In Pennsylvania, the annual Farm Show, held in January, is a big event. To judge from the front page of the local newspaper, it consists primarily of an expansive food court, tractor pulls, the butter sculpture, horse-drawn carriages, cosseted animals and wall-to-wall crowds. Yet behind the hoop-la there are at least four premises on which the Show is based. The first is to showcase the range and quality of agricultural products in the state; the second is to create a window through which the public can gain an appreciation of the work done by an increasingly diminishing proportion of our population for the benefit of all; the third is to provide an experience by which visitors can renew contact with a rural life style which many yearn for and miss without realizing why.
There is a fourth and it can be explained this way. I live in an area rich with milk weed, which is host to the monarch butterfly in its annual migration. For five years Mary and I could count on the fingers of one hand the numbers of monarchs we have seen, nor have there been signs of eggs and larvae on the undersides of the milk weed leaves. In 2017 we saw perhaps a dozen, each sighting being an event of note.
There was a brief segment on TV in 2013 describing a federal initiative to recognize the breeding grounds of the monarch butterfly as protected areas, the main implications of which would be restrictions on the use of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides in these locals. It was the subject of a year-long study and the main opposition came from the Department of Agriculture and various farming associations on the grounds that such regulations would restrict further their ability to work the land effectively.
Another study in 2015 showed that neonicotinoids, introduced via pesticide-soaked seeds, leach into the surrounding soil and water system. Their presence can be detected in native plants 50 feet beyond the point of introduction at a ratio of 64 parts per billion. That is seven times higher than the tolerance level of the larvae of the monarch butterfly on milkweed.
And a study out of Cornell in 2017 focused on fungicides like chlorothalonil which control plant pathogens in crops and which largely have been overlooked because they don’t targets insects. This study showed however that the residues are picked up by the bees when foraging for pollen and nectar. “While most fungicides are relatively nontoxic to bees, many are known to interact synergistically with insecticides, greatly increasing their toxicity to the bees,” the report concluded.
So there are ethical issues involved which might be posed thus : What responsibility does agriculture have over and beyond the production of food? Does the end justify the means? Is anything OK that results in greater yields or lower food prices? Does agriculture have long term responsibilities in addition to the pressure to meet immediate needs?
For the large part, farming is about making money rather than about the quality of the soil, the water or the air. This is understandable as conglomerates incorporate small family farms which cannot compete with the scale of agri-business. And these corporations, not being locally based, do not have the same investment in the immediate environment as does say a family operation being run by a fifth generation of farmers. This is evident in my farming neighbors who are compelled into unhealthy land practices (eg. no longer planting a winter cover crop, or using a two crop rotation of corn and soya beans because the price of winter wheat has fallen off) in an attempt to keep costs low so they can make enough money to pay off the loans used to buy seed, fertilizers and equipment. It is no surprise that farmers use chemically-adapted strains of corn and beans so as not to have to find additional funds to suppress diseases and infestations of ‘weeds’ and insects.
A striking example is Haiti where, according to a report by Marc Lacey in the New York Times of April 18, 2008, the small, age-old family farms cannot sustain themselves in the face of the competition of imported rice which sells for less than half the price of the more labor-intensive, more nutritious, native variety. The local suspicion is that the destruction of farming as a livelihood was a strategy to push women in particular to the city where they would be sufficiently desperate to work all day in hellish sweatshops, sewing some of the four billion tee shirts made globally each year, for which they would be paid one half of one percent of the retail price of each garment they sewed. A 1996 documentary revealed that the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, for whom most of the shirts were being made, was being paid $101 000 an hour.
Those Haitians who stayed on the land are trying to make a living growing organic mangoes for a small, western, gourmet market.
Honey bees, and thus beekeepers, stand at the nexus between these two worlds – the pressure to provide food for an increasing global population and the long term needs of environmental health and survival. Our bees expose both sides : effective pollination is essential for most of the agricultural process yet the bees are threatened by the environment to which they are exposed as they go about their business.
Perhaps State Fairs are not the right venue to raise this dilemma yet we more than many others have the responsibility to initiate the discussion. It is important to rail against the darkness while also lighting a lamp of hope, however feeble the light might seem.
Our Green Cathedral 