5 ms·

Is there a push to move to smaller regenerative farms occurring?

by newsclues 4y ago

WJW 4y ago
Yes, but the farmers are (obviously) not in favor and have been protesting heavily.
- jorvi 4y ago
  I would replace 'protesting' with 'terrorizing'. They've been visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings. What is most aggrieving to me is that the police is pseudo on the side of the farmers. The head of the police said that he 'fully understands the plight of the farmers' and will keep on a policy of de-escalation. Scant few fines too. Meanwhile a couple of climate protestors that tie themselves to a bridge get their head bashed in and then get fines of €300-5000. Clown world.
  - kapsi 4y ago
    If there were that many of organized climate protesters they would be heard as well, it always comes down to numbers and potential for violence.
  - ryan93 4y ago
    I mean placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd. They should have started with severe controls on importing goods from countries with high levels of pollution
    - wartijn_ 4y ago
      Do you have a source of the government "placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers"? The Dutch government wanted[0] to curb emissions, and since (high intensity) farms are huge polluters, some of the measurements affected farmers.But I can't remember them placing the blame on the farmers. [0] Well, they didn't really want it, but had to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/dutch-officials-reveal-measures-to-cut-emissions-after-court-ruling https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/dutch-official...
    - donkeyd 4y ago
      > placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd Nobody is doing that, this is blatant misinformation that is being spread by interest groups that profit off Dutch farmers. Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen. As the OP mentioned, it is causing acidification of nature areas, which is negatively impacting all sorts of wildlife. It's a mostly local problem, often caused by intensive farming and is mostly unrelated to climate change.
      - naasking 4y ago
        > Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen. Yes, and nitrogen fertilizer yields nitrous oxide which is a greenhouse gas implicated in climate change [1]. This is not just "misinformation", this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer. [1] https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/fertilizer-and-climate-change https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/fertilizer-and-climate-ch...
        wickedsight 4y ago
        > this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer Sure, that might be true, but it is definitely blatant misinformation that Dutch farmers are being blamed for climate change. It is not part of the discussion that's currently ongoing in The Netherlands and that is purposefully being misrepresented in (mostly American) right-wing media. This needs to be clear, because the violent protests by framers in The Netherlands are being abused by foreign interest groups who frame them as protests against those farmers being blamed for climate change. This is a real issue, because this is starting to become an actual discussion point for those who are supporting the farmers. They are, for example, asking why farmers are now targeted and airports are not, while farmers cause 88x more nitrogen emissions than flights in the Netherlands. Also, those emissions are less focused on the problem areas. Misinformation is incredibly harmful in this discussion and therefore it's incredibly important to keep the facts straight. Otherwise all discussions and arguments will mix and there will never actually be anything done.
        4y ago
    - fleddr 4y ago
      They were blamed not for climate change, instead for nitrogen disposition. This is a uniquely Dutch problem, largely unrelated to CO2. In larger countries, there's clear zoning and distance between protected nature and intensive agriculture. Not in the Netherlands, where these two things are directly bordering each other. Hence, the agriculture very directly destroys its surrounding nature. Not by CO2, by nitrogen.
  - j0057 4y ago
    The highway blockades have lead to accidents too, in one case a fatal one: https://www.rtvutrecht.nl/nieuws/3443753/twee-aanhoudingen-na-ongeluk-door-a28-blokkade-waarbij-amersfoortse-motorrijder-omkwam https://www.rtvutrecht.nl/nieuws/3443753/twee-aanhoudingen-n...
chickenimprint 4y ago
How would that work? We don't have enough land as it is. And we can't pay for the additional labor small farms need, or food inflation will explode. Making agriculture unproductive will just push the demand outwards like a beaker of toxic reactants boiling over. We can't impose more trade restrictions on foreign agricultural goods either, for fear of a trade war. This hopeless romanticism of small organic mom-and-pop farming is misguided. The only solution I see is huge, highly efficient, automated, but also highly regulated farms. That, and veganism.
- b112 4y ago
  We don't have enough land as it is. Only discussing the land statement here, but we have loads and loads and loads of unused farmland. At least, that is true in Canada, and I suspect the US, and I know in the EU some are paid not to farm. In Canada, we have quotas on some things, to prevent over production. There are two real issues: * drought, or summers with few sunny days, reducing yields * random new diseases So we need that fallow land, just in case, which is why people are given inventives to have farm land, but not use it. Yet we still have so much farm land, that we sell the best of it to developers, who then create housing. We have loads of unused farmland. One last thing. China's population is going to almost halve, over the next 15 years, Russia will have a major population decline, and the most industrialized nations are the same. Canada has solved this top heavy, old age die off, with immigration. More than 30% of Canadian citizens, for example, we not born in Canada. But for those with lower immigration numbers, and low birth rates (basically the entire industrialized world), populations will plummet by 30% to 50% in the next 25 years. China had the one child program, and the birth rate in Canada is less than 1 for every 2 adults, for Canadians boen here. The rest of the West is the same. So worldwide, our population will plummet very soon.
  - rmah 4y ago
    Yes, especially on the east coast, vast swaths of what was once farmland and pasture is now forest again. For example, most of Connecticut's forests were cut down for not very productive farms before good transportation infrastructure allowed that activity to be moved to more suitable areas. It's now forest again and atlantic salmon are back for the first time in a century.
zip1234 4y ago
Probably better to stop propping up the small farms and let the unproductive land be reclaimed by nature. Extensively use pest resistant GMO crops to increase yields on less land and overall lessen the land needed for farming. At the same time, lessening sprawl would be quite helpful. I see plenty of people 'move out to the country' and then spray pesticides over their entire 5 acre lawn.

Is there a push to move to smaller regenerative farms occurring?

WJW 4y ago

Yes, but the farmers are (obviously) not in favor and have been protesting heavily.

jorvi 4y ago
I would replace 'protesting' with 'terrorizing'. They've been visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings. What is most aggrieving to me is that the police is pseudo on the side of the farmers. The head of the police said that he 'fully understands the plight of the farmers' and will keep on a policy of de-escalation. Scant few fines too. Meanwhile a couple of climate protestors that tie themselves to a bridge get their head bashed in and then get fines of €300-5000. Clown world.
- kapsi 4y ago
  If there were that many of organized climate protesters they would be heard as well, it always comes down to numbers and potential for violence.
- ryan93 4y ago
  I mean placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd. They should have started with severe controls on importing goods from countries with high levels of pollution
  - wartijn_ 4y ago
    Do you have a source of the government "placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers"? The Dutch government wanted[0] to curb emissions, and since (high intensity) farms are huge polluters, some of the measurements affected farmers.But I can't remember them placing the blame on the farmers. [0] Well, they didn't really want it, but had to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/dutch-officials-reveal-measures-to-cut-emissions-after-court-ruling https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/dutch-official...
  - donkeyd 4y ago
    > placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd Nobody is doing that, this is blatant misinformation that is being spread by interest groups that profit off Dutch farmers. Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen. As the OP mentioned, it is causing acidification of nature areas, which is negatively impacting all sorts of wildlife. It's a mostly local problem, often caused by intensive farming and is mostly unrelated to climate change.
    - naasking 4y ago
      > Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen. Yes, and nitrogen fertilizer yields nitrous oxide which is a greenhouse gas implicated in climate change [1]. This is not just "misinformation", this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer. [1] https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/fertilizer-and-climate-change https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/fertilizer-and-climate-ch...
      - wickedsight 4y ago
        > this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer Sure, that might be true, but it is definitely blatant misinformation that Dutch farmers are being blamed for climate change. It is not part of the discussion that's currently ongoing in The Netherlands and that is purposefully being misrepresented in (mostly American) right-wing media. This needs to be clear, because the violent protests by framers in The Netherlands are being abused by foreign interest groups who frame them as protests against those farmers being blamed for climate change. This is a real issue, because this is starting to become an actual discussion point for those who are supporting the farmers. They are, for example, asking why farmers are now targeted and airports are not, while farmers cause 88x more nitrogen emissions than flights in the Netherlands. Also, those emissions are less focused on the problem areas. Misinformation is incredibly harmful in this discussion and therefore it's incredibly important to keep the facts straight. Otherwise all discussions and arguments will mix and there will never actually be anything done.
        4y ago
  - fleddr 4y ago
    They were blamed not for climate change, instead for nitrogen disposition. This is a uniquely Dutch problem, largely unrelated to CO2. In larger countries, there's clear zoning and distance between protected nature and intensive agriculture. Not in the Netherlands, where these two things are directly bordering each other. Hence, the agriculture very directly destroys its surrounding nature. Not by CO2, by nitrogen.
- j0057 4y ago
  The highway blockades have lead to accidents too, in one case a fatal one: https://www.rtvutrecht.nl/nieuws/3443753/twee-aanhoudingen-na-ongeluk-door-a28-blokkade-waarbij-amersfoortse-motorrijder-omkwam https://www.rtvutrecht.nl/nieuws/3443753/twee-aanhoudingen-n...

chickenimprint 4y ago

How would that work? We don't have enough land as it is. And we can't pay for the additional labor small farms need, or food inflation will explode. Making agriculture unproductive will just push the demand outwards like a beaker of toxic reactants boiling over. We can't impose more trade restrictions on foreign agricultural goods either, for fear of a trade war. This hopeless romanticism of small organic mom-and-pop farming is misguided. The only solution I see is huge, highly efficient, automated, but also highly regulated farms. That, and veganism.

b112 4y ago
We don't have enough land as it is. Only discussing the land statement here, but we have loads and loads and loads of unused farmland. At least, that is true in Canada, and I suspect the US, and I know in the EU some are paid not to farm. In Canada, we have quotas on some things, to prevent over production. There are two real issues: * drought, or summers with few sunny days, reducing yields * random new diseases So we need that fallow land, just in case, which is why people are given inventives to have farm land, but not use it. Yet we still have so much farm land, that we sell the best of it to developers, who then create housing. We have loads of unused farmland. One last thing. China's population is going to almost halve, over the next 15 years, Russia will have a major population decline, and the most industrialized nations are the same. Canada has solved this top heavy, old age die off, with immigration. More than 30% of Canadian citizens, for example, we not born in Canada. But for those with lower immigration numbers, and low birth rates (basically the entire industrialized world), populations will plummet by 30% to 50% in the next 25 years. China had the one child program, and the birth rate in Canada is less than 1 for every 2 adults, for Canadians boen here. The rest of the West is the same. So worldwide, our population will plummet very soon.
- rmah 4y ago
  Yes, especially on the east coast, vast swaths of what was once farmland and pasture is now forest again. For example, most of Connecticut's forests were cut down for not very productive farms before good transportation infrastructure allowed that activity to be moved to more suitable areas. It's now forest again and atlantic salmon are back for the first time in a century.

zip1234 4y ago

Probably better to stop propping up the small farms and let the unproductive land be reclaimed by nature. Extensively use pest resistant GMO crops to increase yields on less land and overall lessen the land needed for farming. At the same time, lessening sprawl would be quite helpful. I see plenty of people 'move out to the country' and then spray pesticides over their entire 5 acre lawn.