UKC

'intensive agriculture, above all, that is behind the decline in the continent’s bird populations'

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/15/intensive-farming-is-bi...

Thanks, several of my former colleagues as co-authors.

Chemical farming exists side by side with smallholders grazed fields where I live and the contrast is stark. Few birds, no insects, no sound on a calm day and the chemical fields smell nasty too.

Roll on the early retirement of more arable farmers and the rental of their land for solar farms which don’t require chemical inputs and have more opportunities for invertebrates. Although, as ever, it is too little too late. 

Given that we import waaay more food than we export, issues of food security and sustainability, wouldn’t this simply mean either importing more food and/or even more intensive farming and/or using other land for farming arables?

From what I’ve observed, a key issue is turning into arable land into silage production - total green desert - dairy and meat production. iirc, about 3 or 4 times more land is required to get calories from meat rather than crops. So massively cutting down on meat and dairy consumption and turning this land into arable/veg may have the biggest impact. (fully get this doesn’t apply to many large tracts of land - upland sheep farming etc, ).  And could have other benefits, eg food security, less air miles. I’m not hopeful though. 

from memory more like10 times

Although much of this might be better devoted to trees and/or wind power.

Unless you're being subtly sarcastic...

Solar farms are environmental deserts, so although they may be a necessary part of more sustainable energy production, they need to be geographically controlled to ensure that wildlife corridors (so necessary to ensure movement and retention of lots of species) are retained.

I'm sure it's possible to design and install solar farms in an environmentally positive way but at the moment they're all about maximising kW/m2

It's a bit like new housing estates, rather than planning houses around existing greenery (which would make them nicer places to live) it's raize the site, pack in as many boxes as possible and plant a few trees as an afterthought.

They don’t have to be.  Get the balance right and they can reduce transpiration moisture loss in arid climates and prevent or help reverse desertification.

eg https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/crops-under-solar-panels-can-be-a-w...

Solar PV farms on agricultural land as they are in the UK appall me.  Nothing like the one I linked, more or less removing good land from the biosphere whilst equivalent areas of barn and factory roofs remain solar free.  Criminal.  

Solar-PV on reservoirs intended to be relatively sterile is a win/win over the stats quo, as it keeps transpiration loses down, cools the panels for better efficiency and keeps algae powering light out of the water. 

I sometimes wonder about building solar roofs over the motorways - keep the weather off - better safety and longer lasting surfaces, no arable land lost and so on.  Big modular gantry-style units pre-fabbed off site that come in on low loaders and get rotated in to place, say 20% light transmission through glass gaps.  About 3,500 km x 15 m wide is ~ 50 million square meters.  On a sunny day, horizontal panels might get 250 W / square meters yielding 12.5 GW.  That would roughly double installed capacity in the UK.  This would create high power transmission lines along the motorways to double up for lots of rapid chargers, and when the sun is shining it would minimise transmission distance. 

I didn't have you down as an Express reader  

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/1492297/uk-motorways-changes-upda...

I get all my knowledge from the red tops.  Well, that and the Junior Color Encyclopedia of Space.

The other thing we should do with motorways is heat pump them with coolant loops in to ground boreholes for higher grade heat sources for urban areas in winter and to stop them melting in summer. 

It seems extremal events ramp up far faster than averages under global warming, so all this stuff - cooling roads, limiting farmland and reservoir transpiration, scavenging free heat for winter district heating - has a double value of reducing climate damage and mitigating the impact of the damage already and yet to be locked in.

There’s a solar farm near me. The Ainscough family bought a farm (plant hire family, sold for a few hundred million), and turned half into equestrian stuff and half into a solar farm. They let the grass grow rough - saw a brown hare this morning, quite a few yellowhammers, linnets, kestrels hunt there too (and evidence of barn owl).  I think they’re kinda playing at it tbh, but the land holds a reasonable amount of stuff. Foxes and hares can climb through the fencing (deer can’t). And I’ve seen a stoat.  Although another rumour is that it’s all about changing the use of land to make it easier for planning permission for housing. 

Since at least 2016, you cannot put solar farms on Best and Most Valuable arable land, they almost always get placed on grade 3b or lower land. This means that in an arable situation they most often replace cereals such as wheat or barley which in these locations almost always have to be intensive, winter-sown varieties with little or no opportunity for overwinter stubbles. Elsewhere, poor pasture grassland or fertilised hay/silage fields are typical solar farm candidate fields, in which case operators tend to graze with sheep once arrays are built.

We produce a grain surplus in this country. Much (possibly most) of the grain we produce goes to feed animals anyway. The surplus 2+million tons of grain is exported for a paltry $100M or so (a microscopic proportion of our GDP). And at what cost to nature? Millions of acres of intensively sprayed off monoculture arable fields that doesn't produce food for us and supports bugger all wildlife compared to what it could/would have done. In my view our domestic energy security and transition of low carbon sources is more important than our grain exports. Exports which pale in comparison compared to that of other countries (we are 34th in the world, whoopdedoo).

So I disagree that more solar = more food imports. Even in livestock-dominated regions, as meat production and consumption are declining, solar has an important role in providing an alternative reliable income for farmers. 

In my experience of carrying out ecological monitoring on solar farms invertebrate, botanical, herpetile and mammal diversity and abundance on solar farms (and I very much mean your average, efficiency-maximising PV array design) is higher than on either the arable or pasture fields they replaced. They are simply not 'environmental deserts' in these respects, at least. The only significant ecological impacts I see are on ground nesting birds such as skylark and yellow wagtail, although moves are afoot in the industry to ameliorate this on off-site land.

What 'wildlife corridors' are solar farms removing which once existed on the intensive arable and pasture systems they occupy? If a solar farm proposed to rid a site of its hedgerows it wouldn't gain its planning permission, simple as. Farmers only leave substantial uncultivated field margins if they get paid to do so - solar farms have to buffer field boundaries by a far greater distance by design.

Yet, what could that land be if it was managed primarily for natural amenity and not for maximal solar-PV?  That’s the pertinent question given the vast industrial and agricultural roof areas going unused by solar which are much harder to manage for nature.

Vast fields of glass where there could be trees.  There’s a wood near my old home in Essex where the field in the centre is now glass.  It may benefit some types of nature but not in balance.

In terms of holding land away from agriculture rather than nature, I’m not bothered about solar farms - they’re piddling compared to things like golf courses and keeping horses for leisure. 

Thanks for the informative response, I'm in no way defending the environmental disaster that is large scale farming (in the main).

We have the knowledge to be able to develop and operate all these things (renewables and farming) in an environmentally supporting way. We should be legislating so that we actually do this, and subsidising where improving to these standards would be inhibited by loss of income.

I don't fully buy into the argument that locally sourced food automatically results in more food security.

Let's say 100% of UK beef was home grown, all it would take is one of the many related diseases to knock out a huge chunk of our supply. We then wouldn't have the trade relationships in place to do something quickly about it.

If however, 10% comes form the UK, 10% form New Zealand, 10% form somewhere else etc then you are far more resilient to a local problem.

It's still good to produce a good chunk of your own food, so if there's a world war, you can still trade with your allies because you want something from each other. 

UK produces 60% of it's own food. Does it need to be more? Possibly not.

The thing to remember here is the last mile is responsible for circa 50% of the total transit CO2 (figures vary wildly as you would expect, but 50% is often reported). So buying something from across the ocean doesn't have the impact that you wold expect in terms of CO2. Local practices however will be important.

Solar farms as we have them are a mistake in a lot of ways but it's an early industry and distorted by a number of factors, mostly financial. The 'growing crops under them' is basically a dead issue unless you want labour intensive vegetables and at least in Germany anyway prohibited, the land has to be re-designated as industrial not agricultural (as per the proposals of the UK government as I understand it). However by changing the concept from gaining the maximum output per m² to maximising land productivity and reducing the need for peak-production power storage the next generation (pun) around where I live is to change to bi-facial panels orientated N-S installed vertically and spread about 15m apart. The loss of electricity is around 15% from the panels, the peak production problem considerably reduced, installation costs reduced and the land between farmed with usual machinery. And visually they are less intrusive.

As to the loss of farmland birds, surely this is simply a return to a pre-farming era, in other words the natural situation? The bird life before farming must have been considerably different before we actually started artificially feeding them.

Have you got a source to for the last mile 50% of CO2 claim.

This article is interesting:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/21/climate-impact-of-food-...

That may be questionable. The report suggest a major cause of the decline is the use of pesticides:

"Birds that rely on invertebrates for food, including swifts, yellow wagtails and spotted flycatchers, were the hardest hit. "

Ooh, where do you live? New solar scheme are getting real big and I’ve just been working on one to cover over 2,000ha (i.e. colossal) and most of that will be bifacial trackers. 

From an ecological, and predominantly botanical and entomological, perspective this is exciting since, like you say, the gaps between panel rows will be bigger than they have ever been, meaning more contiguous space for managing the grassland for wildlife. It is impossible to graze at this scale in this location so pretty much all that’s needed is sensitively timed cutting. 

I think wishing that all this farmland would just be magically turned to woodland is a red herring. Woodland cover in the uk is slowly increasing and much of these solar locations are in vast open environments to which remaining local wildlife will have already adapted and within which new woodland would end up as isolated islands. We have lost nearly 100% of our traditional meadows and lowland unimproved grassland - real ecological powerhouse habitats - which are far better suited here. Plus, getting back to the point, we start redressing the impact on wild birds of pesticide use and habitat loss. If we can generate clean energy at the same time then fantastic. 

I live in Bavaria but the one we looked at is in Baden-Wuttenburg, 14ha and 4.1MW. It's mowed grass between but there's another one somewhere where they experiment with different crops and using machinery between the rows, the reflectivity of the crop effects the power output and there are things to be discovered like how dust effects the panels, how well the auto-steer works between the panels, wind effects and so on. There's also a possibility since the fields  are grid connected to use the John Deere (I think it is) tethered electric tractors.

Upping the scale and deployment of solar panels must have it's limits without proportionate energy storage facility. Is this technology growing in tandem ?

No but there's more than one way to skin a cat. You can grow a crop between the rows and store it, as the solar output drops you chuck it in a bio-gas plant and turn the generators up. Currently this what happens to our plant except the solar panels are elsewhere on agricultural land taken out of use, we need the law to be changed to allow dual use of the land which is probably going to happen.

It is. The 2,000ha one I mentioned came with a 600MW battery storage facility. All new large scale solar proposals in the UK seem to have accordingly large batteries. Jim’s example works at that scale but those combined operations are not currently attractive on, say, 50MW+ schemes. 

Thanks for your inputs on this. It's becoming increasingly easy to produce energy through solar, alongside farming and improved ecology compared to what was there before. This needs to be better known.

I despair when I compare the state of the agricultural land now that I explored as a kid and much of what I see when I walk now....too many new massive identikit housing estates (where brown field in the nearest town/city remains undeveloped). Loss of trees and hedges  (and ancient runnels: some of the few remaining from old common land agriculture) and massive arable 'deserts' controlled by pesticides... even the hay fields these days. Woodlands that are a mess and usually have no access rights. There are shining exceptions, but not enough.

The problem is that however much we may despair we are all culpable.

The need for cheap and plentiful food comes at a price, we need some big changes to preserve and enhance what we have left and there are some big gaps in the schemes that our government are implementing.

If you haven't already read it I would strongly recommend English Pastoral by James Rebanks. As a farmer who has tried to find the middle way it is a poignant read that is heartbreaking whilst evoking many joyful memories.

Yeah sure. However, as people have pointed out already this isn't always about food for people.

Covid and the climate crisis has me walking much more locally. It's obvious we have fashions (for what is predicted to produce the highest profit) and that includes much corn biomass, oil seed rape, and various animal feed in my area (sugar beet, which used to be common, seems to have hit a sudden decline this year). We have lots of land for horses and dairy/meat (mostly, for cattle, on land not suitable for crops, except for a year of crop rotaion). Lots of woods, but only a small proportion accessible.

Back where I came from, the loss of key aspects of the landscape of my youth makes me weep, especially when the crop is identical boxes for lower middle class people, still often commuters to London, when the real need is affordable rented property (with good landlords like the council and most housing associations) for the less well off in already built up areas, where the work is. Ironically the big local Althorpe estate  (Spencer family) is the best preserved (the rules, animal harm, and privilege on that hunting and shooting estate really annoyed me as a kid and still do).

Edit: I forgot to say thanks for the tip.

The term "highest profit" gives the impression that there is big money in those cropping decisions.

The latest figures indicate that the average household income in farming households is just short of £18k compared to a national average of £35k.

With incomes that low cropping choices are dictated by the markets that we all influence and if estates managed for leisure provide more biodiversity than farmed land we need to re-examine our attitudes to life's necessities and easy means by which we acquire them.

With regards to access, at this time of year I usually take the opportunity to have a look around some of our woodland that is left unvisited for the rest of the year. It always tempting to consider cutting a few paths to make access easier but listening to the calls of startled blackbirds or hearing mammals run from my presence I always conclude that human visitation is not a benign to all creatures.

I'm sure you would be ashamed by some of what I see in woodlands. I know farming is tough but that needs proper state incentives and disincentives. Those sunny highlands of the brexit campaign promises seem further away than ever.

Woodland access has risks but it should also have benefits, not just financial but praise from people who visit in contrast to criticism of bad apples. Nesting doesn’t last all year.

It depends on what you mean by Woodlands being in a mess?

Woodland left to its own devices is messy. I would only realky be ashamed if it was full of human rubbish.

I would like to know more - how exactly in a modern context does one efficiently produce row crops without chemicals ? The first significant impediment I see is machine access - the same which has dictated large open fields ie. without hedgerows. Working the land is an absolute pain when there are obstacles to work around, esp when plowing - which shifts soil left or right to leave a furrow and a ridge after passage. With an open field you are left with just one furrow and one ridge at end of operations.

Pr8bably you can't, even bio farmers use them. However silaging crops don't need much if any.

The strips are 15m wide so no problem for the machines and turnover ploughing fairly uncommon these days, probably only every five years or so if that. Normally it's a whizz over with a heavy cultivator. The edges get filled up when the tilther goes across for seeding anyway. 

Interesting article here from the RSPB which (along with others) emphasizes the value of permanent meadow between the panels.

The article raised eyebrows with this finishing paragraph:

'However, it must be remembered that the primary function of the solar farm is to produce low carbon electricity, rather than being nature reserves. Consequently, management to increase a sites biodiversity value could increase costs by encouraging large flocks of birds to nest in and forage within the site.'

https://community.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/b/science/posts/bird-use-on-solar-far...

I don't get the sense of that phrase ... which birds arrive in large flocks (which would also take advantage of strip meadow) ? Starlings, lapwings ? I reckon many larger flocking species would shun tighter landing and take off access. Smaller birds may be more comfortable but any object could hide a predator.

oilseed crops are not currently produced without pesticides - which would seem to prohibit their value in a system intended to to promote biodiversity.

'The very low energy productivity per hectare of biofuels, coupled with their high requirements for fertilizers, pesticides, and water, severely limits the well-to-wheel reduction of fossil energy use, which in turn limits the environmental benefits.'

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/05/24/biofuels-vs-solar-electricity-for-ur...

In fact, Telegraph 2022, EU oilseed targets (and subsidies) has already led to environmental disaster through increased pesticide use. The greater the surface area of a crop - the more it attracts (becomes vulnerable to ) pests & disease.

What are you on about? Our plant runs on grass, maize, barley, sugar cane hybrid and anything green that can be silaged. Nobody bothers with bio-fuels refined from oil, it's methane and hydrogen we want. Plain grass is fairly popular as it's low investment and a reasonable yield but you always try to rotate the fields anyway.

And if you've seen what a flock of 1,000 wood pigeons can do you'll know why great efforts were made to reduce their numbers, the agricultural methods 50 or 60 years ago starting after the war lead to an enormous explosion in their numbers as it did for some other birds. The change from cattle to grain farming in the war lead to an immediate doubling of the food available to seed-eating birds (and animals like mice).

I’ve also not got a clue what they’re are on about. I walk past a solar farm between 150 and 200 times a year, biggest thing I’ve seen is a flock of about 20 starlings. The land between the panels is rough grass, and bit damp in places. 

If there was some global pandemic (hard to imagine i know, but roll with it), that stopped all cross border trade through fear of contamination, would you like to be in 60% or 40% that does / doesn't get enough food to eat? 

Or maybe some extreme weather on the other side of the world, hottest el nino on record is almost certainly coming this year and next.

I know a farmers who has panels next to his silage / grazing field, he was spreading muck last year with a side spreader and forgot which way it was chucking it out, an expensive ooops! 

thanks for explaining !

Muck spreading near solar panels must be a real shit and miss experience. Or should that be shit and piss. I’ve no idea. 

Indeed, he had poor judgement that day. 

Please please take this blog post with a pinch of salt. It’s clumsily written and there are several things wrong with it which is causing a bit of an issue in my line of work. I have gone into detail and there are inferences in it and conclusions in the thesis which cannot be backed up or are misleading. It’s a shame.  The main one for me being the assertion that skylarks seen singing over solar farms = nesting activity. This is incorrect, it only signifies territoriality. You’d conclude from reading this that skylarks love solar farms but they are, as ground nesting birds, displaced (along with the lapwing mentioned elsewhere here). They are one of the few losers from solar, unfortunately. There is a nest site fidelity effect whereby adult male birds return to attempt to set up territories but the females find that the actual nesting conditions are unsuitable (lots of new predator perched in the form of panels - bad for ground nesters)…

So yeah, I also agree that larger flocking birds such as wildfowl are less likely to congregate in solar farms (although aside from winter stubble/drilling they weren’t that numerous on arable anyway). The big winners are the seed and insect eaters which nest in scrub and hedgerows or woodland in the margins - like linnet, yellowhammer, finches, whitethroat, Reed bunting etc - and you do often get large winter flocks of those moving through to forage. The other winners are raptors such as owls feeding on the increased numbers of voles in the dense grass. 

No worries. I don't know who or what sets the standards, but for solar farms which may now spread across hundreds of acres, it's a bit of a joke to talk merely of hedgerows. We should be thinking of bordering strip woodlands - it's the interface which creates greatest diversity. If the land permits - a few ponds would help too.

Voles are abundant in the fields around here (SW France, Pyrenees foothills) but I rather think the raptors benefit more if the voles surface with greater visibility onto a well cropped sward.

Trade carried on just fine during Covid. Now you could argue what if there was a much deadlier virus. I still don't think this would stop trade. If you have excess anything during a crippling economic crisis of such pandemic, you are not going to refuse to export.

My point exactly. I really hope those countries don't produce and consume 100% of their food otherwise they are in trouble.

Much better to multiple options to weather any situation.

We rely too much on countries with volatile climates, it's us that will suffer too. 

And why are they abundant? The answer in the word fields, the farmers are feeding them and providing cover from raptors. Stop farming and the numbers (and species) of vole will change dramatically. As I pointed out at the start of this thread the question is what time is the baseline for an animal or bird population, that the numbers change in a human generation may be meaningless since the wildlife in farmland is by definition a human artefact. 

The authorities in the Frankenjura had a program to fell trees around the cliffs to encourage raptors and restore the Victorian views, the trees grew after the demise of mass sheep grazing but in turn they had been originally felled to provide industrial fuel and grazing. Previously the raptors would have had a hard time but raptors are trendy so a short period in history was chosen as "natural". And well cropped sward is kinda rare in nature as well.

Its me feeding the voles  - normally its a struggle surviving on grass seeds, but when they discover my potato beds  - Bingo! reproduction takes off

Otherwise I agree, human intervention disturbing balance. Around here they hunt the foxes  - each capable of killing 1000 voles annually

A pain in the butt for farmers (and gardeners), in plague years they get up to 1000 per hectare and destroy up to 20% of the crop, fruit trees they will kill 50% in a winter if conditions are right. They are one reason to plough every few years as it's the only way to control them by destroying their burrows apart from poison which creates other problems. The no-till farmers get particularly badly affected until in the end they have to plow as well. They are also why the "agricultural desert" exists, without ground cover they have no food supply and are at the mercy of raptors and other predators. Judging by the way my dog is digging my lawn up the voles have moved out of the neighbouring field which was just planted!

The damage increases excrementally the closer he gets

Sorry missed that.... woods being used as storage of crap, usually overgrown as well.

This photo was 1st published in 1996 - we knew the answers long ago