Sometimes when Richard Anderson closes his eyes at night he still has visions of Colorado potato beetles. Ive seen them in the furrows inches thick. Millions of them. You can have potatoes 2 feet high, and they eat them right to the ground, says the 51-year-old farmer. Anderson and his family had grown potatoes on their River head, Long Island, farm since the 1940s, but four years ago they got out of the business-largely because they couldnt control the potato beetle. We were forever spraying, he recalls, but they were just immune.
For farmers like Anderson, pesticide use has become not the solution but a cause of many pest problems. Rachel Carson predicted as much 30 years ago in Silent Spring, though the public paid little notice amid the furor her book sparked over pesticides ecological and health effects. In recent years, however, pesticides shortcomings have grown harder to ignore in light of mountain pesticide resistance and destruction of beneficial insects. In fact, a growing number of agricultural experts now argue that reducing pesticide use can actually decrease pests. Pest control has reached a turning point, says pest control expert Robert Metcalf of the University of Illinois at Urbana.
When DDT, the first widely used synthetic pesticide, hit the market in 1946, it looked like the silver bullet that would wipe out insect pests forever. Before DDT, American farmers lost about a third of their crops each year to insects, weeds and disease. Today, with an annual pesticide bill exceeding $ 4 billion, farmers still lose the same one-third share a loss that mounts into the tens of billions of dollars each year.
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