Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe (2023)

by johntfella • 3 years ago

164 104 3 years ago

Roark66• 3 years ago

Putting the entirety of Europe into one basket of "farmland practices" is really not a correct way to approach this. There are countries that have lots of tiny farmers, there are countries that have small number of huge farms. Practices between the two are hugely different. Also in the east where cost of living is much lower many farmers don't do farming (like my neighbours) but they "keep land culture" for which they are paid by the EU. This means essentially mowing the hay twice a year and doing nothing else. One of my farmer neighbours plants his fields every year, for his bees to make hone from a particular plant he wants honey from. He doesn't even collect the results, he just mows it back into the earth. Then there is the amount of woodland area. Compare my country Poland that has over 30% of its area as woodlands and growing with Netherlands(not picking on Netherlands, it is better in other ways). You can't. And their map really shows it.

So making a statement like "overall decline of bird species due to farming practices across Europe" is just untrue.

I'd love to see some sort of comparison of which farming practices specifically cause which bird populations to decline. Perhaps then we can adapt these tgat work better.

ImAnAmateur• 3 years ago

Three of the 51 authors are from Poland. There are breakdowns by country and also comparisons of forest cover, urbanization, and temperature. There's a button that lets you look at the pictures if you want an easy country overview.

veddox6• 3 years ago

Your first point is partly correct, but your conclusion isn't.

The authors split up their results by country to show exactly the differences you mention. However, you have to keep in mind that the EU Common Agricultural Policy applies to all these countries, and actively promotes large-scale intensive agriculture. Bird collapses after a country joins the EU have been shown, for example in the Czech Republic [1]. So yes, while the magnitude may vary, the negative trend is a Europe-wide phenomenon.

There's also been a lot of research done on what aspects of farming cause declines [2]. It's partly species-specific, but the three major causes are: loss of semi-natural habitat area (e.g. hedges, fallows), disturbance mortality (e.g. from harvesting), and pesticides (often mediated through the loss of insects as food source).

[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12585 [2] e.g. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959270919000480, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14400, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13531, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2003.06.004

ExoticPearTree• 3 years ago

The real danger I think is in the decrease of insect population. Anecdotally, 15-20 years ago, a longer trip throughout the country (2-400km) the windshield would be littered with dead insects, now very very few insects hit the windshield.

Is there a study about the effects of decreased pollination?

hellgas00• 3 years ago

Can you elaborate if possible on the comment made about the EU Common Agricultural Policy's effects of promoting large scale intensive agriculture. Specifically what policy attributes support it.

moby_click• 3 years ago

It would be interesting, to also compare the output of farmland practices. If higher input leads to higher output, demand can be met with less land.

Here is one example of that tradeoff: "Scale-dependent effectiveness of on-field vs. off-field agri-environmental measures for wild bees" - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S143917912...

Different species and crops may yield different results.

veddox6• 3 years ago

If higher input leads to higher output, demand can be met with less land.

That is a big debate in conservation biology (known as "land sparing vs land sharing"). One of the major problems of the land sparing approach, which you outline above, is that there is nothing that makes (at least European) farmers as upset as the requirement to give up farming on part of their land. So while it's neat in principle, many conservationists doubt its political practicability.

jgraham• 3 years ago

I don't disagree with you, but to give a bit of colour to the counterargument, as I understand it, we now have maybe 5 decades of experience which suggests that the "sharing" approach doesn't work at scale. In general, if you want to see wildlife in western Europe you go to a nature reserve, not a farm, because "spared" land will have nature but "shared" land increasingly won't. Of course there are some individual farmers who are doing great work and bucking that trend, but so far no one has found a magic formula that allows land to both be subject to intensive agriculture, and also support historically normal levels of wildlife. Or maybe someone has, but if so they've failed to convince farmers to adopt it unilaterally, or governments to impose it as policy.

So arguably the evidence we have is that if you consider only things that farmers like to be politically practical, then we're likely to see wildlife declines continue indefinitely.

That is of course why many people are looking for solutions that don't depend on the consent of the agricultural industry. One approach is to go over their heads and appeal directly to government e.g. the biodiversity COP agreement requiring 30% of land to be set aside for nature. Another is to hope that technological breakthroughs (e.g. precision fermentation) can fundamentally alter consumer demand for food products in a way that makes them much less land intensive (primarily by cutting out meat and other animal products, which use a disproportionate amount of land when farmed extensively, and produces a disproportionate amount of pollution when farmed intensively).

Of course, in the short term, the practical answer is "do both, wherever possible". Conservation organisations should be encouraged to purchase land so that it can be managed directly for wildlife. Farmers should be encouraged to adopt wildlife-friendly practices as much as possible. Governments should be encouraged to consider wildlife conservation a goal in itself when designing incentive schemes for the agriculture industry, and the taxpayers who directly fund much agriculture through subsidies should be encouraged to hold them accountable for their progress in this area.

Easier said than done, of course, but as the original article makes clear, the status quo is chronic failure, and there's no reason to suppose that can be changed within the current paradigm.

veddox6• 3 years ago

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

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

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

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

toss14• 3 years ago

Thank you for your work as an ecologist!

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

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

Something's gotta give.

_y5hn• 3 years ago

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

epistasis5• 3 years ago

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

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

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

Solar farms are far better for the ecosystem.

voakbasda• 3 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

mytailorisrich2• 3 years ago

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

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

dylan6042• 3 years ago

and also evidently responsible for the obesity epidemic.

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

fiftyfifty• 3 years ago

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

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

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

elzbardico2• 3 years ago

Curiously, nobody seems to be very interested in studying the impact of renewable energy projects for bird populations.

Probably hard as hell to get grants for that.

veddox6• 3 years ago

Sorry, that's just not true. Just type "renewable energy bird populations" into Google Scholar and work your way through the results. There's tons of research on that out there.

See e.g. here for a recent study: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.211...

johnnyworker• 3 years ago

Why not check first if it's true before you claim it? It takes the same time, too: I simply copied and pasted from your comment and here they are, take your pick:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the%20impact%20of%20re...

edit: But IMO more importantly, it's not like farmland practices that endanger birds and renewable energy somehow offset each other. Both are desirable (not the harmful farmland practices are, but farming per se is), even vital things, and their undesirable side-effects need to be reduced.

persedes• 3 years ago

If you are referring to wind turbines killing birds, those have been studied. First search result, bunch of studies in the footnotes:

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds

And if you want to put in relation to other bird killers: https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...

hinkley• 3 years ago

So, so many times.

The upshot is that if we wanted to save birds, we would tear down all office buildings and fossil fuel power plants and replace them with windmills.

But first, rid the world of cats.

croes4• 3 years ago

This comes every time when people talk about wind turbines and they are far behind the top 3 killers:

Cats

Cars

Windows in buildings

Cats for instance kill billions each year.

unnamed76ri• 3 years ago

Strange to include a natural predator in this list.

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

Very strange to leave off by far the #1 issue which is habitat destruction.

linuxftw• 3 years ago

This is highly misleading. The birds that are killed by windmills aren't the same type of birds killed by feral cats. Windmills kill high-soaring endangered predator species.

elzbardico2• 3 years ago

Ok. I was wrong. Can someone please flag my comment dead? I don't stand by it anymore and can't delete it.

BobaFloutist• 3 years ago

When I do something like this, I edit the comment, and add something like the following to the top "Edit: I was completely mistaken and no longer stand by this, but I'll leave my mistake up for posterity"

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

No, we should leave your comment alive so we can have a larger discussion about why this is a persistent meme in the discourse, why people like you are predisposed to write this nonsense, and how to counter the scourge of misinformation around renewable energy.

graphe9• 3 years ago

None of these will matter once Ukraine joins the EU. Their soil is the richest and has the greatest depth.

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

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/15/ukraine-memb...

They will incapacitate the EU's ability to farm without subsidies, something they already do heavily.

E.U. farmers currently receive subsidies of more than $200 per hectare farmed. Given its vast arable land, Ukraine would be eligible for billions in payments.
Even with membership many years away, the issue of Ukrainian exports entering the E.U. market has spurred protest, with farmers in neighboring countries lashing out over a glut of grain.

PakG1• 3 years ago

Given what's happening in Ukraine right now, this would imply that high-quality soil could become the next resource that nations literally fight wars over.

graphe9• 3 years ago

If you look at the map, it won't be fought over as much as Ukraine will dominate agriculture. What the Netherlands did for pig farming in the 90s Ukraine will do for the entire industry. China buys pork from the Netherlands it's so cheap.

If you mean natural resources it's still water for trade. Russia has little outward rivers, Crimea and Ukraine would help their trade a lot. The Suez canal and the area around is is incredibly wealthy.

hanniabu2• 3 years ago

And the soil will be filled with lead contamination from it being turned into a battlefield

morsch• 3 years ago

Ukraine would be eligible for billions in payments.

That stands to reason -- France gets almost 10 billion, Germany 6.5, Poland 4.5, to name a few.

cmrdporcupine• 3 years ago

Unfortunately a large % of of the richest soils in Ukraine are on the Russian side of the occupation line (Zaporizhia Oblast mainly).

That and there must be tens of thousands of acres that are damaged and poisoned by constant artillery bombardment, and full of landmines.

What Russia can't take by force, they are destroying.

stefan_• 3 years ago

EU agriculture is an entirely pretend market heavily subsidized for self sustenance - few countries will depend on other states for basic foodstuff, no matter the price. Ukraine joining will not change that.

CrzyLngPwd2• 3 years ago

There is zero chance of Ukraine ever joining the EU.

There is little chance that Ukraine as we know it will even survive.

lukas0994• 3 years ago

I would like to know why you feel so confident.

nashashmi• 3 years ago

Is it because of the lack of trees at farms that is causing the decline of birds?

A side query brought to attention the following research paper: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/iowa-state-university... (Iowa State University Research Finds Wind Farms Positively Impact Crops).

It seems wind farms hinder winds causing positive effects on farms. By a small stretch of the imagination, trees should do the same thing, which will help with bird populations. And bird sticks on wind towers should also help bird populations.

We are a "best practice" away from helping farms, trees, and birds all in one go!

robocat• 3 years ago

Hopefully we don't see similar outcomes to the smash sparrows campaign: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign

mvdl• 3 years ago

It would be interesting to correlate the decline with the presence of wind-turbines and wind farms not mentioned in these studies.

LazarWolf_• 3 years ago

I think what the article meant to say. “Farmland practices keep Europeans alive”

Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe (2023)

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