Much of our current bird population (at least in central Europe) has co-evolved with agriculture over thousands of years. The problem is not so much that there is agriculture happening, it is the scale and destructiveness of the industrialized agriculture that has become the norm. Fields that are literally several square kilometers large without any intersecting hedges or other habitats. Machines that pick up every last grain of wheat and turn soil up to a large depth, effectively sterilizing it of beneficial soil live. Pesticides and herbicides that kill off the basis for entire ecosystems.

We need to develop an agricultural system that can financially sustain itself within smaller structures, that incorporates edges and diversity, that utilizes ecological services instead of trying to suppress natural processes.