#farming

[expressions-of-nature]

Cranberry Harvest by Dave Steers

[victusinveritas]

[animentality]

[wachinyeya]

Cherry Crops Kept Safe from Diseases Thanks to Tiny Kestrel Falcons in Michigan

By keeping rodents and small fruit-eating birds out of the orchards, kestrels were found to be an effective means of pest control.

By Andy Corbley -Jan 27, 2026

A study run by Michigan State University in the state’s upper peninsula has discovered that encouraging American kestrels to nest in cherry orchards also reduces the presence of food-borne illnesses that can be passed via the fruit to consumers.

By keeping rodents—but particularly small, fruit-eating birds out of the orchards, kestrels were found to be an effective means of pest control.

“Kestrels are not very expensive to bring into orchards, but they work pretty well,” said Olivia Smith, lead study author and assistant professor of horticulture at Michigan State University. “And people just like kestrels a lot, so I think it’s an attractive strategy.”

The hypothesis of Smith and her colleagues was that by keeping fruit-eating birds away, fewer avian pathogens would reach the shelves of the grocery store. This proved largely correct, as kestrel-guarded orchards showed an 81% decrease in instances of crop damage, including missing fruit and fruit with bite marks, and a 66% decrease in bird droppings on the fruit trees.

“I’ve noticed a difference having the kestrels around, hovering over the spring crops,” Brad Thatcher, a farmer based in Washington state who has housed kestrels in the fruit and vegetable areas on April Joy Farm for over 13 years, told Inside Climate News. “There’s very little fecal damage from small songbirds at that time of year versus the fall.”

There are no shortage of problems for cherry and fruit farmers these days, from wild weather swings to labor shortages. Perching birds are just one more issue to deal with, and they’re quite the issue, causing some $85 million in losses every year among major growing states like Michigan and California.

Growers attempt to prevent the fruit loss in a variety of ways, including chemical repellents, lethal shooting, trapping, hanging nets over their trees, visual and auditory scare tactics, and even deforesting the area surrounding the orchard.

Not only were the kestrels found to be more effective at keeping the birds away, but the detectable levels of Campylobacter, the most common foodborne pathogen spread by bird feces, were lower on branches in orchards with kestrel nest boxes (0.97% compared to around 10%).

On Michigan Cherry Farms, Small Falcons Are Improving Food Safety - Inside Climate News

Kestrels are already abundant on local cherry farms, but a new study suggests their presence might lower the risk of food-borne illnesses ca

Falcons reduce pre-harvest food safety risks and crop damage from wild birds

[hope-for-the-planet]

Farmers Fencing Off Streams Has Restored Over 1000 Miles of Waterway in Oklahoma

Image and text from this article in the New York Times:

Oklahoma has been exemplary in cleaning up its streams, by some measures more than any other state. A big part of the solution was simple: Give cows clean drinking water and keep them out of streams. When one farmer tried it, he quickly saw results. His veterinarian bills went down and wildlife returned to the area. [...] For Mr. Victor, the decision to fence his cattle off from the waterway wasn’t easy. The creek was why his great-grandmother, who was Cherokee, especially prized the land. The parcel was allotted to her in 1891 through the Dawes Act, which allowed the federal government to break up tribal land. The waterway gave the family’s cattle a place where they could drink and cool off. “I’m sure at the coffee shop, they were all laughing at me,” Mr. Victor, 68, said. But even though it’s my land, it’s not really my land. I’m just a person here with it at this time, and I carry that big responsibility. The benefits of a healthier waterway exceeded his hopes. Mr. Victor thought that the land around the creek might regenerate in five years, perhaps 10. But within just a couple of years, the banks were transformed into verdant corridors of grasses and shrubs. Wildlife appeared, including white-tailed deer, bobcats, coyotes and bald eagles that return each year to a sprawling nest to rear their young.

I think we lose a lot when we envision conservation or environmental protection as something that only folks in left-leaning states or communities care about. Climate change and environmentalism didn't use to be partisan issues. This work is for everyone and there are allies in more places than a lot of people would expect.

[paintdust]

You found a stardrop! 💜 Your mind is filled with thoughts of (insert favorite thing here).

[revolutionary-optimism-now]

So many things about the wildlife management, agriculture, etc. in this country make me feel like the joker.

Yeah the state has to breed fish in captivity and stock them into lakes for game fishing and food web maintence because the ecosystem is so fucked from a combination of overfishing, invasive species, pollution etc. that lakes don’t teem with fish naturally anymore. If you catch and eat fish you gotta make sure to check the gov website guidelines for that lake’s pollution levels. Male sure you don’t eat more than 3 in a month so you don’t give yourself mercury poisoning!

There’s too many deer overgrazing young plants and spreading disease because we expirated wolves so we gotta try to keep their numbers in check through hunting permits. There’s only a few remote lakes and rivers that the DNR say are so far from human settlements that the water is safe to drink straight from it. But don’t worry you can buy bottled water or a filter because you probably shouldn’t drink the tap water. There’s far less frogs and predatory insects around that normally keep disease spreading insects like mosquitoes in check.

Yeah there’s edible wild plants virtually everywhere but you probably shouldn’t pick and eat them unless you live in the middle of nowhere because of contamination from everything from pesticides to car exhaust to heavy metals. If you have a rain barrel the gov says you can use the water for your lawn or garden but not for a vegetable garden because of the chemicals leeched into it from your roof.

You gotta have a lawn so you can imitate the landed gentry who had large estates of land not used for farming so they could show off their wealth. So much money you don’t even need to grow your own food you can just have this completely devoid of life lawn that you have to mow every week (or twice a week sometimes) because you don’t have enough money to pay people to maintain it for you like the wealthy do. It also needs weed killer and fertilizer and seed and water every year too. But hey at least there’s also far less native plants for pollinators and therefore far less pollinators. All for a stupid fucking lawn.

Where I live it’s actually illegal to replace more than 50% of your lawn with a flower garden or a vegetable garden. Half of it just be grass or the city will fine you. And where do you get your vegetables? From the supermarket. Why grow your own food when you could rely on some company to feed you. Most of our country’s farmland is actually corn for ethanol and animal feed, not sweet corn, and then after corn it’s soybeans so we can use soy as a filler ingredient. You can’t grow bananas or avocados in our climate but don’t worry. You can get them in January because we have them shipped in from Guatemala and Mexico.

Despite what republican aesthetics would like you believe, most farms in this country are not salt of earth family farms, they’re huge factory farms staffed by visa workers who are paid terribly, work in unsafe conditions, can’t speak out against violations, and some of whom are even just straight up human trafficked here. But don’t worry why bananas somehow only costs 29¢ each. Don’t grow your own food. Buy it from a store, grown and shipped to you from 2,000 mi away. Because that’s how efficient the free market is baby. Because that makes more sense than every neighborhood designed having a community garden and chicken coop at the center.

I feel crazy. Through most of human history you didn’t have to worry about this kind of stuff, but we’ve built a society where you need the state to monitor air pollution levels so they can warn people not to go outside.