Some of you will be much more familiar with the work of Sir Albert Howard
than me. But I was going through his 1940 book 'An Agricultural Testament'
and found a perspective to the question posed by Willie Lockeretz. It seems
to point out the fork in the road leading to either linear or to
systemic/holistic approaches to pest control, long before Bt corn, Roundup
ready soybeans, systems-speak and computer modelling, and even before the
widespread use of DDT in agriculture.=20
'An Agricultural Testament' is based on forty years of field experience and
observations in England, the West Indies and especially India. Howard
wondered why peasant crops were so free of pests, and between 1905 and 1910
he set out to acquire the traditional knowledge, with the local farmers of
Pusa, India and the =91insects and fungi=92 as his instructors. After 30=
more
years of refining his ideas, he concluded:
=B7 "Insects and diseases are not the real cause of plant diseases but only
attack unsuitable varieties or crops imperfectly grown. Their true role is
that of censors for pointing out the crops that are improperly nourished and
so keeping our agriculture up to the mark. In other words, the pests must be
looked upon as nature=92s professors of agriculture: as an integral portion=
of
any rational system of farming."
=B7 "The policy of protecting crops from pests by means of sprays, powders,
and so forth is unscientific and unsound as, even when successful, such
procedure merely preserves the unfit and obscures the real problem=97how to
grow healthy crops."
=B7 Agricultural research has been an expensive failure. "The cause of this
failure is not far to seek. The investigations have been undertaken by
specialists. The problems of disease have not been studied as a whole, but
have been divorced from practice, split up, departmentalised and confined to
the experts most conversant with the particular fragment of science which
deals with some organism associated with the disease. This specialist
approach is bound to fail. This is obvious when we consider: (1) the real
problem=97how to grow healthy crops and how to raise healthy animals, and=
(2)
the nature of the disease, which includes the soil in its relation to the
plant and the animal."
Season's greetings,
William T. Vorley
Visiting Scientist
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, 209 Curtiss Hall, Iowa State
University, Ames, IA 50011-1050 USA
Tel. (515) 2947853 or 2929302 Fax (515)2949696 wtvorley@iastate.edu