Is the Insect Apocalypse Upon Us?
There are a few practices in modern agriculture that are probably not helping. Farmers use pesticides to kill everything but the crop they are interested in. Then they use pesticides to get rid of insects and other parasites, and finally they use herbicides so they can trigger plants to start dying just in time for harvest rather than waiting this to happen organically.<p>That stuff is nasty. It&#x27;s actually intended to be nasty. And the side effect is that it kills a lot of animals and plants indiscriminately. Also, this stuff is possibly not that great for human consumption either. There seems to be a lot of lobbying around this topic and a lot of debate about what is considered OK here. But I&#x27;d say most people would probably opt out of having any of this stuff in their food, just on the off chance it might decrease their chances of getting some cancer, genetic defects in their offspring, etc.<p>Modern organic farming can actually get great yields by more clever use of soil and land and does not need pesticides, herbicides, or insecticides. There is a lot of high tech stuff facilitating this including drones, water management, use of herds of animals to manage soil (planned grazing), etc. And then there is hydroponic farming as well. Progress in this space is very rapid.<p>Phasing these out and restricting the use of poison in farming would probably be a good thing. This cannot be done over night but there are plenty of farms that have switched to being fully organic while increasing yields and profits. It can be done and it requires doing things differently. Now is a good time to start doing much more of that. And we might actually restore some arid lands to healthy condition in the process which would not hurt our planet either.