OTTAWA — Conventional farmers apply more pesticides when next door to organic crops in order to stave off their neighbours’ more plentiful pests. That’s the upshot of a recent study that suggests organic cropping increases overall pesticide usage on the landscape because of the “spillover” reaction from non-organic producers.
Published in the journal Science, researchers looked at pesticide usage in 14,000 fields over 7 years in Kern County, California. They found a “small but significant increase in pesticide use on conventional fields” surrounding organic fields.
The equation changes if organic fields predominate in an area and are surrounded by other organic fields. But otherwise, organic production at the “commonly observed levels” on the landscape — with conventional production being the vast majority — prompts a net increase in pesticide use.
Only 1.5 % of farm fields in Canada are organic. It’s less than 1 % in the U.S. This means organic fields are usually surrounded by conventional ones.
The researchers suggest that “clustering organic fields together and spatially separating them from conventional fields could reduce the environmental footprint of both organic and conventional croplands.”
Source : Farmersforum