How do you plan on dealing with your pests this season? Do you plan to control them with pesticides (and this includes those botanicals)? It’s understandable if you said yes. After all, isn’t modern chemistry great? Seriously. Lots of amazing things come from the chemist’s lab. Amazing, though, is sort of a subjective word. It depends on what things you’re talking about. One person’s miracle might be another person’s curse. Same is true of pesticides, some think they are an absolute blessing while others see them (more accurately we’ll add with our own subjectivity) as planet killers. In an attempt to be objective, let’s take a look at both sides of this.
A farmer inundated with a certain pest might be sold a particular chemical pesticide that promises to rid him or her of their scourge of the crops. And, just like magic, the pest is eradicated overnight — thousands of bodies lay testimony to the seriousness of the problem. Now, of course, here at GreenMethods.com we’re going to tell you this farmer should’ve been paying closer attention, assuming that is the pest didn’t come in the way it went: overnight.
This really makes a strong argument for the use of chemical pesticides. It really solved this farmer’s issues. We certainly understand why it was done. It beats going out of business as a result of a decimated crop. Sure, maybe the farmer in this example didn’t do things correctly, but modern chemistry can make up for a whole lot. It’s really an easy out at times. There was a chemical smell in the air, the farmer noticed, but within a couple of days it went away. Most of the dead bugs are gone too. Birds ate ‘em. This isn’t so bad now is it? Well, maybe the part about the birds eating the bugs, as the farmer did find a couple of them lying belly up, might not be a good thing. But still, this worked out.
To investigate the other side we know of the dead birds, but let’s say this part didn’t exist. Let’s say the farmer sprayed, endured the smell for a couple of days, and that was that. End of story. No negatives. Is this really the case, though? We don’t see anything bad happening, so therefore nothing bad must be happening. Sure there was a smell for a couple of days, but it went away. It was actually gone after a rainstorm… forgot to mention that. It didn’t quite go away on its own. It was washed away. Okay, the smelly chemical residue it seems, must have gone elsewhere. Diluted into nothingness, into mere trace amounts, downstream. Handily disposed of in this giant world of ours.
No big deal, even when compounded a millions times. Or is it? What’s in the smell? Several years ago a chemical pesticide was introduced to commercial greenhouse growers. The product claimed to be compatible with biological pest control agents, good bugs. We’re pretty up-to-speed about industry happenings, often we’re supplying good bugs to chemical companies for testing. This chemical came at us out of the blue, we hadn’t heard a thing. What testing had this company done? We didn’t hear about any testing, yet they were making these claims.
We became curious and decided to contract some testing of our own. We won’t touch that stuff so we had a third party do it. The first test was purely environmental. Ladybugs, Hippodamia convergens, were introduced to an enclosed space. Sharing that space, though not in direct contact with the beetles, was a single leaf removed from a poinsettia plant. The plant, two weeks before, had been treated with this new chemical, a systemic. In the greenhouse this plant had been in, it should be noted, there was no more smell, none to begin with in fact. The result: By morning the enclosed ladybugs were dead. All of them. In an adjacent control enclosure, one without a leaf, the ladybugs were all up and at ‘em and ready for some breakfast.
Interesting, amazing (there’s that word again), completely unexpected. This compatible chemical, two-weeks from application and in trace amounts, killed. That’s what the experiment showed us. Other experiments were carried out too. To be fair, in one case, using Encarsia formosa, the good bugs survived the exposure. They even did their job and parasitized whiteflies. Unfortunately their offspring weren’t so lucky. We have to wonder how bad it would have been if this chemical wasn’t “compatible” or if the human nose could detect it. It’s probably worth wondering about, but you will, of course, draw your own conclusions.
