Our Failing Food System: Promoting Pesticide Resistance.

I stumbled upon this very informational website with it's own section about food and agriculture (link). It's the Union of Concerned Scientists. I think this site is very interesting because it's more applicable to me from a science perspective on the issues about food and agriculture in our society. In that section I stumbled upon the article: "Our Failing Food System: Promoting Pesticide Resistance." Here's the link to the original article: (link)

The article talks about the pitfalls of large-scale industrial farming that uses herbicides. The crops grown by these farmers are genetically engineered to be resistant to the herbicide developed by the same company. While at first effective, it was found that long term use of this herbicide encouraged the development of weeds that were resistant to it. The consequence of this was that once the weeds were resistant, they spread in a manner that could not be controlled. Farmers would then have to resort to using more herbicide and even heavy tilling--both unsustainable practices. The author mentions that the resistant strains could be avoided by alternation of herbicides; however, this practice is not promoted because it effects the financial gain of the company who both genetically modifies crops and produces the herbicides to treat them. Similarly, the situation with pests and pesticides has developed in that pests are becoming more resistant to pesticides. 

I think this article is interesting for a number of reasons. It addresses the issue of genetic engineering crops and the consequences of use of herbicide from a scientific perspective by listing different references and sources to support its claims. I feel like this issue can be applied to any sort of farm--even an urban one--because weeds and pests are not an isolated issue to industrial farms. My garden at home has a pest problem--these tiny pincher bugs keep eating my flowers! UFarmIIT has pests, though I don't believe it's become a problem yet. But the lesson that should be taken away is that practices should be taken to ensure sustainability. These types of farms grow crops on large scale and thus have to resort to large scale solutions to their pest and weed problems which may not always have our health in the best mind. The reason I bring up health is because I like the fact that our farm doesn't use herbicide or pesticides. For the most part, we have natural ways to ward off pests such as planting specific flowers. It's nice to know that food we're growing doesn't have any unwanted chemicals in it. That means our food is healthy and we're healthy.

I saw this in a pin on Pinterest and thought this was a rather neat trick. Here's the link to the source site. But it's a mixture of water, vinegar and some liquid dish soap that creates a weed killer mix. For a small scale farm or garden, this is a pretty easy way to get rid of weeds because every home has dish soap and water. Personally, I don't cook with vinegar, but I'm sure a lot of people other people do. So this could be a solution to weeds. Could large scale farmers use this method? Probably not unless it was executed correctly.