Wind Energy versus Sustainable Agriculture: An Ontario Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wind power is often promoted as an economical and low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels despite ecological concerns about animal mortalities and energy sprawl. Wind-power developments that are becoming commonplace in rural agricultural landscapes reduce the area of arable farmlands, but to date there have been few attempts to quantify their cumulative effects. This paper compiles data on recently completed wind developments in southwestern Ontario, Canada, in order to estimate how much agricultural land is being lost to wind developments, how much of the rural landscape is being modified, and what the implications are to carbon sequestration, sustainable agriculture, and Ontario’s food security. Although the direct footprint of wind development is small relative to the total area and productivity of Ontario’s farmland, the area of undertaking is many times larger and has already altered 6% of Ontario’s total agricultural land base. Wind-power development must thus be considered among the contributors to Ontario’s projected food deficit, the ability to sequester carbon in agricultural soils, and must similarly be included in any policies aimed at protecting farmlands from non-agricultural uses. Keywords: agriculture; energy sprawl; farmland; food security; Ontario; wind power Resume L'energie eolienne est souvent choisie, comme solution economique alternative a faible teneur en carbone, aux carburants fossiles malgre les preoccupations ecologiques concernant la mortalite des animaux et l'expansion energetique. Les developpements de l'energie eolienne, qui sont devenus monnaie courante dans les paysages de l'agriculture rurale, reduisent la surface de terres cultivables, mais a ce jour il y a eu peu d'efforts pour quantifier leurs effets cumulatifs. Cet article compile les donnees recemment completees sur les developpements eoliens dans le sud-ouest ontarien, au Canada, afin d'estimer la proportion de terres agricoles qui est perdue par les developpements eoliens, la proportion de paysage rural qui est modifiee et les implications de la sequestration du carbone, sur l'agriculture durable, et sur la securite alimentaire de l'Ontario. Bien que l'empreinte directe du developpement eolien est petit par rapport a la surface totale et a la productivite des terres cultivables de l'Ontario, la surface d'operation est bien plus importante et a deja modifie 6% de la surface totale agricole cultivable ontarienne. Le developpement de l'energie eolienne doit ainsi etre considere parmi un des acteurs du deficit alimentaire previsionnel de l'Ontario, reduit la capacite de sequestrer le carbone dans les sols agricoles, et de la meme facon, doit etre inclus dans toute police visant la protection des terres cultivables d'un usage non-agricole.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".