Series: Wildlife and Farmland
Can farmers best protect wildlife by sharing land with animals or sparing land for them? At bottom, the choice between these two approaches implies a stark trade-off when it comes to farmland biodiversity and agricultural productivity: a truly high-yield farm (whether organic or conventional) will have little room to share with wildlife. While opportunities do exist for marginally increasing biodiversity on the farm without reducing productivity—by adopting agroecological practices like crop rotations, for instance, and by employing high-tech tools, synthetic pesticides, and crops with GM traits like Bt—the effectiveness of such management interventions remains limited. As a result, it will be essential to concentrate farmland in locations where biodiversity losses are the least and yield gains the greatest.
Essay
Food Production and Wildlife on Farmland, Linus Blomqvist
Responses
Demand-Side Interventions, Claire Kremen
More than Share-Spare Philosophies Needed, Andrew Kniss and William J. Price
What We Consume Matters. So Does How We Produce It. Ben Phalan
Video
Food Production and Wildlife on Farmland
