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The War on Bugs

By Will Allen

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Introduction

The author, raised as a "farm kid" to believe that the use of chemicals was "Necessary, Critical, Essential, Modern, Progressive, Profitable, Economical, Miraculous, even Heroic", began to question the necessity and safety of their use when he became part of a group of farmers attempting to convert their farms from chemical to organic production. While he knew that chemicals were effective, he also knew that they were extremely dangerous, and that he could obtain good crop yields and high quality without them. Drawing on his own experiences in the Marines, as a university researcher into forest farming, and eventually as a farmer himself in a pesticide-friendly culture, and through his extensive research on the history of the promotion and use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals, he made the following discoveries:

Most of the chemicals in common use on farms were modified versions of the nerve poisons and antipersonnel weapons that he had learned about when studying chemical warfare in the Marine Corps.
Analysis of farm chemicals is not required to be on the labels or in the advertisements, and so most farmers actually know very little about the dangers of these chemicals.
Some bankers require farmers to use the chemicals in order to protect their loans.
In spite of tests required by the California Environmental Protection Agency in the late 1990s that finally proved how hazardous pesticides were to farmers and their families, the chemical corporations continued to block the cancellation of deadly birth-defect- and cancer-causing chemicals.

The author believes that because the FDA and the EPA were more allied with big chemical and corporate farming interests instead of the taxpaying consumer or the health of the farmers, neither of these agencies took the necessary steps to eliminate the use of these dangerous chemicals.

At the same time, the tradition of using chemicals has existed for generations in the farming community, and their use has been promoted by the editorial boards, advertising, and propaganda of many farm magazines such as California Farmer. What follows is the author's eye-opening exploration of the deep roots of chemicals in agriculture, and a vision for a future free of these harmful substances.

Colonial Farming in the Americas

During the large-scale European land grab of the 1500s known as the enclosure movement, royalty, nobles, and the capitalist merchant class began evicting peasants from the common lands and claiming the land as their private property.

This resulted in the creation of a new entrepreneurial class with huge amounts of capital, as well as an abundance of slave and cheap labor from the ranks of the now-impoverished peasants.
A similar appropriation followed in America, as the European monarchies and land speculators, aided by plenty of free and cheap labor, crossed the Atlantic and took over land previously farmed by the indigenous Americans, whose populations were rapidly decimated by disease and war with the European settlers.
By 1700, few indigenous farmers were left, and their innovative and complex ways of farming the land were for the most part wiped out with them.

As in Europe, a very small minority now had control of almost all the good land in both eastern and western North America. The land speculators who had grown prosperous often exploited the slaves, serfs, and servants who did the work that kept the large colonial farms running. As a result:

After the Revolutionary War, between 1785 and 1820, small farmers on the American frontier revolted numerous times.
Much of this social uproar focused criticism on privileged tax schemes, large-scale estates, and the labor abuses and destructive farming practices that the landed gentry employed.
Most of the farmland in Virginia and Maryland was badly abused and suffered long-term damage from nearly two hundred years of continuous production of tobacco, corn, cotton, jute, and hemp.
Scientists and farmers on both sides of the Atlantic began to question the effectiveness of the traditional farming techniques.
Aristocratic American farmers became interested in the new scientific farming methods, while other colonial farmers argued that soil protection and recovery strategies were most important.
From this time, two classes of farmers emerged, each with different attitudes toward farming.

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The War on Bugs

Introduction

Colonial Farming in the Americas

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