Insecticide-free crops

[vegansurveyor]

I've thought about the use of insecticides in growing crops lately. I'm vegan because I don't support killing innocent animals, but even vegan food involves killing animals to some degree, not merely via accidents (such as a harvester running over a snail) but also as part of a deliberate killing through the use of insecticides and (I believe) raticides. Insecticides tend to be used far less often than herbicides in today's industry, and there are calls by the European Union to reduce all pesticide use (including insecticide use) by 50% by the year 2030, but nonetheless, insecticides do cause numerous deaths.

The case can be made that most of the insects and other small animals being killed are pests who go after our food and are essentially interlopers on human land, requiring our farmers to drive them out in order to protect their property, but there are nevertheless some insects, such as detritovores, that do not feed on our crops at all. Though their deaths are unintentional, when people spray their crops, some of them do get killed.

This is why I believe people should push for insecticide-free agriculture. Based on several websites I've seen such as The Spruce, It's my understanding that organic crops are not insecticide-free, but merely use natural chemicals as pesticides instead of the synthetic ones commonly found in the agricultural industry, so organic food is not a solution. I believe, however, that vegans as a whole can promote insecticide-free farming and thus cause less killing in the world, both to pests and to harmless creatures that are unintentionally killed.

Do you folks feel insecticide-free farming should become the norm? Please post your comments and let me know.

 

[Tom L.]

I'm quite interested in insects, although I never had a collection of killed and mounted ones. They're almost always around, are an important part of the ecosystem, and they've always fascinated me.

I want to have insecticide-free farming as an option, but it might be difficult to attain unless we start a colony in space, or under domes on Mars or the Moon. I haven't had too many problems in my garden at home. I remember one year I was growing Romaine lettuce as one of my vegetables, and the earwigs thought they were the GREATEST CONDOS! They liked to get down inside the head of lettuce, nice and snug at the base of a leaf- and a few would scramble out in a panic when I harvested a head. They didn't appear to be doing damage; they were just looking for a safe place to stay.

But this was a relatively small garden. If it were a big, commercial-size operation, with a sizeable expanse of one kind of plant in each field (a "monoculture"), the generally-accepted idea is that an insect which lives and feeds on that plant will just stay there and eat/breed themselves silly.

As an alternative to natural or synthetic substances which would kill them, it might be possible to use something which would just repel them or confuse their senses which would have guided them to the plant they would eat; I think many strong-scented herbs do this. Or perhaps planting large fields with a mix of many different crops would work- but this might be hard to cultivate with heavy machinery, because the corn would have beans or tomatoes climbing all over them, the squash and potatoes would be crawling around in the wheat and oats...

I don't know if this could become the norm. Adherents of the Jain religion do their best to avoid killing animals, and although they're all vegetarian, they still have to eat something. I don't know what their approach is to this issue is, but you can bet they've at least thought about it more than many.

 

[Blues]

I relocated a house to the beach
The next thing to do was a organic veggie garden .
Although I didn’t know much about it , I thought it through. The wind were terrible in summer so I built a massive plastic house and use no-dig gardening.(look it up on YT).
Birds slugs snails butterfly couldn’t get in and to my surprise with my limited knowledge of organics it was one big success .

 

[Lou]

I posted a cool video a while back.....

https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/q8yh9i

 

[Tom L.]

Very interesting (and apparently effective) device!

 

[Graeme M]

I think killing of pest animals to grow crops is a significant and often under-appreciated concern. I am not sure what can be done though, in terms of everyday buying decisions. Pretty much all crops are grown in typical commercial systems which require pest animal treatment so the numbers of animals being killed or suffering is huge.

What can one do? Grow your own fruits and vegetables, perhaps? Though most people might not have easy access to sufficient land to do that. The worst offenders are broadacre crops which are the ones needed by vegans for protein, such as pulses and the like. Even wheat comes with a big toll.

In the end I think it comes down to how much you might care about insects. While one or two probably don't count for much, should we worry when millions or billions are killed for our food? As I pointed out in my other post, we can probably buy foods that come with less of an animal toll or even hunt our own, for example by fishing.

Should vegans push for animal killing free crop farming? I don't know - that would seem to lower yield which will contribute to food insecurity. Certainly as a problem I don't see it right up there with the concerns expressed by various vegan activists.

 

[Maja]

I see insects as biological robots - literally.
I can see that they want to replace meat with insects, but I'm not going to eat meat or insects

 

[Graeme M]

I see insects as biological robots - literally.

You may be wrong about that, but it depends a little on what you mean. We are all, in the end, biological machines, running according to programming routines refined by evolution.