Crop Protection Benefit Article of the Week:

September 30th 2009

In honor of the Jewish High Holiday, Yom Kippur, this week I have been brushing up on the methods used for certification of kosher foods. It's a very interesting process involving aRabbi or a Rabbi representative known as a mashgiach on hand in the production facilities performing Halacha to ensure all kosher standards are being met. It was great to see the lengths the agriculture industry was going to ensure they could serve all the various communities that would purchase their products.

One article I came across I found very interesting. It focuses on the great addition pre-washed, pre-packed salads have been to the kosher Jewish community.

Regular produce can be difficult because it is not washed prior to being sold to the consumer so some products are notorious for insects (especially aphids) being found within the leaves of the produce. This is an issue because consuming insects is strictly forbidden by the Torah. One of the most notorious products is broccoli because aphids often become lodged in the florets making them impossible to remove by hand and thus not kosher to eat. Therefore what does the writer of this article, Rabbi Tzvi Rosen, praise as being great about these prepacked items? The processing after the product is harvested, which consists of:

"Aggressive washing and chemical treatments"

Rabbi Rosen also applauds the choice of the farmers to use:

"good agricultural practices to help control infestation through controlled fertilization and pesticides"

As we have articulated in other articles of the week insect pest control is one of the more difficult aspects of farming. However in this case it really does take on added significance.

In most cases insect control is necessary to make sure your crop does not get destroyed. In this case you are controlling insects to ensure that the food is not just produced but is meeting strict religious standards set by the target consumer.

Rabbi Rosen recognizes that in order to truly control insect populations and ensure that the final product meets the Halacha standards chemical control products must be used. It's unrealistic to imagine that a farm that does not use chemical treatments to kill insect populations during farming and in the post-harvest processing portion will be able to meet Halacha standards.

Without the use of chemicals it would be impossible to ensure produce would be Kosher without going through each and every single piece that leaves the processing plant. Even if you attempted to do it on some plants, such as broccoli, it would not even be possible.

We cannot exactly take credit here for showing him the way on the importance of crop protection products since this article was written months before this blog started, but we're glad to see there are others out there who recognize it!

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[All Washed Up]

September 24th 2009

It's not every week that we get an article here at CropLife Foundation that basically writes our blog post itself, but we definitely do not mind it when we do.

As our regular readers know, we focus on the benefits of crop protection products in our blog and how when we give farmers innovation and choice in agriculture we all benefit. This week's article from Delta Farm Press is clearcut in demonstrating how using crop protection products boosts yields and ensures a consistent production -- making sure farmers are able to maintain their livelihood and consumers have inexpensive and reliable food year after year.

In Noxubee County, Mississppi, the main crop grown is Soybeans. A widely grown crop, helping with the production of products such as soybean oil, soy sauce, and cattle feed, it is a staple of the American farmer. Luckily, scientists have developed products that keep these crops protected from pests so farmers can maintain high yields. These products are so effective that in Noxubee County there has not been a single instance of yield loss due to Soybaen loss since November 2004!

Well...that is until this year. This year saw

"The most severe case of soybean rust found in Mississippi to date...Tom Allen, plant pathologist estimated this field will lose five to ten percent of its yield to rust....

"The entire field has rust sports in it...in some places, you can actually see spores flying if you shake the plant foliage" "

If this kind of damage was happening on soybean farms around the country we would be looking at losses of 100-200 MILLION bushels (or about 6 billion to 12 billion pounds!) of Soybeans per year!

So is this the start of an epidemic in Mississippi?? Should growers near this field be worried about rust spilling over into their fields??

Not at all. There is a reason why this one field near Brooksville is experiencing so much trouble while ALL other fields in the area "are not threatened by this disease outbreak."

"The 100-acre field near Brooksville was not treated with a fungicide...[while] producers applied fungicides to nearby fields on schedule"

And theres your answer!

Lets take a quick examination of this then....Let's say theres 100 farmers in Noxubee county. 99 farmers apply fungicides and this one 100 acre farm does not. The 99 farmers who apply fungicides experience zero soybean rust while the one farmer who did not use fungicides is losing ten percent of his crop.

I think thats about as clear cut of a benefit of using fungicides as you can get.

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[Mississippi: First Loss to Soybean Rust]

September 16th 2009

As most have heard recently, Africa is in desperate need of a green revolution. Technologies and innovations that swept across underdeveloped areas of Asia, Europe, and the Americas in the second half of the 20th century never made the jump to vast swaths of Africa. It is a daunting problem for the world to discover how to modernize farming in Africa and subsequently increase yields and reduce poverty.

At the Foundation our African Herbicide Project focuses on improving African agriculture by using modern crop protection technologies to lessen the burden of weeding in small holder farms. This will reduce the amount of labor tremendously (thousands of hours each season are spent handweeding) and free up time for growing cash crops and for children to go to school instead of working in the fields.

However many, many, organizations have been promoting organics as the key to an agricultural revolution in Africa. As we have highlighted before, it is just not prudent to deny people all the tools out there for protecting their crop. This week's article from The New Vision, a leading Ugandan new site, shows what happens when farmers are pigeonholed into just organics. Demonstration plots set up by a local organization, Dunavant, tried to show how to grow crops without convetional products however...

"deadly pests attacked a major organic cotton demonstration and research farm..operated by Dunavant, an organic cotton promoter in the area"

When faced with a bad pest year the farmers were ordered by Dunavant to spray Nimbicide, an organic pesticide, and only Nimbicide, to solve the problem.

"But what is disturbing is that the pests are spreading. This indicated the ineffectiveness of the 'chemical'"

...what is supposed to be a demonstration plot has become a breeding ground for the pests."

Despite the pleas of the farmers Dunavant refused to allow conventional products to be used, arguing that the organic chemicals would work. Experts now predict that roughly 714 kilos of cotton per acre on this farm will now be lost.

This is supposed to be the solution to boosting African yields? Uganda has been a hotbed for organic promotion and they have seen their cotton yields plummet from 476,000 bales/year to 60,000 bales/year over the past 50 years.

The bottom line is: what happens when African farmers's crops, who have only been permitted by international aid funds and NGOs to grow organically, are hit with invasive pests that cannot be controlled organically? As farmers in Uganda growing cotton have discovered, there is nothing you can do.

You lose your crop, and your livelihood.

[Pests Invade Organic Cotton Farm]

[CropLife Foundation African Herbicide Project]

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September 15th 2009

As part of our efforts to demonstrate the benefits of crop protection articles the CropLife Foundation is making an effort to put online our presentations that outline our research on the value of these products to farmers.

Today we have uploaded one of our largest and more extensive presentations entitled:

The Value of Pesticides in U.S. Crop Production

the data in it is based off our three landmark studies:

The Value of Insecticides in U.S. Crop Production
The Value of Herbicides in U.S. Crop Production
The Value of Fungicides in U.S. Crop Production

All three of these reports can be found on the website under our benefit studies tab

Also, we are always looking for new places to give our presentations so if this or any other our research areas on the site interest you please feel free to contact us if you are interested in setting up a talk!

September 9th 2009

As I am sure many of you have noticed this year has been an especially tough year for tomatoes. Late blight has infested the tomato crop of 2009 like no other, and the media has certainly not been letting this go unnoticed.

However, friends and colleagues that I've talked to about this always remark that it has not seemed to have affected the supply of tomatoes at their local grocery store. There is a reason behind that and this week's article looks to highlight that.

This past summer Cornell University published FAQ for "gardeners, growers & consumers" about late blight that we think demonstrates how our farmers are able to control these diseases and, despite years as bad as this, continue to produce high quality and quantities of crops.

For those who need a bit of background, late blight is a fungal disease that primarily affects potatoes and tomatoes. Most know of it by its most famous occurence. Late Blight was the cause of the Irish Potato Famine at the turn of the 19th century. It was a time in which growers had no control mechanisms and as the history books show, the results were devastating. As Cornell in their document describes:

"Plants can be killed quickly when late blight is not managed. A lesion can form within 3 days of when a spore lands on a plant and a day later be producing spores that can be dispersed by the wind...[and] serve as a source of inoculum (wind-dispersed spores) for other gardens and farms"

Today however with the use of modern crop protection products late blight has become a very manageable disease in conventional agriculture. Cornell is their piece recommends inspecting your crops and staying vigilant for late blight but most importantly,

"Success is more likely if fungicides were applied before symptoms were seen (thus there will be fewer initial symptoms) and spray coverage is maximized...[crops] receiving a good fungicide program have been saved."

Take this in comparison to home gardens where most do not know of this disease and do not apply fungicides and as a result this season has seen in many areas home gardens lose their entire crop.

This summer has shown exactly how amazing the advancements in the crop protection industry has been. A hundred years ago a terrible late blight breakout changed the world, spurring an exodus out of Ireland, and forever changing the makeup of the U.S.

Today?

With a good fungicidal program, the worst outbreak in years, even decades, is merely a blip on the radar of many farmers. Tomato prices remain consistent, crop yields remain high, and all due to their ability to use the right fungicides when necessary on their crop. Farmers do not lose their livelihood to disease and we reap the benefits of cheap, abundant tomatoes -- sounds like a good deal to me!

[Late Blight: Frequently Asked Questions by Gardeners, Growers, & Consumers]

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September 4th 2009

It's a new month, a new week, time for another CropLife Foundation Benefit Article of the Week before a long labor day weekend. This week we want to highlight an article we believe shows the repercussions of restricting the tools our farmers have to battle invasive pests.

This article from Capital Press highlights the efforts of Aaron Esser, a Washington State Extension agent who has been working to fight wireworms from attacking wheat fields in the area. What is strange however is, the wireworm has not been a problem in this area for years, so why is it back? We will come to understand why...

Esser has been setting traps to measure the amount of wireworms in a given field in order to advise farmers how to fight these pests,

"One to four wireworms should be treated with traditional rates of insecticide, and more than four should be treated with higher rates.

Esser said he has found as many as 39 in one [trap]"

This insect will lower yields by increasing weed infestations and causing patchiness amongst the wheat fields. Luckily, as Esser says, farmers can treat their fields with insecticides and we don't have to worry about this problem. Right?

Wrong.

"Esser said he believes a lot of the damage has occurred because of the removal of Lindane [previously registered insecticide] from the market, which farmers historically used to control wireworms

On one testing site, yield was 17 bushels per acre when controls were used, compared with 12 bushels without control. Even with increased treatments, Esser said, there is still more damage than there should be

"We should have had a 30-bushel-per-acre yield potential there" he said of the testing site."

An effective product is cancelled and damage in the area increases, leaving men like Esser scrambling to find new ways to treat for it. This is what happens when we fail to understand the repercussions of our actions upon farmers.

Wheat farmers had tools in which to control these invasive pests but when these tools are taken away we see an insect that had not been a problem for years return to destroy a farmers livelihood. Esser in the article estimates that when controls are removed farmers lose thirty thousand dollars in revenue! By not understanding the consequences of the cancellation we have left the average farmer hamstrung.

Many groups advocate for the eliminations of crop protection products across the country but it is stories like this that raise the inevitable question, what would be the consequences? In this case when an effective product was eliminated we saw the return of a pest that had not been a problem for years, imagine what would happen if we eliminated all products at once...

[Eastern Washington Looks for Wireworms]- Capital Press

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