By Henry Fountain Published: October 12, 2004 How're you going
to keep the birds and insects down on the farm? Not easily, if
it's one that produces cotton. Cotton fields, where herbicides
and insecticides are heavily used and the soil is frequently
tilled, are dead zones when it comes to birds and bugs. But
there are other ways to grow cotton that are more ecologically
friendly. Conservation tilling techniques, for example, can
leave a large amount of the crop residue on the soil surface.
Strip-cover planting, in which clover or another winter cover
crop is sown between rows of cotton plants, achieves the same
goal of creating habitat for insects and birds. Now a study in
the current issue of the journal Conservation Biology shows how
well these techniques can work. Scientists at the University of
Georgia surveyed bird density and insect abundance in cotton
fields in the east-central part of the state. They found that
fields where both strip-cover and conservation tilling methods
were used had up to 20 times