By Mary Lowther
Wouldn’t gardening be a whole lot easier if we used pesticides? We wouldn’t need to cover our crops to keep out cabbage moth, avoid growing crops during slug season or continually hoe out weeds. Sure, we’d have to wear gas masks and hazmat suits when we applied the chemicals but we’d save time, effort and disappointment if our crops were stunted or eaten up. Given the cost of pesticides, we might not save money though. Pesticides, by the way, include both herbicides and insecticides.
I met a farmer from Manitoba who tried growing genetically modified crops one year with the concomitant spraying of the pesticide glyphosate. When he ploughed up the field at the end of the season as usual, he looked behind his tractor to watch the birds that normally flew around, feeding on the newly-exposed seeds. They lay dead and dying in the field. He refused to use glyphosate again.
Charles Benbrook, research professor for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University discovered that, slowly but surely, weeds have become increasingly resistant to glyphosate so farmers have had to apply higher doses more often to control them.
Glyphosate accumulates in the soil and does not break down into harmless byproducts (Solomon, Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, 35th ed., p. 48). As it builds up in the soil, this pesticide prevents the uptake of trace minerals so the nutritional content of crops grown drops, and recent research indicates that glyphosate is far more toxic than we have been told. This is disturbing since glyphosate has been considered less toxic than other pesticides. Rotenone, also formerly considered innocuous has been found to cause many health problems in animals and cannot be used in organic farms.
My farmer friend from Manitoba said that he wouldn’t even touch any produce “with a 10 foot pole” that had been sprayed with a pesticide.
Our good health demands the best quality food we can get our hands on. We can grow our own delicious, unsprayed produce knowing that we aren’t polluting the soil, the water, insects and birds or exposing ourselves to harmful chemicals. Indeed, gardening without chemicals forces us to learn how to grow disease-resistant crops that don’t readily succumb to drought and teaches us how to garden with self-sufficiency.
And let’s not forget the smug factor when we invite folks into the garden to pick and eat their own warm, ripe tomato.
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.