Discover how a natural solution to mouse plagues is farming’s greatest opportunity

Twitter user Tanya Selak asked: So apart from reversing time and fixing the preconditions … what is the answer now? A natural solution to mouse plagues is the best way.

The NSW government and farming community are about to make a mistake that could cost Australia’s landowners billions of dollars and risk the economy and food security. Loss of wildlife is the cause behind land degradation, loss of agricultural land value and yield. The relaxation of laws allowing the widespread and indiscriminate use of powerful poisons to address a mouse plague, will only worsen the rate of collapse and prolong any efforts for recovery. Reversing these processes, by allowing nature to restore systems, costs little, achieves rapid results and could secure Australia’s food security while delivering the equivalent of ten times the 2020 pandemic JobKeeper budget every year. Now is the opportunity for Australia’s farmers and landowners to reverse the continuing economic decline of rural areas, which is marginalising agriculture, jeopardising livelihoods, costing lives and causing the political abandonment of entire communities. It’s not going to be easy to change people’s minds but it’s a conversation that needs to be had, if we’re to avoid mistakes of the past and see a return to healthy and vibrant rural cultures.

Articulating the mouse plague problem:

The principle reason Australia gets regular mice plagues is because of a huge surplus of free energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More in the farmland environment combined with an erosion of biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More processes and the consequent lack of mice predators. The problem is, that poisoning indiscriminately kills other wildlife and further damages those animal-driven ecosystem processes that normally maintain mice populations, as well as maintaining other farm-critical ecosystem services.

The large-scale use of poison poses several catastrophic risks for Australia’s farmers:

• It will prime conditions for more regular / worse mouse plagues in the future, as there will be even less resilienceReferring to an ecosystem’s ability to maintain a steady stable-state. The need to build resilience is entirely anthropocentric and symptomatic of ecosystems that are damaged or declining, leading to loss of ecosystem services on which humans depend. More in the system.
• The free surplus energyThe energy of a system that is emitted as waste and is not part of ecosystem processes. There is always some free surplus energy as this creates the basis for evolution where new species exploit gaps in the ecosystem where free energy becomes available. Surplus energy can occur as a result of disruption or disturbance. When free surplus energy reaches More that farming naturally creates, will still exist but in the absence of mice, will eventually trigger a different and more serious plague, lower down the trophic levelDescribes the amount of energy contained within one step of the food chain. Animals in one trophic level utilise about 90% of the energy they absorb for living, emitting the rest as heat and waste. This means the next step up the trophic chain (e.g. the bigger animals that eat them) only have access to about 10% of the energy More (either insect-based, or microbic).
• The additional mortality of lizards, snakes, birds of prey and other non-predatory animals, will further reduce the value of biodiversity processes, resulting in a suite of other economic pressures, including declining soil health, reduction in groundwater water retention and spread of invasive species that impact crop yield and health.

Poisoning creates huge economic losses, through direct and indirect harm to soil, water and the processes that regulate ecosystem function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More. Farming is inherently reliant on all these processes working and this is all driven by wild animals. If you remove animals from the system, it collapses. Farming cannot exist for much longer, unless wildlife populations are restored. This is the underlying cause and solution to mouse plagues and their frequency. The killing of native animals, either by poisoning or other less direct means, is the reason why farming has become marginal. The same technology cannot be relied upon to fix the problem it has caused.

The benefits of a natural solution to mouse plagues

Loss of global ecosystem services due to land degradation and desertification are up to USD 10.6 trillion annually, equivalent to about 17% of global GDP.

Australia regards the decline in value of farmland production due to land degradation, to be up to 9 per cent of agricultural production which was about AUD 67 billion in 2019–20. This means that Australian farmers could be making an additional AUD 6.03 billion profit a year, if land degradation was addressed … that’s only production though. Additional benefits to farmers would also be received as a flow on from ecosystem services … and this benefits the whole Australian economy.

Let’s say for argument, the global average 17% of Australia’s GDP is lost due to land degradation, that would be costing Australia, based on current GDP of USD 1.4 trillion (about AUD 2 trillion) a loss of AUD 170 billion each year. Though in terms of income, the recovery of ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More would create more than ten times that amount of welfare, a figure The Economics of Land Degradation Initiative puts at USD 75.6 trillion.

To put that into perspective, Australia’s entire JobKeeper budget during the pandemic was AUD 130 billion. By allowing land degradation, we are effectively removing ten times that amount of money from the economy.

Imagine the opportunity? Just 2.2% of Australians directly employed by the agricultural industry could reverse land degradation and secure the livelihoods of every Australian ten times over! All the while, massively increasing farmland and ecosystem resilience, through more secure annual profit-margins. The use of poisons as a solution to mouse plagues puts this at risk.

The solution to mouse plagues

There is only one solution that will work. Farmers need to collectively restore significant components of the ecosystem, beginning with anything that benefits the growth in populations of mice predators including snakes and birds of prey.

A healthy farmland system should have significant numbers of these birds and animals, each of which occupies a small home range, forages in consistent and energy-efficient patterns and rigorously harvests mice, to maintain numbers below plague-inducing thresholds.

STEP 1. This will be controversial but there is only one solution to the immediate problem. The plague has to run its course naturally. This is because any top-heavy intervention is going to make things significantly worse. We have to accept that we caused the disaster by using inappropriate technology in the first place.

STEP 2. Every farmer has to set aside between 10 – 25% of the most marginal land and allow it to recover naturally. Field boundaries and anywhere mice will regularly come into contact with food e.g. split grain, will be the most essential locations, as well as boundaries that connect pockets of vegetation together–these recoveries can happen very quickly. Success will depend on building animals into the exit-strategy, which means a profound change in attitudes to wildlife and a re-questioning of everything that has been done in the past, that has led to wildlife decline. There is a rapidly growing case load of examples where nature-based solutions have only ever created positive outcomes for food production and livelihoods.

Conclusion

Farmers work on the land all the time and deep down, are most likely aware of the dangers of ill-conceived, top-down solutions to ecological problems. They receive very little advice from ecosystem scientists. Instead, common sense is being overrun by knee-jerk political posturing and techno-centric proposals that will further cripple an already ailing rural economy and the ecosystems on which it relies.

Instead, a natural solution to mouse plagues represents a way for landowners to reverse declines. Nature-based solutions are the only way to do this but the upside is they are rapid and cost-effective. The challenge is for the principles to be adopted at a scale large-enough to avoid continuing ecosystem collapse. That will require farmers to question the traditional advice they have been receiving and adopt an entirely new way of thinking about the role and significance of wildlife in maintaining the integrity of land values.