Do organic farms increase pesticide use?
It's all a puzzle with a simple solution
So ….. conventional farmers, ones who rely on pesticides have to use more pesticides if the farm is next to an organic one.
However … conventional farmers will sometimes respond to high levels of pests by reducing pesticide use. It’s expensive and if pest spillover from a neighbouring from is high then the costs increase and the benefits decline. So sometimes a farmer will learn from their organic neighbours and reduce or even eliminate pesticide use.
This study found that where there are few organic farms the first scenario tends to be the case, pesticide use increases. Where there is a higher density of organic farms overall pesticide use decreases. “We see that a 10% increase in surrounding organic cropland leads to a 0.3% increase in insecticide use rates (kg per ha)”.
Given that biodiversity is much higher on and around organic farms, that they have improved soil and water quality per unit area and higher nutritional value it would seem that the best way forward would be to cluster them together.
Except that organic farms are less productive than conventional ones. So they say. This study shows that the gap is much less than the industrial agriculture lobbies make out (19.2% less) and most importantly the gap depends on how crops are grown. Multi-cropping and crop rotation reduces the gap substantially.
But here’s a funny thing, increased biodiversity, sometimes referred to as ecological intensification, improves yields because of enhanced pollination. This is particularly the case on small farms of around 2ha which account for 84% of all farms covering about 30-40% of agricultural land.
As noted just previously the organic products have a higher nutritional value. This leads us beautifully onto another theme trundling around the media….. agricultural products, particularly vegetables show a marked decrease in nutrients between the mid and late 20th century. This is pretty old news for most of us, the Davis study came out in 2004, fresher news is the impact of rising Co2 levels and crop nutrient content studies show that this causes a decline in nutrient content too. Excessive rainfall is a problem too as nutrients are leached from soils and lost.
The first decline seems to be caused by changes to soils (0-70 % of EU soils are unhealthy, in part due to current soil and manure management practices) and more especially due to modern crop varieties that are designed to grow fast and be adapted to synthetic agriculture chemical inputs. Crops have also been adapted to remove certain molecules that give, for example, a bitter taste. Unfortunately the molecules that give the taste are also useful nutrients.
The response from the food industry to this problem is straightforward, let’s add some back in. Fortification means adding nutrients to the foods, biofortification, involves putting nutrients into the seeds. There’s money to be made, much more than just improving soil quality, rotating crops correctly, using heirloom varieties and growing food as polycultures rather than monocultures.
“Old varieties have smaller yields” I hear a lobbyist shout.
Yes but they are more nutritive. It would be a bit simplistic to say that a 38% decline in riboflavin means having to eat 38% more vegetables that contain the molecule but this is somewhat the case. Today we have to eat more in order to have a diet containing the same nutrient levels as our grandparents or great-grandparents. An obscene situation that is directly impacting our health and longevity.
As I’ve mentioned time and again, we must stop talking in terms of tonnes per hectare and use the number of people well fed per hectare instead. The research above simply shows that chasing after quantity rather than quantity has led us down a dark path to poorer health and wellbeing, the collapse of insect populations and ridiculous levels of soil loss through erosion. Natural processes build soils which is why archaeology involves a lot of digging, conventional agriculture destroys them. The recommended sustainable threshold for soil loss is 2 tonnes her hectare per year. This is considered a sustainable loss which is simply absurd, any soil loss should be avoided and agricultural practices should build soil not destroy them. About a quarter of farmland in the EU has erosion levels above the recommended limit, this explains why farmers sometimes discover Roman ruins in their fields. They’ve managed to erode off the soil that built up over 2000 years.
As ever the solutions are simple, getting them into place via government action requires wadding through a slurry of lobbyists, criminals and vested interests. It’s much easier to get on with it at a local level and here’s what we need :
Count the number of people well fed per hectare, not the tonnes.
Switch from extensive agriculture to small scale intensive poly-cultural farming.
Prioritise soil health, stop erosion and promote soil building processes.
Go towards local organic production in an agroforestry context with ecological intensification throughout the local area.
Return to heirloom varieties and start cross-breeding local varieties adapted to each local area.
Diversify our diets.
Integrate all the flows together to create a sophisticated food system. For example, enriched water from local fish and duck production is used to fertilise market gardens.
Everything is linked together but we tend to go in the wrong direction. We build industries that pollute, the pollution disrupts nighttime pollination a the nocturnal insects try and find the scents from flowers in a malodorous smog. Ring a ring of roses that can’t find pollinators and smell of car exhaust. Fewer flowers pollinated mean fewer people fed her hectare. That same smog damages our health and especially that of our children, they are harmed by the lack of nutrients in food and the lack of diversity in our diets.
We can do better, let’s get on with it.