It was one of Ed Rice's comments that caught my ear. He was being pressed about recent efforts to stop the use of pesticides on PEI. He cautioned that homeowners use many of the same pesticides as farmers. I thought that was a courageous thing for him to say. The easy thing for a politician, particularly one from an urban community, and one who's taken on responsibility for the quality and supply of water for Charlottetown would have been to say he'd welcome the move. He didn't and I respect that.
I've written and reported on pesticide issues for many many years, and I'm sure I'm as stuck in my own beliefs as anyone else. For what it's worth here's some of what I believe, and I'm still trying to learn:
1. I'm not trying to be stupid or hard headed, but I'm not sure what a "pesticide-free" PEI really means. I think Stewart Hill has got it right. He taught ecological agriculture at MacDonald College outside Montreal for decades. I had invited him to lecture a class I was teaching at Carleton University in the mid 1970's. I was also an "organic" market gardener at the time (see earlier post). He thinks pesticides have been and always will be used in agriculture, the question is which ones and how they're used. I had asked him about using captan, a fairly toxic fungicide, on seeds planted early in the Spring when it's cold and wet. He said if it's necessary to get the seeds to germinate and grow, he had no problem with that. His view was that as long as farmers made the effort to truly understand the pests or diseases they're fighting, and then determined the product or action that would have the least impact on the environment, then that's what they should do. And he's still telling audiences and students that there are examples where a targeted synthetic pesticide is better to use than a broad spectrum organic insecticide which kills every bug. I had flea beetles chewing up broccoli and cauliflower seedlings, I'd lost dozens in the last ten days. I hand picked, sprayed water, etc. Finally I dragged out some rotenone dust to kill them off. It was that or not having any brocolli in the freezer. Did I use a pesticide? Did I also kill beneficial insects? Yup. And if I was doing this on a commercial basis the problem would be bigger, and a solution much more necessary.
2. Organic farmers use pesticides too, and some like Kocide and rotenone, kill fish as efficiently as the fungicides and insectcides used in conventional agriculture. The difference is that organic farmers manage their soils much more effectively, longer rotations, high organic levels, so they're much, much less risk. So preventing fish kills isn't just as an issue of "going organic", but making sure that pesticides, all pesticides, are kept out of waterways.
3. People's fear and anger is really directed at potato farming. I think there was a great opportunity missed in the mid 1990's as the industry expanded to supply the new french fry plants (now plant after Mccain announced it's leaving) that the government and many in the farming community resisted the common sense recommendations coming out of Elmer MacDonald's Roundtable report: the need for proper buffer zones, using organic matter as a measure of sustainable farming practices, restrictions on row cropping on sloping land, proper crop rotations, and so on. We've waited almost twenty years for some of these to be implemented, and are still waiting on others. Would it have prevented fish kills, dead zones in rivers, nitrates in wells? I don't know. I think it would have made these problems occasional, and manageable. Now they're the expected, and that makes it much more difficult for politicians and farm leaders to create confidence that they know what they're doing. That's when joining the "pesticide free" team seems like the only answer. And for what it's worth, don't forget the dozens of watersheds where fish still thrive even after heavy rains, and don't be surprised if the cause of the North River fish kill wasn't a potato field but something else. And if that's the case, no that doesn't mean everything is OK.
4. Two of the most condemned pesticides these days are neonicitinoids, and glyphosphate (our old pal Round-up), and for good reason. Here's the but. It's not as if either were introduced into a Garden of Eden that's now been poisoned. When both were initially introduced they were replacing herbicides and insecticides that were far more damaging to the environment, and people, some of the old World War Two nerve agents, and herbicides like agent orange and paraquat. The problem with both (and I've written a fair amount on this before) is how they're used. GMO roundup ready crops have lead to millions of acres of farmland saturated with glyphosphate, and the same issue with the neonics, coating grain and corn seed. It's estimated that more than 80% of the neonics being used every year never get close to a real pest, but hurt beneficials like bees.
And here's a well written article from this week on what happens when pesticides aren't used properly. The really aggravating thing for me is that the pesticide companies never seem to have to answer for how their products are used, and then they benefit again when they're no longer effective.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/us/invader-storms-rural-america-shrugging-off-herbicides.html
Invader Batters Rural America, Shrugging Off Herbicides
About
100 miles northwest of Indianapolis, amid 8,000 lush acres farmed by
Dave Harper, his brother Mike and their sons, the Arnold Schwarzenegger
of weeds refuses to die. Three growing seasons after surfacing in a
single field, it is a daily presence in a quarter of the Harper spread
and has a foothold in a third more. Its oval leaves and spindly seed
heads blanket roadsides and jut above orderly soybean rows like
skyscrapers poking through cloud banks. It shrugs off extreme drought
and heat. At up to six inches in diameter, its stalk is thick enough to
damage farm equipment.
“You
swear that you killed it,” said Scott Harper, Dave Harper’s son and the
farm’s 28-year-old resident weed expert. “And then it gets a little
green on it, and it comes right back.”
Botanists call the weed palmer amaranth.
But perhaps the most fitting, if less known, name is carelessweed. In
barely a decade, it has devastated Southern cotton farms and is poised
to wreak havoc in the Midwest — all because farmers got careless.
Palmer,
as farmers nicknamed it, is the most notorious of a growing number of
weeds that are immune to the gold standard of herbicides, glyphosate.
Cheap, comparatively safe and deadly to many weeds, glyphosate has been a
favorite ever since the Monsanto Company introduced it under the name Roundup in the mid-1970s.
After
Monsanto began selling crops genetically engineered to resist
glyphosate in the 1990s, the herbicide’s use soared. Farmers who once
juggled an array of herbicides — what killed weeds in a cotton field
might kill cornstalks in a cornfield — suddenly had a single herbicide
that could be applied to almost all major crops without harming them.
There
were even environmental benefits: Farmers relied less on other, more
dangerous weed killers. And they abandoned techniques like tilling that
discouraged weed growth, but hastened erosion and moisture loss.
But
constantly dousing crops in glyphosate exacted a price. Weeds with
glyphosate-resisting genetic mutations appeared faster and more often —
16 types of weed so far in the United States. A 2012 survey concluded
that glyphosate-resistant weeds had infested enough acreage of American
farmland to cover a plot nearly as big as Oregon, and that the total
infestation had grown 51 percent in one year. Glyphosate-resistant
palmers first surfaced in 2005, in a field in Macon County, Ga. Nine
years later, they are in at least 24 states.
“There’s
no substantive argument about whether the problem’s gotten far worse in
this era of genetically resistant crops,” said Charles Benbrook, a
professor and pesticide expert at Washington State University. “The
advent of herbicide-tolerant crops made it possible for farmers to load
up so much herbicide on one crop that it was inevitable that it would
develop resistance.”
Now
farmers are going back to older techniques to control weeds, using more
varieties of herbicides, resuming tilling — and worse.
Palmer
amaranth is the prime example. Consider the cotton fields that blanket
many Southern farms: Without glyphosate, almost no herbicides can kill
the weed without also damaging cotton plants. Some farmers have mowed
their crops to keep palmer seeds from maturing. In 2009, Georgia spent
$11 million to send laborers into a million acres of cotton fields to
pull palmers out by hand.
For many farmers, including the Harpers, manual labor has become a last resort in the battle against carelessweed.
“I
consider myself a Roundup baby, and it was great,” Scott Harper said.
“You didn’t have to think about anything. And now we get this weed that
flips everything on its head.”
The
Harpers’ 2,500-acre soybean crop is an object lesson in palmer’s
adaptability and how far farmers must go just to keep it in check.
Palmer
amaranths seem as if they were designed by nature to outwit herbicides
and farmers. Unlike many weeds, it has male and female versions,
increasing genetic diversity — and the chances of a herbicide-resistant
mutation — in each new seed. And each plant is astonishingly prolific,
producing up to 200,000 seeds in an average field, said Dave Mortensen, a
professor of weed and plant ecology at Pennsylvania State University.
“If
one out of millions or billions of seeds contains a unique trait that
confers resistance to herbicide,” he said, “it doesn’t take long when a
plant is that fecund for it to become the dominant gene.”
William
G. Johnson, a Purdue University professor of botany and plant
pathology, said the weed probably arrived at the Harpers’ farm in
typical fashion: in manure, purchased as fertilizer, from cows that ate
cottonseed — and, inadvertently, palmer seeds.
The
Harpers initially mistook the weed for waterhemp, a close relative.
Before they learned otherwise, combines had already harvested fields
containing mature palmer seed pods and had spread the seed far and wide.
A
glyphosate-resistant palmer is a mighty beast indeed. Its seeds can
germinate any time during the growing season, so herbicide sprayed in
April is useless against a palmer that appears in July. Once sprouted,
palmer amaranth can grow more than two inches a day. Once it exceeds
four inches, even herbicides for which it lacks resistance begin to lose
their effectiveness.
The
Harpers have kept palmers at bay in their 5,500 acres of corn by
spraying dicamba, a weed killer that is benign to corn. Soybeans are a
different matter.
Last
year, the Harpers sprayed palmer-infested fields several times with
glyphosate and two other herbicides, pushing herbicide costs to $80 an
acre from $15. About eight in 10 palmers died. The rest wilted for a
couple of weeks, then resumed growing.
This
year, they are trying a different chemical cocktail that raises
herbicide costs only to $45 an acre. Their big gun, a herbicide that
blocks palmers from synthesizing amino acids, was sprayed on July 3, the
first of two applications allowed each summer.
“I
came back from the Fourth of July weekend, and they looked dead,” Mr.
Harper said. “I said, ‘I think we smoked ’em.’ My dad says, ‘Awesome.’ ”
He paused. “Ten days later, there’s green coming all over them again.”
Should the second herbicide application fail, Mr. Harper said, he is unsure what to do next.
More
broadly, experts in glyphosate’s travails — farmers, scientists,
regulators, the herbicide industry, environmentalists — feel much the
same way.
The
industry has readied a new barrage of genetically engineered crops that
tolerate other weed killers. The Environmental Protection Agency is set
to approve plans by Dow AgroSciences to sell soybean seeds
that tolerate not only glyphosate, but a much older herbicide, 2,4-D,
and a third widely used herbicide, glufosinate. Monsanto hopes to market
soybeans and cotton next year that resist dicamba.
Dr.
Mortensen and others say the companies are simply repeating the history
that made palmers resistant to glyphosate. He says natural solutions,
like planting what are known as cover crops that keep light from
reaching germinating palmers, may cost more but are also effective.
Mr.
Harper said he believes Dr. Mortensen is right. He also said he cannot
wait for Monsanto and Dow to begin hawking their new soybeans anyway.
“I’m
not stupid. I know you can only ride a pony so far,” he said. “It’ll
probably take another 10 years before palmer becomes a real big problem
again. But that just brought me 10 years I didn’t have.”
