Gotta Bug You About This

The world’s population is heading towards well over nine billion people by 2050, two billion more than we have today. Coupled with the massively negative impact of rapidly accelerating desertification and coastal land loss, shifting areas of agricultural viability – the results of global climate change – effectively requires extracting vastly more food from contracting agricultural resources. Today, the most productive farms are cutting-edge modern, deploying expensive mass planting, harvesting and soil maintenance equipment, managing water resources with decreased use of general or tilt irrigation, and accelerating growth with heavy fertilizer and pesticide usage.

There’s an obvious set of nasty catches. Finding new agricultural lands, expanding into naturally wild regions, has a horrible negative impact on natural vegetation and the wildlife that depend on those habitats. Further, thick forests generate more carbon dioxide cleansing than ordinary farmland… at time where purging CO₂ from the atmosphere has never been more important. Diverting water resources to satiate agricultural and consumer demands creates many unsustainable practices globally, but as major cities (most recently Cape Town, South Africa) face severely dwindling water supplies, huge population centers face dire desperation. Somebody has to lose for those city-dwellers, battling nature and agriculture, to feed their water needs.

But among the litany of nasties, today’s topic, comes the harm we are doing to ourselves, our water supplies and our general health from the application of too many specialized chemicals to our farms, necessities for efficient production, but with some serious longer-term toxicity issues that will impact most of us… badly. Fertilizers, and particularly, pesticides. Let’s face it, pesticides are intended to repel and kill, two qualities that suggest the severity of the relevant toxicity.

“More than 5.5 billion pounds of pesticide, for instance, is used worldwide each year, including 1 billion pounds here in the United States, helping protect plants but also leaching into groundwater as runoff, contaminating drinking supplies, or being carried away by wind (a phenomenon known as spray drift) where it settles on a nearby homes, schools, and  playgrounds. In fact, researchers have found decades-old pesticide particles as far away as Antarctica, which suggests our entire planet is currently covered in the stuff.” FastCompany.com, April 26^th. Not to mention, rivers, lakes and seas.

Faced with agriculture productivity pressures, suggesting that by 2050, we will probably need 70% more food to feed existing and future populations – much of the world is currently under-nourished or starving already. Food demand, and concomitant prices, is/are high now. The future could generate devastating shortages and life-threatening unaffordability for life’s most basic requirements: food, water, shelter and clothing. These realities augur in favor of using more fertilizers and more pesticides… thus making our environment that much more toxic. There has to be another way.

“One of the major problems is that only 2% of pesticide applied to crops actually stays there. Maher Damak, a 27-year-old scientist and MIT Ph.D. candidate, has a solution to make pesticides more sticky, and therefore allow us to use far less of them. ‘The problem is that a lot of plants are what we call hydrophobic, or water-repelling,’ says Damak. ‘Pesticides are mostly water-based, so when it’s sprayed onto plants, droplets either bounce or roll off the surface. This is not visible to the naked eye–it happens in about 20 milliseconds.’

“His invention, five years in the making, was just awarded $15,000 as part of the 2018 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. The fix is an additive made from electrically charged polymers (“basically long molecules,” he says) that uses the power of science, and attraction, to make pesticide droplets stick to crops. The components used in Damak’s mixtures are FDA-approved, and since they’re made from plant and animal extracts, they’re also biodegradable–and safe to eat.

“After a quick and inexpensive retrofit of pesticide applicators, whether handheld or tractor-mounted, farmers can use significantly less pesticide in their fields without harming their harvest.

“‘Farmers use many pesticides, depending on what kind of pests or disease they have in a particular year, but it’s usually on the order of 50 to 100 gallons per acre,’ Damak says. ‘This solution could potentially take it down to 10 gallons per acre.’

“‘Some of the farmers Damak has spoken with say that pesticides account for nearly 50% of production costs, so the cost savings on pesticides alone are enticing. And since pests account for about a 40% loss in global agricultural production, this solution should help increase yields…

“Today, growers from India to Indiana are forced to wait several hours or even days (even a whole week in case of raspberries) before re-entering fields or greenhouses after spraying pesticides, or risk hospitalization or death. This reduces their exposure to toxic chemicals.” FastCompany.com.

We need new approaches, new technologies. Increasing efficiencies in water usage – where researchers from Israel and Chile lead the way – leaning towards drought-resistant crops (sorry, but there will be a whole lot more GMO strains developed out of necessity), are definitely in our future. Our very survival as a species depends on it.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are going to face some tough choices and even more complex negative realities that will only get worse to the extent that we ignore them.