Co-existence isn’t easy

by Anastasia on 29 December 2010

Imagine that you own a small business selling heirloom seeds. Your most important (and profitable) seeds are from a special open pollinated tomato variety that you painstakingly bred under over the past decade by hand crossing other heirloom varieties and selecting the best of their offspring. These tomatoes are everything a tomato lover dreamed of – the perfect red color, soft yet firm texture, sweet yet flavorful taste, and they have high yields to boot.

You’ve carefully transitioned your farm to organic and received your organic certification last year, so your seeds are in even higher demand than usual. Last year, you had far more requests for these special seeds than you could meet, so this year, you planted hundreds of tomato plants, planning to harvest all the seeds to dry and sell the following year to your tomato-hungry customers.

The weather is perfect, the flowers are maturing and about set pollen… and disaster strikes.

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Pest Control Part 2: How Pesticides are Used in Integrated Pest Management

by Joe Ballenger on 12 August 2010
Doesn't this corn earworm larva look delicious? Image courtesy of wikipedia commons.

In Part 1 of Pest Control, I discussed what a pest was and how they were divided into categories as well as how those categories overlap. Identifying pests and how they cause damage is only one part of the puzzle. There’s another part of the puzzle that comes along when you start treating the crops and when talking about pesticides, it’s one that’s the most frequently overlooked. Economics need to be taken into account when treating crops because, believe it or not, going easy on the pesticides can actually be beneficial to farmers.

The latest paradigm for pest control in agricultural situations is called ‘integrated pest management’, which I’ll refer to as IPM from here on out. It takes an economical approach to pest management by sampling pests, looking at how they damage crops and what numbers of a pest are sufficient to damage a set of crops. This is much better than randomly spraying pesticides at anything which looks like it might be eating your crops because it takes into account how much money you’ll spend and save on treatments. It also encourages a conservative use of pesticides which not only lessens a pest’s exposure to pesticides and selection pressure for pesticide resistance but also lowers the amount of pesticides sprayed in the field. Although not all farmers use IPM (although most figures I see are well over 50%), it’s the best way to deal with pests because you know roughly how much money you’re saving by treating versus spraying randomly and you limit the amount of pesticides you spray on your fields.

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Produce Pesticide Rankings

by Anastasia on 5 August 2010

My post Details on the Dirty Dozen on EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides™ led me to dive into the 2008 USDA data to see just how contaminated (or not) our produce really is. There’s so much information that it’s a little difficult to work with, but with perseverance and the right software (JMP is the best!*), I was able to re-do the EWG analysis but with the newest available data.

Below you can find my results with a through explanation of what I’ve done and why. The results are posted without all the commentary at Produce Pesticide Rankings which has all of the results and Pesticide Produce Rankings Tables which has comparisons of my results to the EWG results. You can download the original USDA data yourself or check out the Latest PDP Findings of Interest to Consumers.

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Details on the Dirty Dozen

by Anastasia on 30 July 2010

As you may already know, the Environmental Working Group is a 501(c)(3) NGO with the goal of protecting “kids from toxic chemicals in our food, water, air and the products we use every day”. One of their major efforts is the yearly Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides™.

EWG gives many many reasons why they think you should use the guide, specifying that you (the consumer) should eat organic or at least choose the Clean 15™ over the  Dirty Dozen™:

The 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables (the “Dirty Dozen”) are contaminated with an average of 10 different pesticides, with many tainting more than one type of produce. In contrast, the “Clean 15,” the 15 least contaminated fruits and vegetables, contain an average of less than 2. Eating organic food lowers pesticide body burdens as well. Research shows that concentrations of pesticides in children’s bodies peak during seasons that they eat the most produce, but fall to below detectable levels in just 5 days when they eat organic food.

The list of reasons has a lot of scary facts about how many pesticides detected on food, just how “polluted” our bodies are from the things we eat, and explains how our government barely regulates pesticides. Near the bottom, EWG lets us know that despite the scary facts that the need to eat fresh produce outweighs any risk from pesticide residues. They also remind consumers of the importance of eating fresh produce on their FAQ page. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if anyone gets to that part, considering that media coverage of the Shopper’s Guide rarely mentions it, instead focusing on the scary facts (as in ‘Dirty dozen’ produce carries more pesticide residue, group says on CNN Health, which dismisses the silly government for thinking that small amounts of pesticides won’t hurt us).

The truth is, pesticides are scary. As EWG’s Amy Rosenthal says, “Pesticides are designed to kill things.”

The devil, as always, is in the details.

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Colony Collapse Disorder

by Anastasia on 10 June 2008

Colony Collapse Disorder has been in and out of the media since 2006. With conspiracy theories and non-science abounding, it can be hard to separate truth from fiction.

Dr. Diana Cox Foster of Penn State spoke at Iowa State about her work with CCD. She has been studying bees for 20 years and heads a diverse team of researchers working to solve the mystery. She said that there there are quite a few “theories” that her team disagrees with.

In particular, she said that CCD is not caused by the rapture or the Russians. She puts cell phones and genetically engineered crops in the same category, choosing instead to focus on legitimate leads. She says that there are many reasons why their group is not looking into these as possible causes, but one reason sticks out: some Amish and organic beekeepers whose hives are isolated from genetically engineered crops, many pesticides, and cell phones in the case of the Amish have experienced CCD, while some conventional beekeepers have not.

In other words, there isn’t a common thread connecting colonies that have collapsed.

Despite the fact that scientists like Dr. Cox Foster have spoken on the lack of legitimacy of these theories, people continue to write about them, such as this example from the always creative Global Research. I won’t pick the article apart due to time constraints, but wanted to show the range of views. A lot of mainstream articles have less extreme views, but few if any make an effort to debunk the incorrect theories. Instead, they reinforce them! Karl over at Inoculated Mind has a nice post summarizing some issues with the cell phone and GMO theories that’s over a year old. If only the reporters would research as he did.

There is abundant evidence that the Bt protein Cry1Ab doesn’t affect non-target insects. A meta-analysis from Jan 2008 of 25 independent studies found “that Bt Cry proteins used in genetically modified crops commercialized for control of lepidopteran and coleopteran pests do not negatively affect the survival of either honey bee larvae or adults in laboratory settings.” A meta-analysis from May 2008 of a public database found no significant effect on type or number of arthropods in Bt and non-Bt crops. They did find, as have many others, that various types of insecticides decreases the type and number of arthropods.

A quick lit search did come up with a June 2008 study that showed decreased learning ability in bees that were force fed syrup containing very high concentrations of Bt that are not found in the field. This data might indicate the need for more research on bee physiology, but doesn’t mean that Bt isn’t safe for bees in the field.

Now that we know what it’s not, I’ll share with you what Dr. Cox Foster thinks are the most likely causes and solutions…

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