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Smart land-use planning could ease the conflict between agricultural production and nature conservation. A team of researchers from the University of Göttingen, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and the University of Münster integrated global datasets on the geographical distributions and ecological requirements of thousands of animal species with detailed information on the production of the world’s major agricultural crops. The results were published in Global Change Biology.
Increasing agricultural production usually leads to various negative side effects in agricultural landscapes, such as local decline in wildlife and loss of ecosystem functions. But what would happen if agricultural growth would be focused on areas of the world where only a few animal species would be affected?
The researchers evaluated how far global biodiversity loss could be minimized by such planning. They found that 88 percent of the biodiversity that is expected to be lost under future agricultural intensification could be avoided if global land use was spatially optimized.
“However, global optimization implies that species-rich countries, mainly in the tropics, would be more responsible for safeguarding the world’s natural resources – at the expense of their own production opportunities and economic development,” says lead author Lukas Egli of Göttingen University and UFZ.
This applies mainly to countries that are highly dependent on agriculture. “Unless such conflicting national interests can be somehow accommodated in international sustainability policies, global cooperation seems unlikely and might generate new socioeconomic dependencies.”
Lukas Egli et al. Winners and losers of national and global efforts to reconcile agricultural intensification and biodiversity conservation. Global Change Biology 2018. Doi: 10.1111/gcb.14076.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 11 2018, @06:45PM (7 children)
As an American, this doesn't concern me much because most agricultural land, the plant-crop kind, was basically nothing beforehand anyway. This is doubly so for places like my hometown which are irrigated with canals and without those canals that land would be just dust and tumbleweeds, and last I checked rattlesnakes and jackrabbits aren't endangered species.
What would be more concerning is anything involving heavy logging of dense woodland, or wild-grazing cattle that displace other native species like Bison. And we most certainly should be raising bison for food rather than cattle. The meat is tastier and more lean although it is more chewy than beef. Do you have a problem with that? Are you some kind of pussy who can't chew the meat of real men?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday March 11 2018, @07:05PM
Would you like me to chew on your meat?
I am often told that I'm quite good at it
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday March 11 2018, @07:55PM (5 children)
Still, imagine some avian flu of 1918 proportions. All chickens die off in massive stinking piles. Eggs gone too.
The US is so dependent on chicken and wheat that anything affecting both of those crops in the same couple years would be devastating.
Toss in a feed corn shortage and the beef and pork market would collapse as well.
We've got maybe 8 key varieties of apples, 8 of potatoes, (and maybe 20 varieties of wine grapes with which to drowned our sorrows).
But we are frighteningly dependent on very few sources of food, and industrial scale production of wheat is why we can't restore huge herds of Bison.
Just adding a few alternative foods to our diet, without actually using more land for crops would greatly help, and the variety would be appreciated.
There's some clown here on Soylentnews that delights in pointing out that bacon was commercialized fairly recently, (by Corporations!! Horrors!!) with the clear suggestion this was somehow a bad thing. We need of that sort of thinking. What besides Nutella is made from hazel nuts? Why do tons of acorns go to squirrels every year? Why do we waste farmland growing metric fucktons of pumpkins that nobody eats?
Pacific coast indians never did adapt farming, until after the white man arrived. (And consequently were often on the verge of starvation). But the rest of the north american natives did cultivate and harvest a large variety of foods. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2477757 [jstor.org] and were quick to adopt newly introduced food crops from europe.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 11 2018, @08:17PM
Potatoes and other tubers are easy to grow, and chicken populations are very easily regenerated and kept in confined spaces. As for apples, I've seen firsthand what the orchards look like in Washington state, and there's more than enough nature up there to sustain them without abominations like canals. Wait, maybe not, because the thing about orchards is the bees. To run an orchard you need bees, and cubic wooden-crate industrial beehives have to be bussed-in even in Washington state.
What besides cashew butter is made from cashews? Maybe the raw nuts, by themselves, serve as very tasty morsels in their own right. I love nuts, they're the meatiest things short of actual meat that nature produces. They're not only packed with fiber, but power. Get those flavored salts the fuck off my raw nuts.
One of the most fond memories I have of nuts was a result of growing up in a traditional family, when around Christmastime a large bowl of a variety of shelled nuts was always on the table, and a Tchaikovsky-style Russian nutcracker was always on hand to crack them. But the point of that story is that granny loved explaining Brazil nuts -- with a quick "tee-hee," she was very fast to explain that they were also called "nigger-toes." She was not racist or anything, although she did love to say the word "nigger" when the opportunity arose.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday March 11 2018, @08:20PM (3 children)
Well, WRT acorns I know of answers.
1) Natural acorns are poisonous.
2) Even after processing, acorns are bitter, and few people find their taste acceptable unless they are VERY hungry.
As for hazelnuts, remember that they are also called filberts. The nuts aren't cheap, or they would be more widely used. Even so various commercial breads, at least, contain hazelnuts. Personally, I prefer them as fresh nuts, as they don't have a strong flavor, and it's easily overridden by any other strong flavor.
Oats have a lot to recommend over wheat, but they don't lend themselves as well to volume harvesting. Also, the breads made with them tend to be heavier. There are many other grains, but they each have a reason why wheat is preferred by most commercial entities.
I agree entirely with your major points, but the present circumstances didn't happen by accident, there were reasons for each choice. I often think it would be wise to revisit many of the choices and see if we couldn't find alternatives, but in each case it would cost money, and have no certainty of success. How would you like to invest in developing a variety of oats that would yield a good harvest and be easily made into a light bread? I wouldn't. What might be more reasonable is to invest in, say, developing a peanut that was mold resistant (aflatoxin resistant) and higher in protein. Or perhaps adapting the kudzu genome to convert it into something easily processed into a food. (You want to require the processing step so that it doesn't immediately host huge quantities of insects, rodents, etc. But something simple like processing with aqueous ammonia followed by vinegar.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday March 12 2018, @12:20AM (2 children)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn#Uses [wikipedia.org]
Somehow several thousand generations of humans failed to notice they were poison.
Or maybe they just roasted them just like the roasted poisonous cashews.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday March 12 2018, @02:31AM (1 child)
Did you notice that they ground the acorns up into flour and then boiled the flour?
In that way it's rather like how they make tapioca, but tapioca is bland, where acorns are reputed to be quite bitter even after processing.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday March 12 2018, @02:43AM
Yeah, I did notice that your link didn't say anything about how the acorns were processed before they were eaten. But since you ignored that I said that "Even after processing, acorns are ..." I figured it was only fair to ignore the information on your link. Now if you'd linked to a better source I wouldn't feel that way, but really, that was a link wasn't even appropriate for 4th graders researching their geography essay.
Yes, it's true that AFTER PROCESSING American Indians used to eat acorns during the hungry season. But they didn't do it without first processing them to remove the poisons (I think mainly tannic acid, but I'm not sure), and even then they quickly adopted alternatives, because even after they got used to the taste they didn't really like it.
P.S.: Here's a much better link: https://honest-food.net/how-to-eat-acorns/ [honest-food.net] but, perhaps it's the variety of oak in this area, that's a lot more favorable than the reports I've heard from local people. And this area has a lot of "natural food" faddists.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.