Intergrated Pest Management: A New Dog with a Few Old Tricks

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Wholistic gardeners, stand up and take a bow. At long last farmers, scientists, and--yes-even officials of the U.S. Department of Agri.

Although you're not likely to hear much about it on the 6 o'clock news, an honesttoGod revolution has begun in American agriculture ... one that promises to reduce pesticide use by 30% over the next decade! How? By replacing dangerous, petroleum-based chemicals with a bagful of bug-baffling tricks . . . some as new as tomorrow, others as old as farming itself.

This revolutionary approach to crop protection is known as Integrated Pest Management ... or IPM, for short. And while the name faintly smacks of bureau. cratic jargon, it's actually a pretty fair description of the program. For IPM aims to "manage" harmful insects (rather than obliterate them) through the "integrated" use of numerous strategies (instead of just pouring on ever larger quantities of ever more dangerous chemicals).

Farmers who implement IPM programs - judging, at least, by the record so farcan expect to increase both yields and profits. The rest of us will reap worthwhile benefits too: cleaner soil, water, air, and market produce. And, as an added bonus, all you backyard gardeners and homesteaders will soon be able to add a few new pest perplexers to the natural insect controls you've been using right along.

THE PESTICIDE PREDICAMENT

But why have farmers suddenly begun to change their minds about chemical pesticides after all these years? For one reason, the old poisons just don't work as well as they used to. Time was when you just set up a spraying schedule, then leaned back and watched your local duster apply liberal doses of chemical "crop insurance" to your fields . . . secure in the knowledge that, within a day or so, the only living things left on the treated acreage would be some tainted vegetation and a handful of migrant farmworkers with headaches.

But times change . . . and so do insects! And three decades spent dumping billions of pounds of chemicals on America's farmlands have produced races of "superbugs" ... genetic strains more or less resistant to one or more pesticides. Already, in fact, more than 250 species of harmful insects have evolved resistant subtypes ... and more are on the way. Which may be why worldwide crop losses to pests have nearly doubled since the 1940's even though the use of chemical pesticides has increased tenfold!

In other words, chemical "crop insurance" doesn't really insure much anymore, yet the cost of its use continues to soar year after year. Agriculturalists now not only have to spray more and more just to achieve the same amount of insect control, but the price of their potions-which are mostly petroleum derivatives-has risen right along with the skyrocketing cost of crude oil. And that's the main reason farmers are now beginning to turn to integrated pest management as the only way out of the pesticide predicament.

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