About Pesticides, the Precautionary Principle and Agroecology

January 26, 2024 | Source: PANNA | by Rob Faux

Winter in Iowa, before the snow covers the expanse of corn and soybean fields, highlights how barren it has become.  The crops have been removed and, too often, the fields have been turned.  Left over the winter, the soil is exposed to the elements and is ripe for erosion.  Piles of woody plants, trees and bushes, can often be found at the edges of fields where big equipment has been used to remove what little plant diversity remains.  Tree lines, pastures and fields with cover crops stand out as exceptions rather than the norm.

All of this makes it hard not to succumb to the feeling that efforts to change how we farm and grow food will fail.  It seems as if things have always been this way and there is no model to promote small-scale, diversified farming.  But, that is not true.  The trend of larger farms with single-crop fields (monocrops) and large animal confinements is actually fairly new, and we don’t have to look far to find successful alternatives to our current chemical-intensive food and farming system.