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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

#61

Post by arnoooooo »

unglaublich wrote: post #54

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 ter…

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.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#62

Post by Reason077 »

Lutger wrote: post #56
himinlomax wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They are, but pasture farming implies eating less meat. We are currently near a billion cows worldwide, we don't have marginal land for all of them. That means meat is going to be expensive and you'd rather eat avocado toast instead. Unless demand suddenly drops or we scale growing meat from a lab.

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.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#63

Post by badpun »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #14
tfourb wrote: post #3

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 o…

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 l…

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.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#64

Post by tommek4077 »

ummonk wrote: post #51
tommek4077 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> permacultural practices can compete in terms of output, it's just harder to industrialize Then they can't compete – yet .

I think they meant competitive in land yields, not prices.

If I need 50 workers instead of 1, I can't compete.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#65

Post by CrampusDestrus »

badpun wrote: post #63
jillesvangurp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

Agriculture is subsidized to get the farmers' vote

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#66

Post by danielheath »

CalRobert wrote: post #36
himinlomax wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"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...

Greece has lots of land that's either too steep for humans to walk on, or too rocky to grow anything but grass on, or both.

As a result, traditional Greek cuisine has lots of lamb and goat meat.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#68

Post by [deleted] »

CrampusDestrus wrote: post #65
badpun wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agriculture is subsidized to get the farmers' vote

[deleted]

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#69

Post by badpun »

CrampusDestrus wrote: post #65
badpun wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agriculture is subsidized to get the farmers' vote

That too, but the benefit of food security is there regardless of the motive.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#70

Post by mschuster91 »

runsWphotons wrote: post #12
mschuster91 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

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.

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/gefluegelmaester-in-d...

[2] https://www.boell.de/de/2016/01/13/mecklenburg-vorpommern-wo...

[3] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Nitrat-im-Grund...

[4] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgun...

[5] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Landw...

[6] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgun...

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