Hey Nittany…a science issue

I have been intrigued by the idea of “rewilding” my yard for a few years. Lawns are a problem because grass just doesn’t support a lot of insect diversity. The issue is local ordinances surrounding lawn appearance, height, etc.

wv wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

I have been intrigued by the idea of “rewilding” my yard for a few years. Lawns are a problem because grass just doesn’t support a lot of insect diversity. The issue is local ordinances surrounding lawn appearance, height, etc.

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Any opinion on this:

“Native bees are more efficient pollinators, having a 91 to 72 percent advantage over honey bees…..We’ve been duped by ‘save the bee’ campaigns that show images of European honey bees or graphics of honeycomb. We don’t really need honey bees in North America for pollination. The primary group that needs honey bees is an industrial agriculture system that has come to depend on them; this insect species is one more cog in the industrialization of life that minimizes and destroys ecosystems for profit. We put great stress on these bees, shipping them around the nation, treating them like machine parts with dollar values as their primary worth.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future
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“Ultimately, every garden is an ideology.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

I agree with this. Honey bees are not native to North America. It’s also true that their population is not in trouble, and that native pollinators like bumble bees are better pollinators, although studies show that pollination is most efficient in areas populated by both bumble bees and honey bees – probably due to different flower preferences leading to more flowers being pollinated when both are present.

I’m not sure why honey bees are still the preferred pollinator for agriculture. It’s probably because they are already domesticated, available, and we know so much about them. Bumble bees have been domesticated and are used for some things.

About farming – all farming, regardless of whether it’s “industrial”, conventional, organic, etc, has a negative impact on the surrounding ecosystem. It’s the nature of the enterprise. Organic farming does a little better with maintaining insect diversity, but it is less productive than conventional farming so it requires more land to get the same yield. So organic farming on a large enough scale necessary to feed the amount of people we rely on conventional to feed would require the clearing of more forests and ruination of more natural areas. Organic farming also contributes more to climate change on a per acre basis than conventional farming does.

Zooey wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Organic farming also contributes more to climate change on a per acre basis than conventional farming does.

Why?

“Organic practices can reduce climate pollution produced directly from farming – which would be fantastic if they didn’t also require more land to produce the same amount of food.

Clearing additional grasslands or forests to grow enough food to make up for that difference would release far more greenhouse gas than the practices initially reduce, a new study in Nature Communications finds.

Other recent research has also concluded that organic farming produces more climate pollution than conventional practices when the additional land required is taken into account.“

Link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/amp/

Zooey wrote:

Well…that sounds a little sketchy to me. How many forests are being cleared for organic farming? I mean….

If organic farming was to become the standard of practice throughout the world, then a lot more land would be required to yield the same amount of food that is currently produced. Since practically all the land on earth that is suitable for farming is already being farmed, that means more forests would have to be cleared to support organic.

Instead of looking at farming as organic vs conventional vs industrial, etc, we need to incorporate the best practices of all types of farming to come up with the most environmentally friendly form and understand that some types of farming may not work everywhere.