Avery's Commentary: Agriculture, Pesticides, and the Environment  

     Dennis Avery speaks of the positive aspects of high yield agriculture.  "High yield agriculture is already saving 10 million square miles per year in global wildlands," says Avery.  "Current cropping levels are estimated to be 5.8 million square miles.  Based on 1950's production levels, before the widespread use of pesticides, we would need 15-16 million square miles of land to meet present-day global food requirements.  Everyone knows that agriculture has historically been the predominant destroyer of wildlands and biodiversity." he says.  Without the use of pesticides, agriculture today would be very different.  
  
     According to Avery, "The unfortunate implication of organic agriculture, is that we would be clearing and ploughing more natural areas around the world in order to feed the planet.  This would be a major problem, because "virtually all of the world's wildlife lives in forests and wild meadows.  Organic farming would condemn millions of square miles of these critical areas.  We would have to develop agriculture in even more areas of  Latin America and other places which are already under enough pressure from other forms of resource use, such as forestry.  We would also have to farm more and more marginal areas, with steeper more fragile soils, where soil erosion is even more and more problematic," says Avery.  Fortunately, we have options.  
  
     "Since 1970, herbicides have given high yield farming and the agriculture industry a powerful tool in support of soil, water, and wildlife conservation: zero and minimum tillage", says Dennis Avery.  "These types of conservation farming have resulted in soil erosion reductions in the range of 65% to 95% with less soil compaction."  Other research has also shown zero and minimum till to be economically efficient, particularly through the use of less fuel.  

The zero-till crop emerges through a protective layer of residue from the previous years.

     According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "The cancer risk caused by atrazine is 1/millionth that of chlorinated drinking water, but this is the caliber used to panic housewives," says Avery.  "How much wildlife habitat and soil should be sacrificed to prevent these low-levels of risk?" 
  

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