Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2216573120

by tfourb • 3 years ago

296 254 3 years ago

tfourb7• 3 years ago

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."

anonzzzies• 3 years ago

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.

immibis5• 3 years ago

One is substantially cheaper than the other. That means more profit. And if you don't maximize profit, you are the weakest firm, goodbye.

tfourb7• 3 years ago

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.

mattashii• 3 years ago

The problem: both approaches drastically reduce agricultural productivity

That does not have to be an issue for the EU per se, as the EU is a net exporter of food in value, and potentially in calories as well.

BelleOfTheBall• 3 years ago

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

masklinn• 3 years ago

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.

mschuster915• 3 years ago

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.

runsWphotons4• 3 years ago

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?

hef198984• 3 years ago

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.

elzbardico• 3 years ago

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.

mkmk3• 3 years ago

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

tommek40772• 3 years ago

permacultural practices can compete in terms of output, it's just harder to industrialize

Then they can't compete – yet.

zmgsabst6• 3 years ago

Maybe we could do three good things at once:

- switch to this better method of farming

- end the corporate oligarchy controlling food by having smaller farms

- shift people out of net negative “services” into farming

I don’t see the downfall of industrial farming as a bad thing — they’re a whole problem all on their own (including the recent push to take away family farms from the Dutch).

Lutger2• 3 years ago

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.

raptorraver• 3 years ago

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)

hef198984• 3 years ago

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.

988747• 3 years ago

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?

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

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.

badpun2• 3 years ago

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.

WastingMyTime896• 3 years ago

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.

mempko• 3 years ago

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.

worldsayshi• 3 years ago

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?

AlecSchueler• 3 years ago

With your salary you could easily afford to by some land in eg Portugal and hire someone to manage as you see fit.

nocsi• 3 years ago

Probably start a community garden. Be careful though, some cities hate their citizens being able to grow their own food

tfourb7• 3 years ago

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.

nabla9• 3 years ago

There are also quite convincing studies

There is noticeable quantitative difference.

People 40+ and older remember from their childhood how car's windshield, lamps and grille were covered with dead insects every time you took long drive outside cites. Today you can drive small country roads for a day and get only small number of insects.

It used to be that you could walk in the garden and count easily 10-20 ladybugs eating aphid's from your planted flowers. My mother used fight aphids by spraying vinegar soap mix. Today the exact same spot with same flowers has no aphid problem and very few ladybugs.

balderdash• 3 years ago

Don’t forget the the sounds (crickets at night etc.)!

noselasd• 3 years ago

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.

tfourb7• 3 years ago

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.

Scarblac• 3 years ago

And eating less meat, so we can do with less agricultural production.

himinlomax2• 3 years ago

Pasture farming on marginal land is part of the solution. Industrial meat farming is part of the problem. They're two different things.

alex_duf2• 3 years ago

I think that's by far the biggest lever given how inefficient meat is at converting land area & water to calories.

pvaldes3• 3 years ago

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.

Gustomaximus• 3 years ago

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.

meerita• 3 years ago

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.

flagrant_taco11• 3 years ago

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?

shellac2• 3 years ago

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.

hug• 3 years ago

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.

manojlds• 3 years ago

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!

cjrp4• 3 years ago

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.

jgraham• 3 years ago

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.

[0] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-ento-... [1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-t... [2] https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/landsparing [3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-will-englands-national-food-s...

biorach6• 3 years ago

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.

cjrp4• 3 years ago

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.

clows• 3 years ago

Most farmers now won't grow rapeseed, because the risk of making a huge financial loss is too high.

Do you have data to back that up? The only info I could find is along the lines of the article below.

https://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2022/06/16/eu-rapesee...

EU rapeseed crop 2022 projected at five-year high

myshpa9• 3 years ago

I'm in country which has 15% of its farmland covered in it. Hate it.

It's sprayed 10-20 times per season, the amount of poison it spreads to the nature is staggering.

biorach6• 3 years ago

Most farmers now won't grow rapeseed,

In the EU? I think you just made that up

edumucelli• 3 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.fermedubec.com/la-ferme/la-recherche/ (scroll to the "STUDY REPORTS (English versions)" if you do not speak French.

boudin• 3 years ago

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.

flagrant_taco11• 3 years ago

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.

immibis5• 3 years ago

It is simply not possible to produce food for 8 billion people without destroying the planet.

taneq• 3 years ago

Common bird time series in Europe have shown a general decline in abundance between 1980 and 2016 (−25.4% ± 2.8)

In case anyone else was skimming through to find over what time period this occurred.

jabiko• 3 years ago

Thanks. It's always a bit annoying when someone throws around percentages of changes without giving the time frame.

Symbiote• 3 years ago

The authors of the paper give the percentage right next to the time (as quoted), it's the submitter who has invented a new title.

DrBazza• 3 years ago

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.

nologic01• 3 years ago

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.

mschild• 3 years ago

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.

myshpa9• 3 years ago

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.

kuschku5• 3 years ago

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.

winrid• 3 years ago

Yeah, my understanding is the poor regulation of the emissions controls on container ships is huge.

Y-bar• 3 years ago

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.

msrenee4• 3 years ago

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.

nathan_compton2• 3 years ago

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.

HeckFeck2• 3 years ago

We can't discount the effect of the increase in cat ownership and roaming:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/14/cats-kil...

"A study published in April estimated that UK cats kill 160 to 270 million animals annually, a quarter of them birds. The real figure is likely to be even higher, as the study used the 2011 pet cat population of 9.5 million; it is now closer to 12 million, boosted by the pandemic pet craze"

The study didn't include animals that cats killed and abandoned in the wild, so it is likely higher still.

kuschku5• 3 years ago

Quoting your own linked article:

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.

Veen• 3 years ago

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.

immibis5• 3 years ago

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.

kuschku5• 3 years ago

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.

cmrdporcupine2• 3 years ago

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.

nforgerit3• 3 years ago

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.

You reap what you sow I guess

megablast• 3 years ago

Farmers have always been making excuses why they failed.

nforgerit3• 3 years ago

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.

zmgsabst6• 3 years ago

Dutch farmers are having their farms seized by globalists in their government right now.

There’s a lot of corruption in farming.

brvsft• 3 years ago

Did you mistake farmers for bankers?

ClumsyPilot8• 3 years ago

I am not sure EU is the culprit.

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

unglaublich• 3 years ago

Whenever possible, buy Demeter products. Their approach to farming improves biodiversity and soil quality.

https://demeter.net/biodynamics/biodiversity/

35% more birds and 23% more insects are found in organic farmland thanks to the creation of natural habitats and the absence of chemical and synthetic pesticides.

We, customers, vote with our shopping behavior.

Yes, those products are 100-200% more expensive in terms of money. But don't forget that there is a huge price to pesticide use that is not passed through to the customer.

arnoooooo• 3 years ago

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.

nforgerit3• 3 years ago

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.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demeter_(Deutschland)

vitro• 3 years ago

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.

atlantic• 3 years ago

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.

chris-orgmenta• 3 years ago

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.

boredhedgehog• 3 years ago

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.

eggsmediumrare• 3 years ago

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.

supriyo-biswas• 3 years ago

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.

Solvate8441• 3 years ago

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.

the-dude2• 3 years ago

I moved to the country side, right between the farmers, about a year ago.

It is teaming with life here: insects, birds and bats.

was_a_dev• 3 years ago

Nice singular data point

the-dude2• 3 years ago

Thanks, I agree. Very nice.

Separo• 3 years ago

Anecdotal but I noticed in Portugal recently, in summer, over the course of two months, I saw pretty much no birds.

cmilton• 3 years ago

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.

AbsoluteCabbage2• 3 years ago

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.

immibis5• 3 years ago

The agenda is preventing the extinction of human life.

AbsoluteCabbage2• 3 years ago

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.

myshpa9• 3 years ago

We could immediately reduce the negative impacts of farming by 75%, just by switching to plant based diets.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

The industrial farming practices / propaganda making us reliant on overuse of poisons in our food chains makes us sick, is poisoing/destroying nature, destroying soil microbiomes, biodiversity, waters and air.

We have to find ways to farm without poisons, and teach farmers to use those methods - it won't be easy and it won't change with one law and it will take maybe decades, but the methods exists, it's possible and should be done.

Balero• 3 years ago

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).

myshpa9• 3 years ago

large amounts of artificial fertilisers

Sure, but also pesti/herbicides.

without artificial fertiliser you need to have animals to produce fertiliser

Or compost / nitrogen fixing / companion plants.

But removing all animal products would be counter productive

There are people practicing it for decades pretty well without animal inputs.

Syntropic agriculture (Ernst Götsch), natural farming (Masanobu Fukuoka), veganic farming, permaculture, hydroponics, animal-free biodynamic farming, etc.

It's not a necessity.

bryanlarsen3• 3 years ago

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.

Enter precision fermentation:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/24/green-...

MichaelZuo2• 3 years ago

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.

bryanlarsen3• 3 years ago

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.

juujian• 3 years ago

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.

NDizzle• 3 years ago

Ah yes, more guidance from Europe about getting rid of farms to save birds and stuff.

Let's do that, and instead get rid of people. Cut exports, that's what everyone wants, right?

singularity2001• 3 years ago

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.

ciconia2• 3 years ago

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.

bryanlarsen3• 3 years ago

Europe has a lot more trees today than it had 100 years ago.

have_faith• 3 years ago

What makes 100 years ago a good point of reference? as opposed to a date pre-industrial revolution maybe.

ciconia2• 3 years ago

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.

Fiahil• 3 years ago

Like siblings said : it's not a good benchmark, as forests were not exploited as much before.

In fact, almost all forests are exploited in some way or another. Some recently protected primal old growth will take a few centuries to recover.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest

"The world has 1.11 billion ha of primary forest remaining.[when?] Combined, three countries (Brazil, Canada, and Russia) host more than half (61 percent) of the world's primary forest. The area of primary forest has decreased by 81 million ha since 1990, but the rate of loss more than halved in 2010–2020 compared with the previous decade."

jononomo3• 3 years ago

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.

asdff3• 3 years ago

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.

jononomo3• 3 years ago

There is free energy from the Sun.

jononomo3• 3 years ago

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.

contingencies2• 3 years ago

Large scale terraforming does not have a history of success and is broadly associated with authoritarian governments.

timwaagh3• 3 years ago

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.

pkphilip4• 3 years ago

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?

timwaagh3• 3 years ago

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.

dmreedy2• 3 years ago

"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".

timwaagh3• 3 years ago

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.

j0057• 3 years ago

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.

mvdl• 3 years ago

Is there a reason windturbine effects on bird decline are not used in this study?

asdff3• 3 years ago

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.

Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

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