19
Feb
Herbicide Use in “Regenerative” No-Till Contaminates Waterbodies
(Beyond Pesticides, February 19, 2021) Governments and policy makers are feeling a lot of pressure to mount effective responses to the climate crisis and to extraordinary levels of pollution in our environment. Tackling any one problem without precautionary attention to potential consequences of a solution — before it is enacted — is the opposite of the holistic understandings and strategies needed to solve environmental crises. Piecemeal approaches often generate unintended consequences. To wit: Vermont Public Radio (VPR) reports on revelations from a retired state scientist, Nat Shambaugh, who finds that farmers’ efforts to reduce agricultural runoff from fields into waterbodies, by planting cover crops, has resulted in significant increases in the use of herbicides to kill off those crops. So as one kind of pollution is reduced, another has become intensified.
In Vermont and elsewhere, there has been much attention paid to nutrient pollution of waterbodies and waterways from agricultural runoff, largely because phosphorous and nitrates from fertilizers lead to contaminated drinking water, as well as to blooms of algae (some of which have their own toxic byproducts) and hypoxic dead zones in water bodies. The most notorious of these dead zones in North America are at the mouth of the Mississippi River as it empties into the Gulf of Mexico, and in Lake Okeechobee in Florida.
Beyond Pesticides has written extensively about water quality issues as they relate to pesticides, agriculture, and other land management. But less attention has been given generally to the problem of pesticide residues and metabolites in agricultural runoff, which also threaten drinking water sources, ecosystem health, and biodiversity. The report from VPR indicates that the increases in herbicide use may well be contaminating the state’s watery gem, Lake Champlain, and questions whether the state’s Agency of Agriculture is acting sufficiently on its policy to reduce pesticide use.
The Vermont official in charge of pesticide regulation has explained the idea behind this shift to chemical “no till” (cover cropping plus herbicide kill-off of that crop). As dairy farmers instituted cover cropping to reduce nutrient runoff from their silage corn fields, they would adopt genetically engineered (GE) corn seed plus the herbicide Roundup, with which the GE seed must be paired, as a “trade” of one kind of nasty chemical (atrazine) for another (glyphosate/Roundup). (Cover crops create a “canopy” of foliage that reduces the impact of rain on the surface of soil, reducing erosion and runoff, and assisting with rain’s infiltration into the soil.)
So Vermont farmers have upped their use of toxic herbicides, particularly the glyphosate-based Roundup, which has been promoted as relatively “benign” compared with the previous favorite, atrazine (a recognized carcinogen). Glyphosate is applied to the corn crop as it grows, adding the compound not only to the soil (from where it can migrate to ground or surface waters), but also, because glyphosate is a systemic herbicide, to the whole of the plant that livestock will ultimately eat. Then, farmers are using the herbicide on the same fields again to kill off cover crops once those have grown and served their purposes.
Thus, the “solutions” for reducing runoff have resulted in heightened threats to waterways and ecosystems. Glyphosate use rose from roughly 13,000 pounds annually in 2009 to nearly 30,000 in 2016; and atrazine use increased from 50,000 pounds in 2007 to nearly 80,000 in 2018. In addition, despite industry claims, glyphosate is hardly benign, and data show that atrazine is still being used widely in the state, according to data collected between 2007 and 2018.
Mr. Shambaugh used to work on water monitoring and pesticide regulation for the state Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets. He thinks that the inattention to pesticide runoff is problematic both for Vermont’s waterways and for how the state deals with pesticide use. He maintains that the state needs a monitoring system to track herbicide use, and believes the state has failed to follow its own policy of limiting overall pesticide use, pointing to the increases his report reveals. Mr. Shambaugh also cites as problematic the state agency’s permitting of corn seed coated with neonicotinoid pesticides, which are notorious for their harmful and indisriminate impacts on pollinators and other insects.
Director of the Lake Champlain Citizens Advisory Committee, Lori Fisher, said Mr. Shambaugh’s report showing increased pesticide use raises serious concerns for Lake Champlain. “Certainly those [herbicide metrics] were shocking numbers. And it was really disconcerting to see that we’re seeing an increase in pesticide [and] herbicide use.” Mr. Shambaugh points to one study of a stream in Franklin Count that drains corn fields and flows into Lake Champlain. The research showed atrazine and other pesticides — including neonicotinoids — at concentrations high enough to kill insects and plant life. “So if we’re having a potential effect on the bottom of the food chain, the insects and the plants in the water,” he said, “who knows what it’s doing to everything else?”
The Vermont farmers, wittingly or otherwise, were adopting two of the tenets of regenerative approaches to agriculture — use of cover crops, and low or no tillage. The goals of regenerative agriculture — as opposed to conventional, chemical-intensive farming, which is called “degenerative” by regenerative advocates — are to restore and enrich soils, increase biodiversity, and enhance ecosystem health. Out of those goals have arisen strategies commonly understood to be hallmarks of regenerative farming: minimal soil disturbance, use of cover crops (to avoid bare soils), crop rotation, silvopasture (integration of livestock and trees into the farmscape), use of compost and compost tea, perennial crops, and a halt to application of chemical inputs (pesticides and synthetic fertilizers). “Real” regenerative practices would not involve toxic chemicals as a means of felling cover crops, for example.
The nonprofit organization Kiss the Ground offers this primer on the basis of the regenerative approach: “The system that makes nature regenerative on land is the symbiotic relationship between photosynthesizing plants and soil microorganisms. Together they create soil and biomass. This ‘technology’ is the reason why life on Earth can restore itself when harmed or why ecosystems can regenerate. It is this process that pulls carbon from the CO2 in the atmosphere and converts it into the building blocks of everything alive, making life, as we know it, possible.”
The concept of “regenerative agriculture” is increasingly being pointed to, among policy makers, as an important widget in the climate toolkit, which it certainly can be. But effective responses to the climate crisis will wind down, and ultimately eliminate, use of fossil fuels, either as fuels or as components of toxic pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. As Beyond Pesticides recently wrote, “Proposals now in Congress and the administration require close attention and scrutiny” to ensure that progress on climate does not come at the cost of other fossil fuel pollution. Recent proposed policy fixes — including the Growing Climate Solutions Act in Congress, and President Biden’s Climate 21 Project — talk about the capacity of soils to sequester carbon and a variety of strategies to encourage increased carbon storage in agriculture.
But, according to the Beyond Pesticides Daily News Blog of February 16, neither initiative “adequately and comprehensively responds to the current and looming interconnected threats to public health and the environment. The focus on carbon to the exclusion of a holistic approach that addresses complex, life-supporting, biological communities allows the continuation of disproportionate hazards to people of color and communities living adjacent to toxic sites. The mechanisms of carbon trading or the purchasing of carbon offsets under consideration do not establish an end date for admittedly unacceptable materials and practices, nor do they ensure a transition to life-sustaining practices.”
Such proposals fail, to date, to employ an integrated, holistic, and precautionary framework for addressing the climate crisis. They do not contend with the soil health and ecosystem impacts of synthetic, high-nitrogen fertilizers (which exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions); the damage to ecosystem and soil health caused by pesticides; the toxic harms of chemical no-till practices (which rely on Roundup and other herbicides); and the fact that pesticides and fertilizers use petrochemicals that come from fossil fuels.
Absent such a framework, the rush to climate solutions that include soil as a carbon sink may well encourage chemical-intensive, no-till agriculture that uses genetically engineered crops and huge amounts of herbicides, such as glyphosate, dicamba, and 2,4-D. This could happen despite the availability of organic farming and land management practices that eliminate these toxic compounds and exposures, and are a viable, profitable, and protective approach to food production and healthy landscapes.
Beyond Pesticides Executive Director Jay Feldman has said, “Strategies that allow continued use of toxic substances undermine the soil biology and biodiversity that [are] critical to healthy plants. It’s past time to talk elimination of toxic pesticides and nothing short of that.” The Rodale Institute’s chief executive officer, Jeff Moyer, addresses the “regenerative without organic” issue pithily: “We believe that in order to be regenerative, you have to start by being organic. It’s a little disingenuous to say you can regenerate soil health and sequester carbon and still use nitrogen fertilizers and synthetic pesticides. What you’re really saying is equivalent to saying, ‘I want to be healthy as a person, but I still want to smoke cigarettes.’”
Organic, regenerative agriculture can be a powerful, healthful, and profitable climate solution. But without adequate definition of “regenerative agriculture” — which would include proscription against chemical inputs — a level of “greenwashing” may be afoot as decision makers scramble to add soil’s (and crops’) carbon-holding capacity to climate mitigation approaches. Adoption of some regenerative practices, without the features of organic agriculture that are so critical to genuine soil and ecosystem health, leaves the door wide open for the kind of herbicide intensification Vermont is now experiencing. Organic agricultural practices must be part and parcel of the implementation of any regenerative approaches to farming that aim to mitigate the climate crisis.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
True regenerative agriculture mimics nature and the symbiotic relationship between plants, the soil microbiome and human nutritional needs.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:39 amWe often forget that the point of agriculture is to provide the maximum density of nutrition, macro and micro elements, for the human body and all of our systems. The only way to do that is through enabling all of the natural vegetation processes that have evolved over 1 billion years.
Only a live soil with all of its potential bacterial, fungal, protozoal and nematode species can provide the mineral nutrients needed by plants for the metabolic systems for growth, development and defense.
Industrial agriculture, which has adopted the philosophy of “greater” production, uses chemical and biological inputs to feed the plant and nothing to actually help the soil. They have twisted the meaning of agroecology and regeneration so that production is increased for their profit and the profit of the big growers. The key to true regeneration of the soil organic matter, remediating the water systems and increasing the flora and fauna species is through helping repopulate the soil microbiome with many thousands of primordial bacterial and fungal species.
On my farm in Ecuador, we make a biological compost and extract the microorganisms to spray on the soil and plants. The cost is pennies and it requires no fertilizers, no growth hormones and no pest control. The food produced is incredibly delicious with all of the potential micronutrients from the soil, lots of new birds visit the farm and the work only requires the spraying every ten days.
The plants’ leaves will produce up to 100,000 individual, unique sugar molecules which will be primarily used to transmit to the root radicular system in the soil (about 65% for trees and 40% for vegetables). These sugars will attract thousands of unique bacterial and fungal species who will consume the sugars and emit an enzyme that breaks down the crystalline soil aggregate structure of sand, silt and clay to free up the locked in minerals. The bacteria and fungus will consume the minerals and they in turn will be consumed by predator nematodes and protozoa who only require 50% of the energy with the remainder going to the roots. It is a very complicated set of natural processes with signaling between the plant and the soil microbiome.
This is how nature works in the forest that can live for millions of years without interruption and a true regenerative agriculture is a copy of these processes.
The results will be a regenerative environment for all of the earths elements and a human nutrition rich in antioxidants, phytonutrients, probiotic microorganisms and many trace minerals. A long and healthy life with a robust immune system that can ward off most (65%) non-infectious diseases and all viruses.