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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

#211

Post by [deleted] »

tfourb wrote: post #183
worldsayshi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#213

Post by contingencies »

danielheath wrote: post #66
CalRobert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Corn does well on rocky and steep terrain.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#214

Post by contingencies »

jononomo wrote: post #208

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 product…

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

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#215

Post by Fiahil »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #198
ciconia wrote: post #195

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,…

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

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#216

Post by kiliantics »

flagrant_taco wrote: post #148
Scarblac wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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. Ra…

All those animals need to eat. Most crop farming is done to feed livestock rather than humans. That's a lot of wasted land use which could be habitat for wild ecosystems if we just cut down our meat consumption.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#217

Post by Balero »

myshpa wrote: post #122

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 farm…

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).

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#218

Post by aziaziazi »

mihaic wrote: post #173
psiops wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be a lot easier to feed everyone if we grow food for humans rather than cattle.

It seems that optimal calorie output from all our available land involves some intermediary animals that eat whatever humans can't eat. I agree we're raising far too many cattle, but just wanted to point out it's not very simple.

Depends how you define « optimum ».

For IPCC it’s GHG mitigation and the vegan diet beats them all, while « all diets needs to provide full complement of nutritional quality, including micronutrients ».

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/4/2022/11/SRCC... (Page 488)

Edit : translate giec to ipcc

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#219

Post by timwaagh »

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.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#220

Post by pkphilip »

timwaagh wrote: post #219

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 a…

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?
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