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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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!
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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, and you remove caterpillars which are a staple food for baby birds.
So yeah, deforestation + pesticides = less birds, and will lead to a desertification of Europe in more than one sense. But even in the desert you can find here and there an oasis, a place full of life where birdsong is just as vigorous as ever. There are still many places across Europe where this is happening, many oases (plural?) that teem with life, and bring happiness to the heart. In fact, this is not so difficult to do, just bring back the trees and the biodiversity, then the insects will return, and when the insects are there, birds will return.
Build it and they will come.
It is high time we change our agricultural practices from destructive to regenerative. The techniques are already well known, and pioneering work in this field of regenerative practices have been going on for decades already - from Yeomans, Molisson, and Holmgren in Australia to Fukuoka in Japan and Goetsch in Brasil, the knowledge is there.
I live with my family on a small piece of land where we work to increase biodiversity and to reforest. Every year, birdsong gets louder and louder. I know it's possible and my garden is proof. Build it and they will come.
IIRC EUs farming regulations stem from 60s/70s and their only adaptations were intensification and market concentration. Some decade ago the sister of a small German farmer told me how EU laws were systematically pushing him out of the market forcing him to sell his ground to bigger competitors to avoid going bankrupt.
Firstly, EU has some of the smallest average farm size in developed economies - below 50 hectares, USA is close to 500.
Secondly, the concerns around machines dominate farming. For exanple many studies have shown effectiveness of multicripping - growing severage different crips together. This will never take off, because muticropping fields are unharvestable - harvesters are specialised for grains, potatoes, etc. While they are hacesting one, they would damage / destroy another.
Machine have become much larger, more sophisticared and more expensive. So many farmers don't own all the machines, they rent them or pay someome to d
perform a job on their fields.
Lastly, if you eant a decent existance, you need to generate enough revenue from your farm. Farms below 50cha can hardly support a family with the revenue they generate.
The only way to save small farms is for them to diversify income - I knew a few farmers that installed wind turbines, etc. However UK planning system makes it impossible to get permission for a win turbine. In the past 5 years there were like 2 permissions given for any time of wind turbine in all of UK
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 farmers to use those methods - it won't be easy and it won't change with one law and it will take maybe decades, but the methods exists, it's possible and should be done.
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).
When I was a kid growing up in the London suburbs in the 70s and 80s I could remember flocks of all types of birds especially starlings and blackbirds being common place, and then, reading this article, it reminded me that I stopped seeing flocks.
Even now, living outside London, I rarely see flocks of birds, and if I do, nowhere near as large as I remember, and I don't think its observer bias either.
Slightly off-topic, but because of farming we also started to have problem with mistletoe. Many small bushes of rose-hips, blackthorns and other food that birds usually eat disappeared because of smaller fields being merged to one, flattened. So what birds eat now is mistletoe, spreading it from tree to tree by wiping their beaks onto the bark of the tree, leaving mistletoe seeds there.
To clear mistletoe from that many trees is fairly expensive so owners usually don't do it, and we have alleys and alleys of trees full of mistletoe. Eventually the tree dies because of mistletoe parasitizing it.
This is why all those "don't have outdoor cats, they kill all the birds" stories annoy me. At best they're misguided, at worse they're intentionally misleading to hide the fact that pesticides and farming practices are actually at fault. (In Europe, on other continents the story may be different)
Similar to the CO2 footprint, it's another way to individualize social issues and distract from large corporate sources of environmental destruction.
"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 pet craze"
The study didn't include animals that cats killed and abandoned in the wild, so it is likely higher still.
Ok, don't have outdoor cats because they live short lives with high risk of dying painfully.
They definitely do stalk feeders and add to the stressors already in place for bird species. More than one thing can contribute to the reduction of bird populations.
Entirely two different environments -- cats are a threat to birds in one of the oasis environments outside of modern mass agriculture -- urban areas. More and more, cities are becoming a place where certain key species actually find refuge. Unleashing cats in that environment is cruel to both cats and birds.
That, and if cats are our friends and we care about them, we should be sheltering them from the hostilities of an outdoor environment. I have had enough cats I knew in the past die from injuries from cars, or diseases/injuries they acquired outside to feel that it's just best to keep ours inside. We live rural, on 6 acres, and she loves it outside, naturally, but so do birds we love. Would she be "happier" outside? Maybe. But considering all trade-offs, I'll keep her pampered inside, and let the birds nest on my deck.
Precisely! The people reiterating that study also acts like it is valid all around the world, including places where cats are not invasive. For example in mainland and southern Europe the cat has been tamed since at least 1200 BC and the wild cat has been since the ice age. Birds in those areas have long since adapted, as evident by the wild cat which predominately hunts ground-dwelling mammals.
It is of course a good argument to consider the study generally valid on e.g. the British isles and North America where the cat was more recently introduced into the fauna.
Is this a U.S. thing? Where I live—a rural part of the UK—I don't think anyone thinks twice about letting their cats out. It's just what you do with cats.
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.
"Man – despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a 6-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
I'd hesitate to be flippant about the complexities and difficulties in the generation of food, and the market forces that it drives. And I'd certainly hesitate to claim that anyone has "better things to do".
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?
Probably the most exciting future technology is precision fermentation.
We use massive amounts of land to grow monocultures because that's the cheapest way to produce food.
We're in a conundrum: more expensive food would cause mass suffering. OTOH, our current food production methods are destructive, and cause mass suffering.
A cheaper method to produce food that uses a lot less land and resources would be a game changer.
> 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.
From the abstract: "We find that agricultural intensification, in particular pesticides and fertiliser use, is the main pressure for most bird population declines, especially for invertebrate feeders. Responses to changes in forest cover, urbanisation and temperature are more species-specific. Specifically, forest cover is associated with a positive effect and growing urbanisation with a negative effect on population dynamics, while temperature change has an effect on the dynamics of a large number of bird populations, the magnitude and direction of which depend on species' thermal preferences."
> 35% more birds and 23% more insects are found in organic farmland thanks to the creation of natural habitats and the absence of chemical and synthetic pesticides.
We, customers, vote with our shopping behavior.
Yes, those products are 100-200% more expensive in terms of money. But don't forget that there is a huge price to pesticide use that is not passed through to the customer.
Europe is a double whammy then for bird populations. The first thing you notice traveling around many european cities is ostensibly there are no spay and neuter programs (or they must be totally ineffective) for the thousands of stray cats that clad each and every rooftop and loiter around every park and street. For some places like Istanbul the overabundance is a point of pride or a tourist attraction in its own right. It's hard to imagine there are any birds at all in these cities with the bulk of the calories in the environment seemingly being held at the small game predator level, which is sustained at a higher level than the available prey can even support thanks to stuff like restaurant dumpsters or people feeding the cute little killing machines directly.
If you are the author, and you are in this thread: those graphs are stunning. Would have never thought to superimpose graphs over maps. But you folks made it work, and it's not just a gimmick, it provides information in a helpful and intuitive fashion.
In the old days, there were flocks of birds so large that they would blot out the sun, and the herds of bison were so large that it would take a week for a herd to walk by your campsite.
These 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.
This is anecdotal, but I see a lot of land that used to support birds and small animals and is now stripped of vegetation and covered in solar panels. Destroying habitats to save the planet is the order of the day, apparently.
This comment + the dovecote comment elsewhere makes me ponder whether solar will ever be part of crop rotation / intercropping / cover cropping.
Mini nests/pigeonholes/etc could potentially be built into/under panels (though potential issues include predator access, + guano and other substances degrading equipment.)
And/or solar panels could 'migrate' over time, plugging themselves into their nearest hub once they have moved themselves to a fallow / poor soil area. Fixed solar would always be more efficient, but perhaps migrating solar could one day have a niche position in soil science / ag, and allow solar to be position closer to cities.
Anyway... all unlikely to be economical, I suppose.
[+] [-] tfourb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] edumucelli|2 years ago|reply
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/ (scroll to the "STUDY REPORTS (English versions)" if you do not speak French.
[+] [-] mkmk3|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scarblac|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hef19898|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjrp|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] worldsayshi|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] manojlds|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noselasd|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mattashii|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shellac|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jgraham|2 years ago|reply
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-... [1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-t... [2] https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/landsparing [3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-will-englands-national-food-s...
[+] [-] immibis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciconia|2 years ago|reply
So yeah, deforestation + pesticides = less birds, and will lead to a desertification of Europe in more than one sense. But even in the desert you can find here and there an oasis, a place full of life where birdsong is just as vigorous as ever. There are still many places across Europe where this is happening, many oases (plural?) that teem with life, and bring happiness to the heart. In fact, this is not so difficult to do, just bring back the trees and the biodiversity, then the insects will return, and when the insects are there, birds will return.
Build it and they will come.
It is high time we change our agricultural practices from destructive to regenerative. The techniques are already well known, and pioneering work in this field of regenerative practices have been going on for decades already - from Yeomans, Molisson, and Holmgren in Australia to Fukuoka in Japan and Goetsch in Brasil, the knowledge is there.
I live with my family on a small piece of land where we work to increase biodiversity and to reforest. Every year, birdsong gets louder and louder. I know it's possible and my garden is proof. Build it and they will come.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nforgerit|2 years ago|reply
You reap what you sow I guess
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|2 years ago|reply
Firstly, EU has some of the smallest average farm size in developed economies - below 50 hectares, USA is close to 500.
Secondly, the concerns around machines dominate farming. For exanple many studies have shown effectiveness of multicripping - growing severage different crips together. This will never take off, because muticropping fields are unharvestable - harvesters are specialised for grains, potatoes, etc. While they are hacesting one, they would damage / destroy another.
Machine have become much larger, more sophisticared and more expensive. So many farmers don't own all the machines, they rent them or pay someome to d perform a job on their fields.
Lastly, if you eant a decent existance, you need to generate enough revenue from your farm. Farms below 50cha can hardly support a family with the revenue they generate.
The only way to save small farms is for them to diversify income - I knew a few farmers that installed wind turbines, etc. However UK planning system makes it impossible to get permission for a win turbine. In the past 5 years there were like 2 permissions given for any time of wind turbine in all of UK
[+] [-] megablast|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myshpa|2 years ago|reply
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 farmers to use those methods - it won't be easy and it won't change with one law and it will take maybe decades, but the methods exists, it's possible and should be done.
[+] [-] Balero|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] taneq|2 years ago|reply
In case anyone else was skimming through to find over what time period this occurred.
[+] [-] DrBazza|2 years ago|reply
Even now, living outside London, I rarely see flocks of birds, and if I do, nowhere near as large as I remember, and I don't think its observer bias either.
[+] [-] jabiko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vitro|2 years ago|reply
To clear mistletoe from that many trees is fairly expensive so owners usually don't do it, and we have alleys and alleys of trees full of mistletoe. Eventually the tree dies because of mistletoe parasitizing it.
[+] [-] kuschku|2 years ago|reply
Similar to the CO2 footprint, it's another way to individualize social issues and distract from large corporate sources of environmental destruction.
[+] [-] HeckFeck|2 years ago|reply
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 pet craze"
The study didn't include animals that cats killed and abandoned in the wild, so it is likely higher still.
[+] [-] msrenee|2 years ago|reply
They definitely do stalk feeders and add to the stressors already in place for bird species. More than one thing can contribute to the reduction of bird populations.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|2 years ago|reply
That, and if cats are our friends and we care about them, we should be sheltering them from the hostilities of an outdoor environment. I have had enough cats I knew in the past die from injuries from cars, or diseases/injuries they acquired outside to feel that it's just best to keep ours inside. We live rural, on 6 acres, and she loves it outside, naturally, but so do birds we love. Would she be "happier" outside? Maybe. But considering all trade-offs, I'll keep her pampered inside, and let the birds nest on my deck.
[+] [-] Y-bar|2 years ago|reply
It is of course a good argument to consider the study generally valid on e.g. the British isles and North America where the cat was more recently introduced into the fauna.
[+] [-] Veen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winrid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timwaagh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmreedy|2 years ago|reply
I'd hesitate to be flippant about the complexities and difficulties in the generation of food, and the market forces that it drives. And I'd certainly hesitate to claim that anyone has "better things to do".
[+] [-] pkphilip|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|2 years ago|reply
We use massive amounts of land to grow monocultures because that's the cheapest way to produce food.
We're in a conundrum: more expensive food would cause mass suffering. OTOH, our current food production methods are destructive, and cause mass suffering.
A cheaper method to produce food that uses a lot less land and resources would be a game changer.
Enter precision fermentation:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/24/green-...
[+] [-] j0057|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tfourb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unglaublich|2 years ago|reply
https://demeter.net/biodynamics/biodiversity/
> 35% more birds and 23% more insects are found in organic farmland thanks to the creation of natural habitats and the absence of chemical and synthetic pesticides.
We, customers, vote with our shopping behavior.
Yes, those products are 100-200% more expensive in terms of money. But don't forget that there is a huge price to pesticide use that is not passed through to the customer.
[+] [-] Separo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juujian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jononomo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the-dude|2 years ago|reply
It is teaming with life here: insects, birds and bats.
[+] [-] singularity2001|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvdl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atlantic|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris-orgmenta|2 years ago|reply
Mini nests/pigeonholes/etc could potentially be built into/under panels (though potential issues include predator access, + guano and other substances degrading equipment.)
And/or solar panels could 'migrate' over time, plugging themselves into their nearest hub once they have moved themselves to a fallow / poor soil area. Fixed solar would always be more efficient, but perhaps migrating solar could one day have a niche position in soil science / ag, and allow solar to be position closer to cities.
Anyway... all unlikely to be economical, I suppose.