Big Agriculture Problems #1: Not to be dramatic, but we’re all gonna die.
When people talk about global warming, the phrase “we are killing the earth” comes up quite a bit. It is, of course, patently untrue: we are not killing the earth. The earth has an astounding ability to bounce back from all types of environmental disasters — from massive earthquakes, and solar flares, to meteors and volcanic eruptions. We are not killing the earth. We are killing ourselves. In no industry is this as true as the agricultural industry. For decades, we have strived to feed the planet, mass-producing food at an unsustainable pace, and causing some of the worst environmental crises in history[1]. The use of monocropping, pesticides, herbicides, tilling, intellectual patents, and general land degradation have been combined in insidious, profitable ways, encouraging further environmental destruction.
Before going further, it is important to note that farmers themselves are largely not to blame for the destructiveness of conventional farming. It is incredibly time consuming and expensive to transition to environmentally friendly ways, as we will discuss later in the year, and the benefits and tariffs at play on the economic side of agriculture make it even more confusing and difficult. I am not playing the blame game here; I am just talking about how horrible conventional agriculture is. So, let’s talk.
Horribleness number one: Monocropping
Monocropping is the practice of growing one crop in the same field year after year. Think “amber waves of grain” style farming. Think “Jenny running through the corn in Forrest Gump” style farming. For those who prefer a more contemporary reference, think “Maeve from Westworld running her hands through the wheat fields” style farming. Monocropping doesn’t seem terrible on the surface. Monocropping allows farmers to spend less money on field management while providing more profits. It is a relatively simple way to farm, and the benefits of monocropping are immediate-sow 100 acres of potato in the spring, harvest 100 acres of potatoes in the fall. America is a country of mass production-why shouldn’t it be the same for food? For one key reason: Food is not made, it is grown. Growing plants, as any gardening enthusiast would tell you, is a little bit like having a child. They need care, shelter, water, the right soil, the right sunlight, and the right management strategy. Monocropping robs the plants of the right care. It decreases soil fertility[2] and drains the soil of key nutrients[3], such as potassium and nitrogen. How does this happen? Plants all need slightly different levels of nutrients, and slightly different levels of care and they also provide different levels of nutrients. There are specific groups of bacteria and fungi that contribute to the balance of the soil by helping to process and make these nutrients available to other plants in the system. Let’s say that I was to plant a monocrop of kale, which needs a lot of nitrogen. If I planted nothing but kale year after year, it would use up all the nitrogen in the soil. There are no other plants around to help restore the nitrogen to the soil (remember some plants provide nutrients to the soil) and eventually, the soil becomes extremely nitrogen deficient. This leads to a decrease in the number of helpful bacteria, making it even harder for the plants to find available nutrients. So, if the plant was a child, monocropping would essentially be putting all children into a state-run facility with completely non-individualized care from ages zero to five, and then never letting renovations be done on the building where the children live, and never letting the caregivers of the children retire, AND also never hiring new caregivers. Now, the first couple rounds of kids ages one to five, they might be okay (we’ll ignore the trauma of being separated from your family — it’s not a perfect metaphor). They have a newly built building and the caregivers are full of energy. The later children to enter this program might not be so lucky. They are going to grow up in a dilapidated old building with caregivers who are exhausted and overworked. In this metaphor, the building is the soil, and the caregivers are the bacteria. It’s worth noting that many farmers know that monocropping is bad for the soil and plants, but they are simply unable to make a living through other means of farming. So, to recap, monocropping results in horrible soil conditions that will eventually result in limited plant growth.
You may be saying, “okay, I get it, it’s terrible. But if it’s been in use for so long, then how come it still seems to work? I still can go out and buy kale.”
This is true, you can go buy kale. It will taste awful, but that’s more because kale is gross than the way it was grown. The reason you can keep buying kale is that monocropping is not happening in a vacuum. It is combined with intense fertilizers, and pesticide and herbicide usage so that the kale still grows. However, these additions don’t stop the damage of monocropping, they simply mask it, while wreaking havoc on their own. Which brings me to…
Horribleness number two: Pesticides
~ A quick note before I begin: Pesticides are dangerous chemicals that are sprayed on farms and gardens to kill harmful pests. Herbicides are a type of pesticide that is sprayed to specifically kill the plants in a given area. Herbicides and pesticides harm the environment through the same methods, so I will not be talking about them individually in this blog, but please be aware that anytime I say “pesticide”, herbicides are included within that framework. ~
Okay, hands up if you read Silent Spring by Racheal Carson. If your hand is up right now you already know the harmful effects of pesticides, so go ahead and skip this section. If your hand is down right now, please read Silent Spring! And the rest of this section, which will explain why pesticides are terrible. First, all you pesticide defenders: I see you. Pesticides have changed a lot in the last few years. They have grown more specialized, are a lot safer now than they have been in the past, and they do a fantastic job of preventing bugs from eating plants. But they still suck.
Pesticides have been proven to harm wildlife in multiple ways. Typically, harm to wildlife can be split into four different categories[4]: Acute, chronic, secondary, and indirect. Acute harm, also called acute poisoning, is when wildlife is directly poisoned by an application of pesticides. For example, if a farmer applied pesticides to a field, and then a heavy storm occurred, the water flowing through the farm would pick up and carry the pesticides through groundwater or to local streams. This runoff then causes the local fish to be inadvertently poisoned by the pesticides as it infects the water. In some cases, this can also happen without rain, as the pesticides could mix with the groundwater if the water table is high. Acute exposure also happens commonly to birds, who eat pesticide covered insects. Farmers can mitigate these risks by planning pesticide usage for non-rainy weeks, but the vast swaths of farmland in America ensure that no matter how careful the farmers are, some acute poisoning will occur. A quick specific example of acute harm: the pesticide imidacloprid is known to cause direct harm to honeybees, fungi, and other aquatic and terrestrial wildlife.[5]
Chronic harm occurs when wildlife has been exposed to pesticides for a long time, and detrimental effects develop over time. Perhaps the most well-known cases of this are DDT effects on bald eagles[6]. DDT is a pesticide that had widespread use before regulations in the 1970s. It caused the shells of large birds of prey, including bald eagles, to be extremely fragile, resulting in mass death[7]. Since the regulations, birds of prey species affected by DDT have largely recovered. It is a challenge to track the long term effects of pesticides as the ecology of water sources and marshlands is extremely complicated, and have many conflating variables. The fear in using pesticides is that we will not be able to track all the possible chronic effects on wildlife, and will end up irreparably harming nearby ecosystems. Although the United States federal government does do extensive testing of pesticides before approving them for commercial usage and has guidelines and regulations to follow, it is impossible to know exactly how the surrounding wildlife will be affected. Because pesticides have already been proven to be harmful, the relative ambiguity of the chronic effects is dangerous.
Secondary harm occurs when wildlife is indirectly poisoned from pesticides. One example of this is when predators feed on an animal dying from acute exposures. The predator, eating these dying animals, consumes the same pesticides, and also dies or is extremely harmed. Secondary poisoning can also occur from the accumulation of pesticides through the food chain. This happens in the same way that mercury poisoning from fish happens. The wildlife at the bottom of the food chain — let’s say a worm chilling out in some pesticide sprayed dirt-ends up with some small amount of pesticides in its little worm body. Then, a toad comes along and eats the worm. Now, the frog has both the worm (yay for food!) and the pesticide (ugh, no thank you!) in its body. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem; if the small amount of pesticides didn’t cause adverse harm to the little worm body, then it most likely won’t in the bigger frog body. Except the toad is hungry that day. So, instead of eating the one worm, the toad eats three. Now, the toad has three times the amount of pesticides in its body then one worm did. But-GASP! A snake is coming! And not only does it eat the toad, ingesting both the toad and the pesticide, but it also eats two toads. Now, the snake has six times the amount of pesticides in its system than the worm did. Eventually, as the pesticides move up the food chain, they accumulate to dangerous levels. Pesticides have a truly frightening ability to stick around in an ecosystem long after they have been used, and they can be extremely hard to break down. This makes sense-pesticides are designed to be durable chemicals that target wildlife in some form-and it increases the danger of pesticide use.
The fourth category of pesticidal impact on wildlife is indirect effects. As the name implies, indirect harm from pesticides does not involve direct contact between pesticides and wildlife. Instead, indirect harm is when the use of pesticides depletes a resource for wildlife. For example, the use of herbicides may reduce food sources and nesting grounds for birds, small mammals, and insects. The use of insectile pesticides reduces food sources for bats, birds, and other wildlife that eats insects. This change of resource availability can cause ripple effects throughout an ecosystem, resulting in food and habitats shortages.
I have been talking about these four effects (acute, chronic, secondary, and indirect) individually, but they happen simultaneously. Anywhere that pesticides are used, all four effects have to be considered. When used in tandem with monocropping, as they often are, pesticides can have even worse effects, as poor soil quality increases runoff in an area[8]. Nothing happens in a vacuum, all of these problems from conventional agriculture affect each other.
Conventional agriculture has a multitude of problems. Monocropping and pesticide use are simply two of many. Next week, I am going to discuss some others, including tilling practices, and intellectual patent law. Yes, patent law is one of the worst offenders of agricultural destruction. Tune in next week to learn how.
With frustration about pesticide usage,
Ajah
[1]Richardson, Sarah. The Land Blew Away. Vol. 50 Historynet LLC, 2015. https://holycross.idm.oclc.org/login?auth=cas&url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=108277744&site=eds-live&scope=site.
[2] Zhou, Xianhui, Wenjuan Wu, Kechang Niu, and Guozhen Du. Realistic Loss of Plant Species Diversity Decreases Soil Quality in a Tibetan Alpine Meadow. Vol. 279 2019. doi:10.1016/j.agee.2019.03.019. https://holycross.idm.oclc.org/login?auth=cas&url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=8gh&AN=136389190&site=eds-live&scope=site.
[3] Yang, Pu, Yan Luo, Yang Gao, Xiaoli Gao, Jinfeng Gao, Pengke Wang, and Baili Feng. “Soil Properties, Bacterial and Fungal Community Compositions and the Key Factors After 5-Year Continuous Monocropping of Three Minor Crops.” PLoS ONE 15(8) (2020). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0237164. https://holycross.idm.oclc.org/login?auth=saml&url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.633404686&site=eds-live&scope=site.
[4] Purdue University Cooperative Extension Service. PESTICIDES AND WILDLIFE: An Introduction to Testing, Registration, and Risk Management.2019.
[5] Washburn, Mary, and Ashlee McCaskill. Poster Abstract. “Effect of Imidacloprid on Mycelial Growth Rate of Soil Fungi.” University of Northern Georgia (2019). https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1248&context=gurc
[6] Purdue University Cooperative Extension Service. PESTICIDES AND WILDLIFE: An Introduction to Testing, Registration, and Risk Management.2019. https://ppp.purdue.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/PPP-30.pdf
[7] Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. 40th ed. London: Penguin Classics, 2012.
[8] Hawes, Neil. Personal Communication. September 13th, 2019.
