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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

#231

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

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…

Yes, animal husbandry is an integrated part of food production, but there is merit to the suggestion of _reducing_ meat consumption; most of the world has increased meat consumption per capita quite a lot the last 20 years and going back to 2000 levels might not be a bad idea in the case of a lot of richer countries.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#233

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

biorach wrote: post #166
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in Northern Europe 100% of manure from housed animals is used, That's the wrong statistics to look it - 100% of waste coffee is used. They already have it, good management will figure out a way to use it. But you cannot make an argument that we have to keep drinking coffee because fertiliser industry will collapse without waste coffee. There are thousands of studies about impacts of intensive animal faming on…

I have no idea why you are taking about coffee. You said > Only a small percentage of manure is reused as fertiliser because transporting it is expensive, and messy That's straight up false, for Northern Europe anyway.

Can confirm. It's the norm up here. Wikipedia says the practice was imported from the US after WW2.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#234

Post by binx_ »

mempko wrote: post #229
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…

I'm sorry but it seems that it's global warming that is causing insect declines as the primary driver, not farming practices (though farming practices do play a role of course). Protected lands of the Puerto Rican rain forest saw huge declines in insect and consequently birds and there is no farming there. The explanation is simple. Heat waves are killing the bugs. They simply can't cope with 1 or 2 weeks of intense…

"Climate Chaos" is certainly apt - things are becoming verifiably hotter but also more unpredictable and volatile. I was a proponent of using 'climate change' fairly exclusively but this comment has helped reframe that, thank you.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#235

Post by ummonk »

tommek4077 wrote: post #64
ummonk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Many of the practices proposed to reduce the impact on the environment are nonstarters because of low land yields (and indeed might actually be worse on the environment because you need to convert more land to farmland).

If this method has equal land yields and less environmental impact but is highly labor intensive, perhaps there is scope for mechanization to make it competitive.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#236

Post by myshpa »

Balero wrote: post #217
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 thoug…

> large amounts of artificial fertilisers

Sure, but also pesti/herbicides.

> without artificial fertiliser you need to have animals to produce fertiliser

Or compost / nitrogen fixing / companion plants.

> But removing all animal products would be counter productive

There are people practicing it for decades pretty well without animal inputs.

Syntropic agriculture (Ernst Götsch), natural farming (Masanobu Fukuoka), veganic farming, permaculture, hydroponics, animal-free biodynamic farming, etc.

It's not a necessity.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#237

Post by ClumsyPilot »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #169
orwin wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural landowners who didn't had a marketable crop/produce (wine) already got expropriated, and their land already incorporate 'rationalized' ag. I know of 6 person in my mother's village who killed themselves between the 80s and late 90s, because of 'revolver' credits (aptly renamed), and tbf the rest of their family (4 different families) got it worse imho, until the state swoopt in and forgave the debt. I think onl…

No idea where you are from but I'm French and my family has owned a farming equipment dealership for close to 50 years. I haven't seen this mass incorporation you speak of. Farms have indeed grew larger through consolidation (no one got expropriated - farming is now capital-intensive and economy of scale kicks in with larger farms - small owners either bought their neighbours and became big, sold or went bankrupt) bu…

> Livestock farming is the only activity which remains somewhat widespread on a small scale here and it's miserable. It's a buyer market. Farmers are being squeezed out as much as possible by their distributors.

Exactly, people removed from farming do not understand how predatory the market actually is towards them. And they go around tilting at windmills.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#238

Post by j0057 »

> Considering both the overwhelming negative impact of agricultural intensification and the homogenization introduced by temperature and land-use changes, our results suggest that the fate of common European bird populations depends on the rapid implementation of transformative change in European societies, and especially in agricultural reform.

The chance of transformative change like that happening in the Netherlands anytime soon is 0%. BBB has won big in provincial politics and they will be able to stall or vote down any policy that isn't beneficial to the few big agro firms for the coming years.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#239

Post by pvaldes »

kiliantics wrote: post #225
pvaldes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big plot hole in this master plan that many people apparently can't see or accept. If we remove the production of meat, this will severely harm the production of vegetables. They are connected. You can't have real agriculture without manure. Fossil guano is a finite, scarce and very expensive resource, and human manure is not so desirable as replacement by several reasons so, how do they expect to feed their gree…

Most soil fertiliser today comes from fossil fuel. This was the whole Haber Bosch breakthrough. If we give up artificial fertiliser and need to use animal manure, that would not justify the unsustainable scale of livestock we have today. There are also alternative sustainable nutrient sources like compost and seaweed. I don't know how much manure can be replaced with alternatives but I don't think your point lets us…

Seaweed has salt. I you put salt in a soil you will ruin it for agriculture. In the first years there are a few salt tolerant vegetables that you can still culture. After a while the accumulated salt will be just too much even for asparagus.

Compost can help. I don't know how much that would scale in any case.

Is true that we can produce some fertilizers chemically, but we need to invest huge amounts of energy for this; After Wikipedia >1% of all the energy that we humans use in the planet is spent just to make ammonia, and many of this is used to make urea. If I'm not wrong we need also natural gas to feed the process, so this energy came basically from non renewables. Is part of the solution but not a miracle cure.

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