In Praise of Pesticides
It would not be possible to feed 7.6 billion people today without pesticides – let alone the 9-10 billion expected by 2050. So as well as being cautious and sparing in pesticide usage, let’s also give them some praise.
Pesticides
New Study Finds Neonicotinoids May Have Harmful, Beneficial, or No Effects on Bee Health
Reporting on two new papers on neocotinoids and bee health single out the pesticides, but a closer look at the data doesn’t support that angle.
Monsanto Gas Mask Man: Activist imagery and its meaning to farmers
Terence Bradshaw, Director of the UVM Horticulture Research and Education Center tries to bring some sanity and context to the use of protective gear when applying pesticides in both organic and conventional systems.
“U.N. Report” Inadvertently Makes the Case for Modernizing Agriculture in the Developing World
Kevin Folta explains how a report on pesticides from the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food inadvertently makes the case for modernizing agriculture in the developing world.
4 Essentials of Sustainable Agriculture
There are certain requirements that agriculture must meet to produce food and to keep producing food. We should view them as a hierarchy, such that if the top requirement is not attained, the lower requirements do not mean much, but once the top requirement has been met, we can move to the next one, provided that how we do it does not threaten any of the requirements above it. Each component is required, but not sufficient; all of them are needed.
Have GMOs Failed to Live Up to Their Promise? You’re Asking the Wrong Question!
Guest Author: Andrew Kniss, Associate Professor, Weed Biology & Ecology University of Wyoming | Follow him on Twitter: @WyoWeeds This essay previously appeared on Plant Out […]
On Getting Near The Center of the Bullseye On The First Try
On Getting Near The Center of the Bullseye On The First Try. Quickly and With Some Degree of Confidence [Editor’s note: This is a popular essay […]
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Bees and Pesticides Edition
Planning pesticide application around the arrival of bees for pollination would seem like something that growers and beekeepers should be able to work out among […]
Slugs, Roseannadanna, and Agroecology as a Moving Target.
Vice has an interesting piece on the historical causes of current problems with slugs on Oregon farms. The author, Leah Sottile details how a pair […]
Cut pesticide use to boost yields? It’s worked for millions of farmers in Asia and Africa
[This article originally appeared in The Conversation on April 30, 2015 . It is published here under a Creative Commons License] [The FAFDL Facebook thread […]
Some Carcinogens Are More Equal Than Others (sigh)
Following up on the glyphosate as carcinogen story, I couldn’t help notice some coverage that shows how political orientation informs the way different people cover […]
Notes From The Glyphosate Dust Up.
I don’t have much to add to the recent dustup over the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) designating that glyphosate is a […]
Chipotle To Give Their Customers What They Want: More Imazamox, Atrazine and Chlorpyrifos
Chipotle, in a move to meet consumer demand, will be removing (some) GMOs from their menu and switching from sustainable ingredients to “sustainable” ingredients. To […]
Focus on Pesticides is a Distraction from Major Eco Impacts
Whether pesticide use is still a major environmental concern in farming remains a central debate. Let’s look at the data.