"Large-scale farms account for most of the global food supply, but smallholdings protect species and are just as profitable.
Small farms tend to be more productive and biodiverse than large ones, and are roughly as profitable and resource-efficient.
Worldwide, 84% of farms are less than 2 hectares in size. Many policymakers and scientists argue that these smallholdings outperform large industrial operations — which provide the bulk of the world’s food — on a range of environmental and socioeconomic measures. Vincent Ricciardi and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, analysed 118 studies conducted over 50 years across 51 countries to assess how farm size affects outcomes other than food production.
The team found that small farms have higher yields than large ones do, perhaps owing to the increased availability of family labour. Smaller farms also tend to have more crop diversity, as well as higher non-crop biodiversity. That’s probably because, compared with industrial farms, modest farms rely less on insecticides, cover more-diverse landscapes and have more field edges between crops and non-cultivated land.
The authors suggest that supporting small farms boosts food production while providing important humanitarian and ecological benefits." [1]
The European Union cannot continue to fund large-scale agriculture, which is highly polluting. As a result, these farms are facing bankruptcy:
"In Lithuania, the average farm is about 200 hectares and its income, if we just follow the requirements of the Green Course and do not use modern technologies, will fall by 20-30%. It is fortunate that these calculations were commissioned by the European Parliament and carried out by the French, so far they are practically the only serious study, and another by the US Department of Agriculture. and we will lose 25%, which means collapse. How much does a 200-hectare farm need to invest to adapt to the new requirements? Such a farm needs to buy three modern units: a sprayer, a fertilizer and a seeder, which would cost about 500 thousand. euros. Obviously, the farmer simply cannot do it from his own funds. Such a farm earns an average of 300 euros per hectare, which is 60 thousand per year from which the farmer's family has to live. After some hesitation, he can give 20 - 30 thousand EUR of these funds so they may be used for investments. But the problem is that you have to constantly get into debt and constantly buy land without which you can not work."
If we want to have strong agriculture in Lithuania, we must ensure the support of the Lithuanian state for small farms now, without waiting for them to die out altogether.
1. Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms. Vincent Ricciardi, Zia Mehrabi, Hannah Wittman, Dana James & Navin Ramankutty,
Nature Sustainability (2021), Published: 25 March 2021
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