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The War on Bugs

By Will Allen

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Industrialization of the Small Farm

In the post-war era, many small farmers attempted unsuccessfully to compete with the further consolidation and expansion of the highly integrated farm monopolies. The discovery that feeding small amounts of antibiotics to young livestock caused them to significantly increase their weight had the following effects:

Animals could be kept in close quarters without being affected by the stress of the crowded conditions of confinement.
The confinement strategy for farm animals soon came to dominate agricultural practices in the U.S.
The extensive use of antibiotics led to the emergence of bacteria that were resistant to the antibiotics.
Generations of bacteria succeeded in developing resistance to the drugs being fed to cattle, and the continued large-scale use of these antibiotics threatened to eliminate the effectiveness of these antibiotics for human illnesses.
The successful marketing of antibiotics encouraged the use of hormones to increase the size of livestock (including DES, the now-banned form of synthetic estrogen), with far-reaching consequences for public health.

With the introduction of antibiotics, confinement management, and growth hormones, the raising of meat and the production of milk became highly industrialized.

Public Resistance to Second-Generation Pesticides

The environmental movement of the 1960s was vocal in its criticism of DDT, and led in part to the organic populism that surfaced after the Vietnam War. With pressure from the public and publications such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the chemical corporations eventually gave up the fight to keep DDT on the market in the United States, though they continued to sell it in other countries. Other harmful chemicals quickly took its place, however, and the struggle to prohibit their use continues to this day. In spite of public pressure and research showing the danger to ecosystems and humans, many highly poisonous chemicals that were thought to be almost eliminated from farming are still widely used.

On the other hand, some important breakthroughs in the biological control of pests have taken place during this period of widespread pesticide use.

Farmers began using "trap crops" which are more attractive to pests than the crop they were designed to protect.
A study finding that organic growing methods used in India, which make use of nonchemical fertility and cropping strategies such as cover crops and composts, were the most effective soil-health and production practices when compared to Europe's chemical-intensive programs.

The Twenty-First Century: Organic Farming and the Anti-Factory-Farm Movement

Throughout the last century, safer and increasingly more effective biological pest controls had become more widely available, but their price was high, relative to that of the chemical poisons. The school of agriculture of the University of California served as a major promoter of poisonous pesticides and fertilizers, and in the late 1990s finally eliminated its Division of Biological Control, the one department that had been committed to biological pest control and organic strategies such as trap-crop and cover-crop research, worldwide searches for beneficial insects, farm-habitat enhancement, and biologically based integrated pest management (IPM).

In spite of receiving little government or university support, from the 1980s until the present, the organic movement and organic markets have continued to grow.

Farmers all around the world and in the United States cooperated with each other and overcame many shared problems.
Research has shown that small- and medium-sized farms are more efficient than large-scale farms, and that both animals and the land are cared for better on smaller-scale farms.
By 1995, organic farms had attained yields equivalent or nearly equivalent to yields of conventional farms on an acre-for-acre basis in most crops.
Organic farming has flourished in recent years and today it represents the fastest-growing sector in U.S. and international agriculture.

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The War on Bugs

Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Industrialization of the Small Farm

Public Resistance to Second-Generation Pesticides

The Twenty-First Century: Organic Farming and the Anti-Factory-Farm Movement

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