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?
Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
181–190 of 267 posts
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#183There 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…
> 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.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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]. [1] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2023-01/co2-certificates-frau...
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…
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.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
> Since house cats are one of the biggest threats birds face in the wild—they kill somewhere between 1.3 and 4 billion birds every year in the U.S.
The Audubon society lists domestic outdooor cats as one of the biggest threats to birds.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#187These 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.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
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.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Since house cats are one of the biggest threats birds face in the wild—they kill somewhere between 1.3 and 4 billion birds every year in the U.S. The Audubon society lists domestic outdooor cats as one of the biggest threats to birds. https://www.audubon.org/news/how-stop-cats-killing-birds
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.