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Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
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Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#22This 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.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#23There 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 o…
> 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 f…
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.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#24There 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 o…
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.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#25There 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 o…
And eating less meat, so we can do with less agricultural production.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#26There 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 o…
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
> permacultural practices can compete in terms of output, it's just harder to industrialize
Then they can't compete – yet.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#27IIRC 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
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#28IIRC 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
Farmers have always been making excuses why they failed.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#29There 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 o…
And eating less meat, so we can do with less agricultural production.
Pasture farming on marginal land is part of the solution. Industrial meat farming is part of the problem. They're two different things.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#30There 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 o…
> 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.