The War on Bugs

By Will Allen

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Origins of the Modern Organic Movement

• Many farmers began to go bankrupt by the mid-1920s, prior to the Wall Street crash of 1929.
• Rural families moved to cities and became factory workers, bringing the rural populist movement with them.
• Many factory and farm union organizers, from the 1890s to the 1950s, came from small farm families.

• The importance of organic soil management
• The idea that calcium was the most important of soil nutrients
• The concept of the farm as a self-sustaining system or organism
• The importance of using carefully composted manure for nitrogen, because where nitrogen came from and how it was composted made a difference to its effectiveness and safety

The Use of Pesticides Increases

• The earliest pesticide applicators were a folded piece of paper or cardboard from which a person blew the poison onto the plants, or a simple flour sifter to spread the poison over a larger area.
• Pump applicators were the next development, for use in spreading the poisons at home and in the fields.
• Over time, these canister pumps were endlessly modified for household use and to be pulled by horses through crop fields, orchards, and vineyards.

In spite of an attempt by some journalists to raise warning flags about the dangers of pesticides, the chemical merchants, aided by the non-action of the FDA and FTC, mounted an increasingly aggressive marketing campaign, including domestic households in their push to spread the use of these chemical products. As insects became resistant to arsenic and lead, new poisons were recruited for use as pesticides throughout the 1930s and 1940s. During World War II, militaries on both sides of the conflict tested thousands of old and new chemicals for their toxic potential for use as pesticides, antipersonnel weapons, and explosives.

After the war, a large portion of this taxpayer-funded technology and industrial capacity (especially for chemicals, electric devices, and farm equipment) was given to corporations to manufacture products to sell to America's farmers and householders, rather than given to the farmers as they had been led to believe would happen. This post-war period marked a major shift in U.S. agriculture towards chemical dependency.

• DDT and DD were released in 1945.
• Organophosphates like parathion and malathion, originally researched and developed by the Nazi's during the war, became accepted and defended, not only by the chemical companies that manufactured them, but by chemically dependent farmers, corporation-dependent university professors, advertising-dependent farm journals, and government farm agents dependent on corporate projects and grants.

In spite of research showing the harmfulness of these chemicals, their widespread use became an integral part of large-scale farming in the United States.

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