Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
modern agriculture that has to kill nature in order to survive. Over the
years, the situation worsened. On the verge of quitting farming because
of pesticide resistance (nothing seemed to work any more), Kevin was
asked by Sue Heisswolf of the local research station to try something
different. The aim was to develop a system dependent upon natural pest
control methods. 3 The psychological barriers to overcome were massive.
Kevin says: 'I was called a nut but I had a go. I put all my crops on the line, and eventually
the people who called me a nut came back and asked me how I did it.'
Sue and Kevin later helped to form the Brassica Improvement Group
to bring together 30 or so local farmers to experiment with new farm
methods and to share their results. They began regular scouting for pests,
cut conventional pesticide use and adhered to a summer production break.
They introduced predators, pheromone strips, and natural products, such
as Bacillus thuringiensis ( B.t. ) sprays, and manipulated the farm habitat by
adding trees to encourage birds and planting allysum in cabbage rows to
provide food for beneficial insects. The impact has been startling. Says
Kevin: 'Crops which would have been sprayed 36 times in three months are now only
sprayed once or twice with a natural pesticide.' The fields are now full of green frogs,
wasps, spiders and birds, all providing a free service in the form of pest
control.
Many others in the valley have got the message, too, and aggregate
pesticide use has fallen dramatically. But not all farmers have changed.
When I asked the group what was their biggest worry, they said ' our fathers ',
who kept on asking ' when will you go back to farming properly, rather than messing
around with these strange methods '. Just 500 metres from Kevin's farm, a
neighbour continues to spray every two days, even though Kevin's farmland
biodiversity has done the job perfectly for the past ten weeks with no need
for any intervention. His broccoli performs best, as he has not sprayed
that for three years. Kevin reflects on this fundamental challenge for
redesigning ecological and social landscape: 'Conventional farming has played
havoc with our farms, but farmers still have difficulty changing.' And change they all
must, for the forces of ecological and economic change are stacking up.
Commodities or Culture?
Modern agricultural methods provoked a 50-year revolution in farming
in industrialized countries. They brought spectacular increases in product-
ivity - more cereals and animals per hectare , more meat and milk per animal,
more food output per person employed. The fear of widespread hunger
has largely been banished, as productivity has grown in almost every sector.
In the UK, wheat yields remained largely unchanged from the 1880s to
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