The reality, to which the department was blissfully ignorant, is
that pest control (or nutrient management, or herd health
management, or any of the other elements on an ecologically sound,
economically competitive, commercial farm) is not simply choosing
among chemicals - natural or synthetic, old or new. It is a whole
system geared to remove the opportunities for pest outbreak (or
nutrient loss, or disease proliferation), rather than deal with them
"after-the-fact". Chemicals (or, I might add, any routinely
purchased biocontrol agents) are a re-active appproach. Holistic
approaches (such as promoting extant, indigenous biocontrol
populations) are pro-active, by their very nature.
Organic farming (or holistic farming in general) is not just
abstinence from chemicals, contrary to the perceptions of the smugly
knowledgeable members of the unnamed department. It is a whole suite
of practices, whether strategic choice of crops for a particular
rotational sequence to allow cultivation at different times in the
season, or having a vigorously competitive winter cereal growing in
the temporal window that quackgrass might otherwise gain a
competitive advantage in, or promoting earthworm populations by
building up soil OM, specifically to encourage leaf litter
disappearance, and hence, withdrawal of the innoculum for next year's
disease problems.
There is little question that % losses due to pests of all kinds have
increased in recent decades, compared to the "good old, pre-chemical
days", simply because chemicals have given farmers the illusion -
***well buttressed by the slick advertisements and fast-talking
salespersons of certain unnamed "life sciences" companies (I love
that term, used last night by Jeremy Rifkin in a CBC interview
regarding his new book, The Biotech Century)****
that chemical approaches to pest control obviate the need for
sensible, well-established and effective, non-chemical control
practices (as detailed above). This is, after all, to the advantage
of the purveyers of chemical approaches, because chemicals must
then be bought and applied in increasing amounts to compensate for
their ineffectiveness in the absence of sound rotations, tillage,
smaller fields with healthy, biocontrol agent-harboring borders etc.
A classic example is growing corn, not once in a long, complex, well
designed crop rotation, but once every 1, 2, or 3 years, as is normal
in the "corn" belt. If there was ever a crop that begged for pest
encroachment in the upper midwest and Canada, it has to be corn (or
soybeans). Both are wide-row, warm-season, full-season crops growing
in a cool, short-season environment. So, we plant them in May, when
it is too cold for them to grow well, and when spring-vigorous weeds
are only too happy to fill in the vacuum that Nature abhors. At
present, corn and soybeans occupy just over one-third of the
hectarage sown to crops in Ontario, yet demand 84% of the herbicide
active ingredient applied to all field crops - specifically because
of the way we insist on growing them: simple rotations of
weed-friendly crops, year after year. Weeds can be managed in corn -
I've seen it done - on an organic farm, but only when rotations are
sensible and weed populations are not overtly encouraged - the
current practice.
Not to pick on corn too much, the same illogical thinking has been
used to construct mixtures for alfalfa. Alfalfa and timothy are the
combination of choice, although neither has the capacity for lateral
expansion to fill in gaps and occupy space. And then we blame low
yields (and short standlife) on dandelion encroachment, when the
opposite is in fact true - dandelions encroach BECAUSE the sown crop
is leaving holes in the sward (literally), which manifest themselves
as lower yield and dandelions.
So - why haven't we figured this out? Why are farmers, extension
agents, and researchers so very "into" linear - not holistic -
thinking? Good question. I'll look for some good answers from this
thoughtful group, but will close with a thought of my own.
Agriculturalists are just doing what the rest of us are doing.
Why should they be different, or held accountable to a higher
standard? Linear thinking is pervasive in contemporary western
society, whether in driving shiny, never-seen-dirt "off-road"
vehicles to work, in routinely partaking of beverages in
single-serving containers, or using disposable diapers and electric
can-openers. We do it because we can, and because we have become
convinced that this is not just the best way, but indeed the *only*
way. What an enormously ignorant and cruelly wasteful charade
is being perpetuated on/by the 17% of the world's population that
lives in the developed countries.
I am quite prepared to encourage farmers to think more holistically,
but if, by some miracle, sizeable numbers actually do it, it will be
against a heavy current of linear thinking that is driving all the
rest of society. The rest of society had better take a real close
look at that stone before throwing it at the agricultural community.
Ann
ACLARK@plant.uoguelph.ca
Dr. E. Ann Clark
Associate Professor
Crop Science
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON N1G 2W1
Phone: 519-824-4120 Ext. 2508
FAX: 519 763-8933
http://www.oac.uoguelph.ca/www/CRSC/faculty/eac.htm
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