Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
been presenting data for about four years now showing that, you know,
this happens, this really is something that you should consider using. . . .
The approach has always been, if you see a bug, spray it and kill it. Well,
that doesn't work very well anymore because the sprays we have don't kill
the bugs, at least not in the old form. We've got to look more at managing
[insect] populations, and that starts talking about area wide kind of man-
agement. We can no longer talk about just protecting this fi eld. We've
gotta talk about protecting the crops on this ranch. Or we talk about pro-
tecting the crops in this part of the valley. So that brings up interesting
issues because you have growers who are treating their fi eld, and they're
saying, “Well, I don't see the impact here.” Well, no, but in your fi elds
that are planted around that, you'll have less insects.
Here the advisor is working against a common way of representing the
success of a fi eld trial on insect control: looking for dead bugs in the test
plot. The chemical he was using does not kill the insects but instead regu-
lates their growth so that they will not fully mature and reproduce. Further,
success in this trial is hard to represent through the traditional conventions
of fi eld trials; the “seeing is believing” power of fi eld trials actually works
against this application in two ways. First, the chemical is intended to work
over a longer period of time, controlling insects throughout their life span.
Admittedly, the insect that the advisor describes here has a short life span
measured in weeks, but the impact of the treatment may still take several
insect generations before the results are apparent. By the typical standards
of a fi eld trial, this is a relatively long period of time to wait for results,
especially given that a crop's life span is also not very long. Even if, over
the long term, numbers show that the alternative treatment did not hurt
or even helped yield, the growers still see insects alive in their fi elds in the
short term. Second, this chemical is meant to manage an insect population
over a wider area; the advisor said, “We can no longer talk about just pro-
tecting this fi eld.” Again, this strategy is diffi cult to represent. The chemical
may in fact be controlling the insect population on a larger scale, although
specifi c fi elds may still have signifi cant numbers of insects. Like the tem-
poral issues involved in this trial, these spatial differences could be quanti-
fi ed by taking a kind of census of the area insect population, and perhaps
such a survey would show lower numbers in the overall population. These
numerical representations, however, still contradict the growers' demands
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