fed to animals.
Most farm animals are kept in absurdly large stables. In Germany, the record is at 600.000 chickens (avg. 40.000) on a single farm [1], for pigs and cows it's 10.000-18.000 per farm [2].
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.
Will reducing fertilizers and other chemicals help in any meaningful way ?
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.
Much of our current bird population (at least in central Europe) has co-evolved with agriculture over thousands of years. The problem is not so much that there is agriculture happening, it is the scale and destructiveness of the industrialized agriculture that has become the norm. Fields that are literally several square kilometers large without any intersecting hedges or other habitats. Machines that pick up every last grain of wheat and turn soil up to a large depth, effectively sterilizing it of beneficial soil live. Pesticides and herbicides that kill off the basis for entire ecosystems.
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.
But a non-trivial amount of that is really intensive (one could say unnecessarily so) farming e.g. factory pig farming in the netherlands.
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.
There's also the fact that we are developing new agricultural advancements constantly and I mean the collective we - vertical farms in Asia, new irrigation systems, lab-grown stuff and so on. Surely we can think of ways to improve agriculture while retaining our feathered friends
> There are also quite convincing studies that show even worse declines for insect populations
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.
While not particularly useful as a scientific method, and obviously not attempting to counter your broader point asking for more detailed analysis, there’s incredibly compelling evidence: Go for a 100 mile drive at night, and count the bugs on your windshield. Ask your parents about it. Ask every 70 year old you know. Bugs are in decline.
There’s absolutely no lack of evidence. We know it’s real. We just haven’t catalogued that evidence very well.
Ironically I removed my mention of the windscreen evidence. There are some citizen science surveys documenting the decline (e.g. a UK study found a 60% decline over 20 years, or something like that). But it's a good example of a strong indicator but not the greatest quality evidence - geographically limited, concerns low flying population only, might be confounded by changes in car aerodynamics, verge / hedgerow maintenance etc.
You can see the effect on the very same car very clearly. We have been traveling with a camping car from germany to romania. In germany we did not need to clean the windscreen at all. In romania we did it almost every day.
Could also be that insects evolved to avoid long black patches of ground.
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.
> The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects
> There are also quite convincing studies that show even worse declines for insect populations, again mostly due to industrialized farming techniques and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides
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.
Refreshing to see a well researched comment, with appropriate citations that expresses well the complexity of the situation and the tradeoffs involved. This subject matter attracts a lot of cranks and simplistic non- solutions, so thanks.
There are multiple factors causing the decline in bird population, but I'd like to focus on a single one: deforestation. Trees provide so many different functions for birds (as for other animals, and for humans too), both directly and indirectly: shelter, fruits, a cooling effect in summer, and most importantly, they act as an entire ecosystem for insects and caterpillars. You remove the tree, you remove the insects, and you remove caterpillars which are a staple food for baby birds.
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.
"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."
I would say there's a difference between a fir Douglas plantation and a multi-species forest. The two are not ecologically equivalent. At least around where I live (department 71 in France), there are less and less forests and more and more tree plantations.
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.
IIRC EUs farming regulations stem from 60s/70s and their only adaptations were intensification and market concentration. Some decade ago the sister of a small German farmer told me how EU laws were systematically pushing him out of the market forcing him to sell his ground to bigger competitors to avoid going bankrupt.
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
No it’s backed by some reports i’ve heard and read in the meantime. There’s no excuse but bitter results of BigFarm corps lobbying and politicians who incentivize the wrong things.
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 replacements for some of those poisons (large amounts of artificial fertilisers) are animal products. In a world without artificial fertiliser you need to have animals to produce fertiliser.
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).
When I was a kid growing up in the London suburbs in the 70s and 80s I could remember flocks of all types of birds especially starlings and blackbirds being common place, and then, reading this article, it reminded me that I stopped seeing flocks.
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.
Slightly off-topic, but because of farming we also started to have problem with mistletoe. Many small bushes of rose-hips, blackthorns and other food that birds usually eat disappeared because of smaller fields being merged to one, flattened. So what birds eat now is mistletoe, spreading it from tree to tree by wiping their beaks onto the bark of the tree, leaving mistletoe seeds there.
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.
This is why all those "don't have outdoor cats, they kill all the birds" stories annoy me. At best they're misguided, at worse they're intentionally misleading to hide the fact that pesticides and farming practices are actually at fault. (In Europe, on other continents the story may be different)
Similar to the CO2 footprint, it's another way to individualize social issues and distract from large corporate sources of environmental destruction.
"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.
I agree that the environmental changes are affecting birdlife as well.
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.
If you read the article, they actually argue that the cats don't really have an effect because those 40 million birds are usually of species that aren't endangered and are usually birds that otherwise wouldn't have made it anyway.
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.
We've got to be really careful with those numbers. There's a massive difference in the ecosystem between continents. While we've become used to flora and fauna from continental Europe being brought to the rest of the world, that doesn't make them native there.
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.
Ok, don't have outdoor cats because they live short lives with high risk of dying painfully.
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.
This seems nuts to me. Keeping a cat in an apartment its entire life is psychological torture and almost all the indoor only cats I've ever met are neurotic.
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.
Entirely two different environments -- cats are a threat to birds in one of the oasis environments outside of modern mass agriculture -- urban areas. More and more, cities are becoming a place where certain key species actually find refuge. Unleashing cats in that environment is cruel to both cats and birds.
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.
Precisely! The people reiterating that study also acts like it is valid all around the world, including places where cats are not invasive. For example in mainland and southern Europe the cat has been tamed since at least 1200 BC and the wild cat has been since the ice age. Birds in those areas have long since adapted, as evident by the wild cat which predominately hunts ground-dwelling mammals.
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.
Is this a U.S. thing? Where I live—a rural part of the UK—I don't think anyone thinks twice about letting their cats out. It's just what you do with cats.
European cats aren't native to northern america, and as result, they're quite an invasive species with significant harm to the ecosystem. But that's not just limited to cats, that issue applies even to different species of lawn grass.
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.
It's an environmentally conscious person thing. Most people in most countries don't think twice about having cats or letting them out - even though they kill birds.
But what are the environmental effects of harvesting & manufacturing the food for the cats that are kept indoors? This is always left out of the equation in these conversations. Cats have to eat some animal to survive. To me, it seems bad for the environment to have cats as pets at all... (I have a cat)
Farming does a heck of a lot worse damage than 'a decline in bird populations'. What causes such decline in wild animal populations and causes damage to humans is that farming takes up all the available room driving both animals and humans away. I would rather see the farmer being free to sell their lands to housing developers or build on it instead of the current level of masochism with considerations like autarky and tradition being dominant. Presumably a lot would go for it. Farmer happy, people happy. Probably birds happier too. We will
help to ensure Ukraine wins that war and afterwards it can sell us food. Or Africa. Or wherever, really. Europe has better things to do.
"Man – despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a 6-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
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".
As fancy as it is to use fancy phrases, the lecturing tone here is not matched by any substance. The argument boils down to an appeal to authority followed by a personal attack.
I like to think of it as an encouragement to meditate a bit more on, for example, why this "solution" (let the free market handle it) isn't currently already solving everything. Not argument by authority, just a reminder that perhaps you are not the first person to have thought about this problem.
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.
What do you think is going to happen if farmers start selling their land for building residences and offices? where do you think your food is going to come from? Corporate farms? do you seriously think corporate farms are going to be carrying more for the environment than farming families?
I think they might actually now that you mentioned it. In the same way h&m has a better policy than most locally owned clothing stores. Families typically face immense pressure to only think about the short term. But it wasn't what I was thinking of.
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.
Not producing food locally and being dependent on imports for even basic food supplies is actually even more dangerous than being dependent on other countries for stuff such as electricity. Plus consider the huge amount of energy needed to transport food crops across the globe.
Another question worth thinking about - what landscape pollutes the air/water/land more? is it farm land or the cities?
Probably the most exciting future technology is precision fermentation.
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.
If it's cheaper for more nutritious food, and every other aspect remains the same or better, then you won't need to convince anyone, it'll sell itself.
I doubt there is anything which is more conservative and traditional than food. So even if its cheaper, more nutritious, better for the environment and tastes better, a lot of people will shun it and eat the same foods they've always eaten.
> Considering both the overwhelming negative impact of agricultural intensification and the homogenization introduced by temperature and land-use changes, our results suggest that the fate of common European bird populations depends on the rapid implementation of transformative change in European societies, and especially in agricultural reform.
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.
From the abstract: "We find that agricultural intensification, in particular pesticides and fertiliser use, is the main pressure for most bird population declines, especially for invertebrate feeders. Responses to changes in forest cover, urbanisation and temperature are more species-specific. Specifically, forest cover is associated with a positive effect and growing urbanisation with a negative effect on population dynamics, while temperature change has an effect on the dynamics of a large number of bird populations, the magnitude and direction of which depend on species' thermal preferences."
Here forests and trees in general are all cut so the farmers can do farming. Considering the amount of land that is changing into a deserts (which negatively affects the farmers too), it's a bit strange they keep cutting forest cover instead of subsidising maintaining and replanting.
> 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.
Biodynamics is complete hogwash. We do need labels for sustainable farming, but we need them to be based on science, not popular beliefs about moon phases and such things.
Agreed. Demeter is based on highly esoteric principles. Plus they've had an "interesting" relationship with the Nazi regime and obviously repeated their non-scientific weirdo theories in the Covid pandemic[0]. Personally, I only buy if I cannot avoid it.
Just to add an another anecdotal view, here in the US, I have seen more birds than recent years. I attribute the increase in my area to the halting of mosquito spraying practices.
Europe is a double whammy then for bird populations. The first thing you notice traveling around many european cities is ostensibly there are no spay and neuter programs (or they must be totally ineffective) for the thousands of stray cats that clad each and every rooftop and loiter around every park and street. For some places like Istanbul the overabundance is a point of pride or a tourist attraction in its own right. It's hard to imagine there are any birds at all in these cities with the bulk of the calories in the environment seemingly being held at the small game predator level, which is sustained at a higher level than the available prey can even support thanks to stuff like restaurant dumpsters or people feeding the cute little killing machines directly.
If you are the author, and you are in this thread: those graphs are stunning. Would have never thought to superimpose graphs over maps. But you folks made it work, and it's not just a gimmick, it provides information in a helpful and intuitive fashion.
In the old days, there were flocks of birds so large that they would blot out the sun, and the herds of bison were so large that it would take a week for a herd to walk by your campsite.
As we get more control of the resources on this planet, the proportions of species measured in earths biomass will certainly change. For example, there are no more wild cattle in europe. There are actually more domestic cattle in europe than there were ever wild cattle, however. The calories to support that surplus of bovine has to come from somewhere in the environment, there is no free energy. More nutrients that would have otherwise gone towards other plants perhaps are used to grow foods for the cattle, and n-th order effects to the rest of the environment happen from there. You can't have 8 billion people generating a surplus of food without changes to the rest of the network of life's interactions.
These are very soft words for the ongoing biocide.
If you look at animal farms and insecticide even a word as drastic as "animal holocaust" might be appropriate.
This is anecdotal, but I see a lot of land that used to support birds and small animals and is now stripped of vegetation and covered in solar panels. Destroying habitats to save the planet is the order of the day, apparently.
This comment + the dovecote comment elsewhere makes me ponder whether solar will ever be part of crop rotation / intercropping / cover cropping.
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.
Birds had smart enough DNA to outlast the dinosaur era and conquer the sky but I wonder if they have smart enough DNA to survive the mammalian pest that has been unleashed on the planet.
Don't forget that elimination of sparrows in some regions in China led to a famine with millions dead.
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.
Theyll probably survive, but in what numbers and which types of birds is an entirely different story. Nevermind the massive impact that has on the environment in general.
Is “farming to blame”, or is farming being blamed to suit an agenda?
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.
I’m pretty sure we need farming to continue existing as a species. Insane rhetoric like blaming cow farts on the end of the world will lead to the death of hundreds of millions due to starvation.
Cow farts are contributing to the end of the world, and that's a fact. Denying reality will lead to the death of billions due to starvation. Were you unaware there are other things you can eat besides cows? Did someone pay you to post this?
We need to move away from agriculture as a means of food production and switch to becoming herders. Farming is an incredibly destructive practice.
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.
Why should I care about animals that have no use for me?
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.
The consequences of killing birds and insects could be worse than the cost of keeping them around. That's what it boils down to. Knowing that, you just have to figure out if you think this is true for the things you value. You can try to figure this out yourself, or, if you think someone else could make a better judgement, see what they think. If the answer is "yes, perhaps the consequences of killing birds and insects could be worse than the cost of keeping them around for the things I value", then you should care.
Because birds and insects act as pollinators. Replicating natural, biological processes like that are difficult to replicate and most easily done by letting the natural process do its thing.
You live in nature. You might not be able to draw a straight line from bears to your quality of life, but everything is connected and if the rest of the web collapses, you will go with it.
