11 ms·

There are also quite convincing studies that show even worse declines for insect populations, again mostly due to industrialized farming techniques and the wide

by tfourb 3y ago

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 of eco-farming, i.e. conventional farming without the chemistry. The problem: both approaches drastically reduce agricultural productivity. We really need a push towards regenerative agricultural practices (agroforestry, holistic grazing, etc.) that can deliver high yields while also improving CO2 sequestration and habitat creation.

mattashii 3y ago
> The problem: both approaches drastically reduce agricultural productivity That does not have to be an issue for the EU per se, as the EU is a net exporter of food in value, and potentially in calories as well.
- masklinn 3y ago
  But a non-trivial amount of that is really intensive (one could say unnecessarily so) farming e.g. factory pig farming in the netherlands. And on the other hand, the revenue model tends to require this sort of practices, unless there’s room in (and you aim for) the more bougie distribution channels / outlets the hit is hard to absorb, especially the hit in reliability.
- BelleOfTheBall 3y ago
  There's also the fact that we are developing new agricultural advancements constantly and I mean the collective we - vertical farms in Asia, new irrigation systems, lab-grown stuff and so on. Surely we can think of ways to improve agriculture while retaining our feathered friends
mschuster91 3y ago
> 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 farms.
- runsWphotons 3y ago
  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?
  - knutzui 3y ago
    It is better, because switching from meat to grains results in less area needed for planting grains, since we don't need to feed the animals anymore. Most grains that we farm today are fed to animals.
    - runsWphotons 3y ago
      Interesting. But rough time to be a cow.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    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-deutschland-gnadenloses-wettruesten-im-huehnerstall-1.1759132 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/gefluegelmaester-in-d... [2] https://www.boell.de/de/2016/01/13/mecklenburg-vorpommern-wo-die-megastaelle-stehen https://www.boell.de/de/2016/01/13/mecklenburg-vorpommern-wo... [3] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Nitrat-im-Grundwasser-Niederlande-will-Hoefe-zur-Not-enteignen,grundwasser206.html https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Nitrat-im-Grund... [4] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgungsbilanzen/fleisch https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgun... [5] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Landwirtschaft-Forstwirtschaft-Fischerei/Feldfruechte-Gruenland/aktuell-erste-schaetzung-getreide.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Landw... [6] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgungsbilanzen/getreide https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgun...
mkmk3 3y ago
I've heard that permacultural practices can compete in terms of output, it's just harder to industrialize. I wonder if improvements in robotics could make this sort of approach more feasible, or if it really is comparatively productive in any case
- tommek4077 3y ago
  > permacultural practices can compete in terms of output, it's just harder to industrialize Then they can't compete – yet.
  - ummonk 3y ago
    I think they meant competitive in land yields, not prices.
    - tommek4077 3y ago
      If I need 50 workers instead of 1, I can't compete.
      - flagrant_taco 3y ago
        Doesn't that just depend on whether income can pay for the 50 employees, and that you can find 50 people willing to work the job?
      - psychoslave 3y ago
        This is framing premises so that only this conclusion appear relevant. It's not a predefined unavoidable destiny that is to go through, that is all about what policies are chose with which agenda in mind. Unemployment didn't reach 0% anywhere last time I checked, and as it was already mentioned, no actor out there is playing without some public subsidiaries. This is all political decisions. Local short term optimisation of plutocrate revenues is one possibility. Perennial national sustainability is an other one. These two agendas however probably don't overlap much.
      - 3y ago
hef19898 3y ago
I think, and I have to admit I don't have any current numbers on that, that Europe is actually producing more food than we currently need. So cutting backnon industrial agriculture, ranging from grains to meat, so covering all sorts of foodstuffs, can only be a good thing, for people, the environment and animals.
- 988747 3y ago
  And yet a billion people in this world are starving... Cutting back on industrial agriculture means participating in a genocide, basically. Some geeks here are coming up with sci-fi ideas of producing food in vertical farms, or underwater, why don't we start by simply using existing techniques?
  - knutzui 3y ago
    This is incorrect. If all food we produce world wide was distributed equally everywhere not a single person would starve. However it isn't distributed anywhere close to equally. In many societies food is instead wasted in large amounts. Cutting back on industrial agriculture is sorely needed from an environmental standpoint, as well as reducing food waste. Solving starvation requires different solutions, such as improved distribution, as well as political stability.
    - runsWphotons 3y ago
      Distribution is hard, though. Will reducing food even in countries where it is wasted solve distribution any better, or will it just hurt the people at the bottom of the distribution chain more?
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Global food production is a, and I oversimplify a lot here, more of a distribution problem than it is a capacity problem. Certain countries cutting back on theor surplus has zero impact on the starving regions of the world, because as things stand now those surpluses aren't exported there anyway. Quite the opposite, exporting said surplus, besides accute deliveries to mitigate famine, can kill local farming. There is no way small, just a bit above subsistance farming can compete with the surplus of industrial farming in, e.g., Europe. Take chicken for example, in Europe we prefer chicken breasts and legs, the wings are a far, far third place. As a result, a lot ofbthe chicken left overs, legs, wings and so in, didn't have a market in Europe. It got expoeted to Africa, with a purchasing price of close to nothing since the meat sold in Europe already covered costs, overhead and profits. With shipping being close to nothing per chicken wing, the imported food was way cheaper than locally produced food, driving a bunch of local farmers out of busimess and into poverty. And reducing local food production, increasing the risk of local famine while increasing dependency on global food markets (not really a good thing neither....). Same principle applies for donated clothes, only now local tailors, often women, are affected. So no, cutting back on industrial over production is by no means taking part in genocide (!) (you couldn't aim lower than that, could you?).
jillesvangurp 3y ago
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 like milk and butter. Wine is another example where subsidies lead to over production. And another side effect of subsidies is that it counteracts development aid sent to places that the EU competes with on farmed products. Instead of boosting their economies by importing stuff from those countries we kill their exports with subsidized local produce and then spend a lot on development aid. And fragile economies in Africa of course create all sorts of collateral issues including wars and refugees. All to protect local farmers so they can produce things like sugar beet so we can have subsidized local sugar production instead of just importing that from outside Europe.
- badpun 3y ago
  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.
  - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
    Agriculture is subsidized to get the farmers' vote
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - badpun 3y ago
      That too, but the benefit of food security is there regardless of the motive.
    - cjrp 3y ago
worldsayshi 3y ago
> 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?
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  With your salary you could easily afford to by some land in eg Portugal and hire someone to manage as you see fit.
- nocsi 3y ago
  Probably start a community garden. Be careful though, some cities hate their citizens being able to grow their own food
- tfourb 3y ago
  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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
nabla9 3y ago
> There are also quite convincing studies There is noticeable quantitative difference. People 40+ and older remember from their childhood how car's windshield, lamps and grille were covered with dead insects every time you took long drive outside cites. Today you can drive small country roads for a day and get only small number of insects. It used to be that you could walk in the garden and count easily 10-20 ladybugs eating aphid's from your planted flowers. My mother used fight aphids by spraying vinegar soap mix. Today the exact same spot with same flowers has no aphid problem and very few ladybugs.
- balderdash 3y ago
  Don’t forget the the sounds (crickets at night etc.)!
noselasd 3y ago
Will reducing fertilizers and other chemicals help in any meaningful way ? It seems the main problem is that birds, the things bird eats, and for that matter other animals need a place to live, and there's really not a lot of places for them to live anymore when their habitat is turned from a natural environment, quite often forests, in to roads, cities, production of cereal, grass, vegetable etc.
- tfourb 3y ago
  Much of our current bird population (at least in central Europe) has co-evolved with agriculture over thousands of years. The problem is not so much that there is agriculture happening, it is the scale and destructiveness of the industrialized agriculture that has become the norm. Fields that are literally several square kilometers large without any intersecting hedges or other habitats. Machines that pick up every last grain of wheat and turn soil up to a large depth, effectively sterilizing it of beneficial soil live. Pesticides and herbicides that kill off the basis for entire ecosystems. We need to develop an agricultural system that can financially sustain itself within smaller structures, that incorporates edges and diversity, that utilizes ecological services instead of trying to suppress natural processes.
Scarblac 3y ago
And eating less meat, so we can do with less agricultural production.
- himinlomax 3y ago
  Pasture farming on marginal land is part of the solution. Industrial meat farming is part of the problem. They're two different things.
  - alex_duf 3y ago
    But would pasture farming on marginal land scale to the level of consumption we have today?
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    "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...
    - a_c 3y ago
      Lands are not equal. They all have different conditions. Some land for example can't grow food but is good for grazing. Grazing, done correctly, is beneficial to the land too. E.g. grazing brings dungs to the land. The dungs give nutrients to both plants and insects. Stamping the land aerate the soil and exposes insect for birds, hence limiting pest. Birds spread seeds. Everything is in balance. Food is ultimately created from sunlight. Industrial farming, on the other hand, simplifying heavily, is converting fossil fuels into food.
      - CalRobert 3y ago
        I don't understand how that shows human involvement in these landscapes is necessary.
    - 3y ago
shellac 3y ago
> There are also quite convincing studies that show even worse declines for insect populations Has the evidence improved recently? About 3 years ago there were a few papers, including a meta analysis (-ish), which were suggestive but also noted the lack of longitudinal studies, and their lack of geographical diversity (Germany and UK as I recall). The consensus was that everyone was certain there was a serious issue, but it was nearly impossible to usefully (even broadly) characterise the issues.
- hug 3y ago
  While not particularly useful as a scientific method, and obviously not attempting to counter your broader point asking for more detailed analysis, there’s incredibly compelling evidence: Go for a 100 mile drive at night, and count the bugs on your windshield. Ask your parents about it. Ask every 70 year old you know. Bugs are in decline. There’s absolutely no lack of evidence. We know it’s real. We just haven’t catalogued that evidence very well.
  - pif 3y ago
    Could this effect be caused, or enhanced, by the aerodynamics of the modern cars?
    - Someone 3y ago
      Could also be that insects evolved to avoid long black patches of ground. That doesn’t look likely, but also not impossible. That’s why we need the study. Also, predator-prey systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka–Volterra_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka–Volterra_equations) can have fairly large cycles with huge population swings. That makes verifying that there really is a decline not _that_ easy. You can’t just repeat an insect count done 30 years ago and compare the numbers.
    - micw 3y ago
      You can see the effect on the very same car very clearly. We have been traveling with a camping car from germany to romania. In germany we did not need to clean the windscreen at all. In romania we did it almost every day.
manojlds 3y ago
I had to learn about this from Clarkson of all people. He seems to genuinely be involved in what he's doing and Clarkson's Farm is a great show as well!
- cjrp 3y ago
  I'd recommend "Harry's Farm" on Youtube as well. He's in a similar situation, where realistically he's not financially-dependant on the farm any more (made money elsewhere), but has great insight into the day-to-day running of one.
jgraham 3y ago
> 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 Yes e.g [0]. Neonicitinoids in particular are basically nerve agents for insects that we wantonly spread all over their habitat, and which turn out to not remain localised on crops, but spread through runoff, via pollinators, etc. As you might imagine if someone were to spread sub-LD50 concentrations of novichok all over the human environment, the widespread use of these componds dramatically affects insect behaviour and therefore survival rates. > holistic grazing Unfortunately this in particular turns out to be unsupported by various studies that have been done to try to validate the claims (e.g. [1] for a popular article with some useful links). In general the debate between nature-integrated farming vs maximising yield in smaller areas is complex, and I don't think I know enough to summarise it in a HN comment. For example [2] claims that maximising yield, but in smaller areas, is a better overall strategy. But I suspect the outcomes depend on exactly which factors you include in the model (e.g. if you want high yield farms using artificial fertislisers to maintain that productivity, do you account for runoff into rivers that can then have a non-local environmental effect? Maybe studies do this but, not being an expert, it seems hard to model). In any case, a great deal of the land used for farming is given over to pasture, or the production of livestock feed. [3] has a map for the UK, showing that about half of the total land area is used for beef and lamb production alone, plus a similar area of land overseas. This compares to about 8% of the UK that forms the urban environment. So clearly there's plenty of scope for improvement here, but it depends on the will to change; an understanding that the world has value even when it's not farmed, and that we should stop subsidising, and therefore encouraging, high land use, high carbon, diets. [0] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-ento-011019-025151 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-ento-... [1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-talk-is-wrong-and-the-benefits-of-holistic-grazing-have-been-debunked.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-t... [2] https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/landsparing https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/landsparing [3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-will-englands-national-food-strategy-help-tackle-climate-change/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-will-englands-national-food-s...
- biorach 3y ago
cjrp 3y ago
> increase the share of eco-farming, i.e. conventional farming without the chemistry. The problem: both approaches drastically reduce agricultural productivity. A prime example, the seed-dressing used to treat rapeseed and prevent cabbage-stem flea beetle from destroying the crop has been outlawed in the EU. Most farmers now won't grow rapeseed, because the risk of making a huge financial loss is too high. Result? We import rapeseed from countries which haven't outlawed the insecticide.
- clows 3y ago
  > Most farmers now won't grow rapeseed, because the risk of making a huge financial loss is too high. Do you have data to back that up? The only info I could find is along the lines of the article below. https://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2022/06/16/eu-rapeseed-crop-2022-projected-at-five-year-high/ https://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2022/06/16/eu-rapesee... > EU rapeseed crop 2022 projected at five-year high
- myshpa 3y ago
  I'm in country which has 15% of its farmland covered in it. Hate it. It's sprayed 10-20 times per season, the amount of poison it spreads to the nature is staggering.
- biorach 3y ago
  > Most farmers now won't grow rapeseed, In the EU? I think you just made that up
edumucelli 3y ago
That is simply not true! Use of mechanical farming and fertilizers/pesticides can be beaten in productivity by permacultural practices. One example in France that has been followed by researches (and has produced several papers [1]) is the Ferme du Bec. It is able to produce multiple times more and more qualitative (organic), for the same area than the national average mechanized production in France. The pesticide industry and mega farmers want you to believe that what they are doing is to produce more food, but that does not stand the fact check of initiatives like permacultural ones. [1] https://www.fermedubec.com/la-ferme/la-recherche/ https://www.fermedubec.com/la-ferme/la-recherche/ (scroll to the "STUDY REPORTS (English versions)" if you do not speak French.
- boudin 3y ago
  The real underlying issue here is that good farming practices require hands. If we don't value back farming related work and allow people to invest a lot of there time and energy into sustainable practices we cannot have the amount of people required to do what is done at la ferme du bec at a much bigger scale.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    In the US currently industrial and smaller scale farms use heavy amounts of effectively slave labor / indentured servants with fake/stolen papers, bussed to unknown remote locations, company housing and company towns with local sheriff in kahoots with the owners, routine ICE raids to force compliance and break up organizing. We’re quite far from kindness to labor. Many modern liberal countries like SKorea, Italy have similar. Our most democratic nation states run on slave labor.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  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 it's cut. Local food production may go a long way as it reduces the steps between the farm and the end consumer. That still may not be enough though, rewiring higher food prices regardless of how it's produced. In one of the linked studied the result was that one person working 43 hours per week could profit €900-1600 per month. The same article mentions a minimum wage of €9.61/hour, so even on the high end the farmer is working all that time and owning the risk of a bad harvest to make less than minimum wage. They didn't mention any holdback on the crops to feed the farmer, so they might be separately paying for food out of that income. People just aren't going to do that in large numbers unless they have to.
immibis 3y ago
It is simply not possible to produce food for 8 billion people without destroying the planet.

by tfourb 3y ago

mattashii 3y ago

> The problem: both approaches drastically reduce agricultural productivity That does not have to be an issue for the EU per se, as the EU is a net exporter of food in value, and potentially in calories as well.

masklinn 3y ago
But a non-trivial amount of that is really intensive (one could say unnecessarily so) farming e.g. factory pig farming in the netherlands. And on the other hand, the revenue model tends to require this sort of practices, unless there’s room in (and you aim for) the more bougie distribution channels / outlets the hit is hard to absorb, especially the hit in reliability.
BelleOfTheBall 3y ago
There's also the fact that we are developing new agricultural advancements constantly and I mean the collective we - vertical farms in Asia, new irrigation systems, lab-grown stuff and so on. Surely we can think of ways to improve agriculture while retaining our feathered friends

mschuster91 3y ago

> 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 farms.

runsWphotons 3y ago
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?
- knutzui 3y ago
  It is better, because switching from meat to grains results in less area needed for planting grains, since we don't need to feed the animals anymore. Most grains that we farm today are fed to animals.
  - runsWphotons 3y ago
    Interesting. But rough time to be a cow.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  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-deutschland-gnadenloses-wettruesten-im-huehnerstall-1.1759132 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/gefluegelmaester-in-d... [2] https://www.boell.de/de/2016/01/13/mecklenburg-vorpommern-wo-die-megastaelle-stehen https://www.boell.de/de/2016/01/13/mecklenburg-vorpommern-wo... [3] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Nitrat-im-Grundwasser-Niederlande-will-Hoefe-zur-Not-enteignen,grundwasser206.html https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Nitrat-im-Grund... [4] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgungsbilanzen/fleisch https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgun... [5] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Landwirtschaft-Forstwirtschaft-Fischerei/Feldfruechte-Gruenland/aktuell-erste-schaetzung-getreide.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Landw... [6] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgungsbilanzen/getreide https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgun...

mkmk3 3y ago

I've heard that permacultural practices can compete in terms of output, it's just harder to industrialize. I wonder if improvements in robotics could make this sort of approach more feasible, or if it really is comparatively productive in any case

tommek4077 3y ago
> permacultural practices can compete in terms of output, it's just harder to industrialize Then they can't compete – yet.
- ummonk 3y ago
  I think they meant competitive in land yields, not prices.
  - tommek4077 3y ago
    If I need 50 workers instead of 1, I can't compete.
    - flagrant_taco 3y ago
      Doesn't that just depend on whether income can pay for the 50 employees, and that you can find 50 people willing to work the job?
    - psychoslave 3y ago
      This is framing premises so that only this conclusion appear relevant. It's not a predefined unavoidable destiny that is to go through, that is all about what policies are chose with which agenda in mind. Unemployment didn't reach 0% anywhere last time I checked, and as it was already mentioned, no actor out there is playing without some public subsidiaries. This is all political decisions. Local short term optimisation of plutocrate revenues is one possibility. Perennial national sustainability is an other one. These two agendas however probably don't overlap much.
    - 3y ago

hef19898 3y ago

I think, and I have to admit I don't have any current numbers on that, that Europe is actually producing more food than we currently need. So cutting backnon industrial agriculture, ranging from grains to meat, so covering all sorts of foodstuffs, can only be a good thing, for people, the environment and animals.

988747 3y ago
And yet a billion people in this world are starving... Cutting back on industrial agriculture means participating in a genocide, basically. Some geeks here are coming up with sci-fi ideas of producing food in vertical farms, or underwater, why don't we start by simply using existing techniques?
- knutzui 3y ago
  This is incorrect. If all food we produce world wide was distributed equally everywhere not a single person would starve. However it isn't distributed anywhere close to equally. In many societies food is instead wasted in large amounts. Cutting back on industrial agriculture is sorely needed from an environmental standpoint, as well as reducing food waste. Solving starvation requires different solutions, such as improved distribution, as well as political stability.
  - runsWphotons 3y ago
    Distribution is hard, though. Will reducing food even in countries where it is wasted solve distribution any better, or will it just hurt the people at the bottom of the distribution chain more?
- hef19898 3y ago
  Global food production is a, and I oversimplify a lot here, more of a distribution problem than it is a capacity problem. Certain countries cutting back on theor surplus has zero impact on the starving regions of the world, because as things stand now those surpluses aren't exported there anyway. Quite the opposite, exporting said surplus, besides accute deliveries to mitigate famine, can kill local farming. There is no way small, just a bit above subsistance farming can compete with the surplus of industrial farming in, e.g., Europe. Take chicken for example, in Europe we prefer chicken breasts and legs, the wings are a far, far third place. As a result, a lot ofbthe chicken left overs, legs, wings and so in, didn't have a market in Europe. It got expoeted to Africa, with a purchasing price of close to nothing since the meat sold in Europe already covered costs, overhead and profits. With shipping being close to nothing per chicken wing, the imported food was way cheaper than locally produced food, driving a bunch of local farmers out of busimess and into poverty. And reducing local food production, increasing the risk of local famine while increasing dependency on global food markets (not really a good thing neither....). Same principle applies for donated clothes, only now local tailors, often women, are affected. So no, cutting back on industrial over production is by no means taking part in genocide (!) (you couldn't aim lower than that, could you?).

jillesvangurp 3y ago

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 like milk and butter. Wine is another example where subsidies lead to over production. And another side effect of subsidies is that it counteracts development aid sent to places that the EU competes with on farmed products. Instead of boosting their economies by importing stuff from those countries we kill their exports with subsidized local produce and then spend a lot on development aid. And fragile economies in Africa of course create all sorts of collateral issues including wars and refugees. All to protect local farmers so they can produce things like sugar beet so we can have subsidized local sugar production instead of just importing that from outside Europe.

badpun 3y ago
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.
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  Agriculture is subsidized to get the farmers' vote
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - badpun 3y ago
    That too, but the benefit of food security is there regardless of the motive.
  - cjrp 3y ago

worldsayshi 3y ago

> 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?

AlecSchueler 3y ago
With your salary you could easily afford to by some land in eg Portugal and hire someone to manage as you see fit.
nocsi 3y ago
Probably start a community garden. Be careful though, some cities hate their citizens being able to grow their own food
tfourb 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
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nabla9 3y ago

> There are also quite convincing studies There is noticeable quantitative difference. People 40+ and older remember from their childhood how car's windshield, lamps and grille were covered with dead insects every time you took long drive outside cites. Today you can drive small country roads for a day and get only small number of insects. It used to be that you could walk in the garden and count easily 10-20 ladybugs eating aphid's from your planted flowers. My mother used fight aphids by spraying vinegar soap mix. Today the exact same spot with same flowers has no aphid problem and very few ladybugs.

balderdash 3y ago
Don’t forget the the sounds (crickets at night etc.)!

noselasd 3y ago

Will reducing fertilizers and other chemicals help in any meaningful way ? It seems the main problem is that birds, the things bird eats, and for that matter other animals need a place to live, and there's really not a lot of places for them to live anymore when their habitat is turned from a natural environment, quite often forests, in to roads, cities, production of cereal, grass, vegetable etc.

tfourb 3y ago
Much of our current bird population (at least in central Europe) has co-evolved with agriculture over thousands of years. The problem is not so much that there is agriculture happening, it is the scale and destructiveness of the industrialized agriculture that has become the norm. Fields that are literally several square kilometers large without any intersecting hedges or other habitats. Machines that pick up every last grain of wheat and turn soil up to a large depth, effectively sterilizing it of beneficial soil live. Pesticides and herbicides that kill off the basis for entire ecosystems. We need to develop an agricultural system that can financially sustain itself within smaller structures, that incorporates edges and diversity, that utilizes ecological services instead of trying to suppress natural processes.

Scarblac 3y ago

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

himinlomax 3y ago
Pasture farming on marginal land is part of the solution. Industrial meat farming is part of the problem. They're two different things.
- alex_duf 3y ago
  But would pasture farming on marginal land scale to the level of consumption we have today?
- CalRobert 3y ago
  "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...
  - a_c 3y ago
    Lands are not equal. They all have different conditions. Some land for example can't grow food but is good for grazing. Grazing, done correctly, is beneficial to the land too. E.g. grazing brings dungs to the land. The dungs give nutrients to both plants and insects. Stamping the land aerate the soil and exposes insect for birds, hence limiting pest. Birds spread seeds. Everything is in balance. Food is ultimately created from sunlight. Industrial farming, on the other hand, simplifying heavily, is converting fossil fuels into food.
    - CalRobert 3y ago
      I don't understand how that shows human involvement in these landscapes is necessary.
  - 3y ago

shellac 3y ago

> There are also quite convincing studies that show even worse declines for insect populations Has the evidence improved recently? About 3 years ago there were a few papers, including a meta analysis (-ish), which were suggestive but also noted the lack of longitudinal studies, and their lack of geographical diversity (Germany and UK as I recall). The consensus was that everyone was certain there was a serious issue, but it was nearly impossible to usefully (even broadly) characterise the issues.

hug 3y ago
While not particularly useful as a scientific method, and obviously not attempting to counter your broader point asking for more detailed analysis, there’s incredibly compelling evidence: Go for a 100 mile drive at night, and count the bugs on your windshield. Ask your parents about it. Ask every 70 year old you know. Bugs are in decline. There’s absolutely no lack of evidence. We know it’s real. We just haven’t catalogued that evidence very well.
- pif 3y ago
  Could this effect be caused, or enhanced, by the aerodynamics of the modern cars?
  - Someone 3y ago
    Could also be that insects evolved to avoid long black patches of ground. That doesn’t look likely, but also not impossible. That’s why we need the study. Also, predator-prey systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka–Volterra_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka–Volterra_equations) can have fairly large cycles with huge population swings. That makes verifying that there really is a decline not _that_ easy. You can’t just repeat an insect count done 30 years ago and compare the numbers.
  - micw 3y ago
    You can see the effect on the very same car very clearly. We have been traveling with a camping car from germany to romania. In germany we did not need to clean the windscreen at all. In romania we did it almost every day.

manojlds 3y ago

I had to learn about this from Clarkson of all people. He seems to genuinely be involved in what he's doing and Clarkson's Farm is a great show as well!

cjrp 3y ago
I'd recommend "Harry's Farm" on Youtube as well. He's in a similar situation, where realistically he's not financially-dependant on the farm any more (made money elsewhere), but has great insight into the day-to-day running of one.

jgraham 3y ago

> 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 Yes e.g [0]. Neonicitinoids in particular are basically nerve agents for insects that we wantonly spread all over their habitat, and which turn out to not remain localised on crops, but spread through runoff, via pollinators, etc. As you might imagine if someone were to spread sub-LD50 concentrations of novichok all over the human environment, the widespread use of these componds dramatically affects insect behaviour and therefore survival rates. > holistic grazing Unfortunately this in particular turns out to be unsupported by various studies that have been done to try to validate the claims (e.g. [1] for a popular article with some useful links). In general the debate between nature-integrated farming vs maximising yield in smaller areas is complex, and I don't think I know enough to summarise it in a HN comment. For example [2] claims that maximising yield, but in smaller areas, is a better overall strategy. But I suspect the outcomes depend on exactly which factors you include in the model (e.g. if you want high yield farms using artificial fertislisers to maintain that productivity, do you account for runoff into rivers that can then have a non-local environmental effect? Maybe studies do this but, not being an expert, it seems hard to model). In any case, a great deal of the land used for farming is given over to pasture, or the production of livestock feed. [3] has a map for the UK, showing that about half of the total land area is used for beef and lamb production alone, plus a similar area of land overseas. This compares to about 8% of the UK that forms the urban environment. So clearly there's plenty of scope for improvement here, but it depends on the will to change; an understanding that the world has value even when it's not farmed, and that we should stop subsidising, and therefore encouraging, high land use, high carbon, diets. [0] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-ento-011019-025151 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-ento-... [1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-talk-is-wrong-and-the-benefits-of-holistic-grazing-have-been-debunked.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-t... [2] https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/landsparing https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/landsparing [3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-will-englands-national-food-strategy-help-tackle-climate-change/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-will-englands-national-food-s...

biorach 3y ago

cjrp 3y ago

> increase the share of eco-farming, i.e. conventional farming without the chemistry. The problem: both approaches drastically reduce agricultural productivity. A prime example, the seed-dressing used to treat rapeseed and prevent cabbage-stem flea beetle from destroying the crop has been outlawed in the EU. Most farmers now won't grow rapeseed, because the risk of making a huge financial loss is too high. Result? We import rapeseed from countries which haven't outlawed the insecticide.

clows 3y ago
> Most farmers now won't grow rapeseed, because the risk of making a huge financial loss is too high. Do you have data to back that up? The only info I could find is along the lines of the article below. https://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2022/06/16/eu-rapeseed-crop-2022-projected-at-five-year-high/ https://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2022/06/16/eu-rapesee... > EU rapeseed crop 2022 projected at five-year high
myshpa 3y ago
I'm in country which has 15% of its farmland covered in it. Hate it. It's sprayed 10-20 times per season, the amount of poison it spreads to the nature is staggering.
biorach 3y ago
> Most farmers now won't grow rapeseed, In the EU? I think you just made that up

edumucelli 3y ago

That is simply not true! Use of mechanical farming and fertilizers/pesticides can be beaten in productivity by permacultural practices. One example in France that has been followed by researches (and has produced several papers [1]) is the Ferme du Bec. It is able to produce multiple times more and more qualitative (organic), for the same area than the national average mechanized production in France. The pesticide industry and mega farmers want you to believe that what they are doing is to produce more food, but that does not stand the fact check of initiatives like permacultural ones. [1] https://www.fermedubec.com/la-ferme/la-recherche/ https://www.fermedubec.com/la-ferme/la-recherche/ (scroll to the "STUDY REPORTS (English versions)" if you do not speak French.

boudin 3y ago
The real underlying issue here is that good farming practices require hands. If we don't value back farming related work and allow people to invest a lot of there time and energy into sustainable practices we cannot have the amount of people required to do what is done at la ferme du bec at a much bigger scale.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  In the US currently industrial and smaller scale farms use heavy amounts of effectively slave labor / indentured servants with fake/stolen papers, bussed to unknown remote locations, company housing and company towns with local sheriff in kahoots with the owners, routine ICE raids to force compliance and break up organizing. We’re quite far from kindness to labor. Many modern liberal countries like SKorea, Italy have similar. Our most democratic nation states run on slave labor.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
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 it's cut. Local food production may go a long way as it reduces the steps between the farm and the end consumer. That still may not be enough though, rewiring higher food prices regardless of how it's produced. In one of the linked studied the result was that one person working 43 hours per week could profit €900-1600 per month. The same article mentions a minimum wage of €9.61/hour, so even on the high end the farmer is working all that time and owning the risk of a bad harvest to make less than minimum wage. They didn't mention any holdback on the crops to feed the farmer, so they might be separately paying for food out of that income. People just aren't going to do that in large numbers unless they have to.

immibis 3y ago

It is simply not possible to produce food for 8 billion people without destroying the planet.