Subject: Preditors and Prey
From: [email-masked] (Lowell Zelinski)
Date: Thu, 19 May 1994 06:01:15 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.sustainable.agriculture

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
(Larry London) wrote:

> From: [email-masked] (Mark Williams)
> Date: Tue, 17 May 1994 16:59:32 GMT
> Subject: Re: Articles About Killing Things
> Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
> Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
> Path: bigblue.oit.unc.edu!concert!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!col.hp.com!news.dtc.hp.com!hplextra!hpcss01!markw
> Newsgroups: rec.gardens
> References: <[email-masked]>
> Lines: 19
> 

Everything is simple as long as you don't understand it.  The relationship
between population growth rates of preditors and prey is well known. 
Beneficial insects do no t and can not have the same rates of population
growth until their food supply is "large".  Unfortunately this means the
harmful insects - the prey for beneficials - must reach some population,
not necessarily economically injurious, before preditors can increase.  

Farming is most about limiting risks.  All growers take steps to minimize
the risks associated crop production.  This involves use of consultants,
attorneys, pesticides, beneficial insects, fertilizer, irrigation, high
yielding varieties, in short every aspect of farming.

People whose economic survival does not depend on high yields are quick to
tell farmers what the should do.  I challange them to but their money where
there mouth is.  Try raising a family, being able to send your chilldren to
college, getting a new car every once in awhile, not to mention getting
financing by ag lenders without efforts to limit risk.  

The reason the US has the most productive ag system in the world is
education and growers efforts to limit risks by adopted technologies which
provide greater returns from smaller areas.  Most of the poor farmers are
gone.

Can farming in the US be improved?  You bet, and US growers will adopted
new technologies that economically sound faster then any other country in
the world.  We are the best farming system that has every existed.  Offer
any comparison you would like and find one that has freed more people to
persue other things the US Ag.  This is the true indication of a sucessful
food and fiber production system.  (If china is such a "good" system why do
80% of the chinese have to be involved in farming just so they don't
starve)

Again.. Everything is simple as long as you don't understand it.  Do some
reading, take some farm business management classes, try farming as your
sole source of income.  You will quickly learn that we have the best system
in the world.

> My daughter works in the greenhouse at an agricultural college (UC Davis).
> They are moving more and more to insect predators for control of pests.  The 
> reason is that insecticides wipe out the beneficial insects just as they
> do the the harmful ones, and (guess what) the harmful ones come back 
> more quickly, so you need more insecticides, and so on.  (And the paperwork
> required to apply the hazardous materials is just too much effort.)  The 
> truth is that the pesticides just don't work as well as maintaining a
> balanced population of insects, and using predators as controls.  
> 
> The guy in charge of raising the predators has an interesting problem:  he
> has to maintain a zoo of food insects for them, the very pests the insects
> are meant to control.  It is an awful sight for a gardener to view.  
> 
> There is an odd parallel here between the overuse of insecticides and the
> overuse of antibiotics in medical treatment.  It seems that more and more
> diseases are mutating to become resistant to the latest antibiotics, partly
> because of overuse of antibiotics by doctors.  New strains of terrible 
> diseases are emerging, which are resistant to all known drugs.  There is 
> no quick chemical fix in sight...

-- 
Lowell

What a long strange trip its been