7-Step Process

This semester, I have been working on a process to work towards addressing an issue related to food production. I have learned a lot and will be uploading the documentary I made with three other people relating to my process below and the process the others in my group went through. Here is what I went through in order to address this problem: 

1. What’s the problem?

Pests in United States agricultural farms are becoming resistant to insecticides used on them.

2a. What are the causes/drivers of this problem?

• Farmers
• Public
• Pesticide Manufacturers
• Pests

b. What are the root causes of the drivers?-use the 5-why’s strategy

Farmers: Farmers are using pesticides that the pests are becoming resistant to -> They need to keep their crops safe -> Pests feed constantly off of them -> The pests have a constant supply of food -> The farmers are practicing monocropping -> There is a high demand for certain crops

Public: The public is making farmers use pesticides on their crops -> the farmer has to make more crops -> The public is demanding more crops -> Their population is increasing -> There is more food for them to consume -> More food is being produced

Pesticide Manufacturers: Provide farmers with pesticides -> They make money off producing pesticides -> Farmers need a way to protect their crops -> Pests are eating their crops -> There’s an abundance of them -> Farmers are monocropping

Pests: Pest are the reason farmers are using pesticides-> Farmers don’t like them -> The pests are consuming the crops -> They have an easily accessible supply -> There’s monocropping -> Farmers only produce certain types of crops

c.Who is impacted by the problem and how are they impacted (this includes both positive and negative impacts)?

Pesticide Using Farmers: Have to buy increasing amounts of pesticides in order to keep up with the resistance in pests. This would cost them more and more money and then once the pest was fully resistant they would need to purchase a new type of pesticide, costing them more money. The pests would also be feeding on their crops unopposed, causing a loss of money due to not being able to sell as much crops.

Public: Would have crops that have been heavily treated with pesticides if the farmer can sell them, and if the farmers lose a lot of crops prices would go up due to there being less crops in stock from farms to sell.

Pesticide Manufacturers: Would be making more money because farmers would keep purchasing pesticides to use on their farms.

Pests: The pesticides would be killing out the weaker of the pests and would leave the ones immune to the pesticides to breed and produce a new generation of offspring immune to the pesticides. The immune pests would have all the food they needed.

Grocery Stores: Grocery stores might be less stocked on produce depending on how much the farmer sells and the prices would go up as a result. The store might also run the risk of losing money if they aren’t as in stock with produce.

Organic Farmers: Organic farmers that don’t use pesticides might have more opportunities to sell their products since the farmers using pesticides are decreasing and causing less competition. The organic farmers could make more money off of this than they usually do.

Bees: Pesticides are suspected of causing Colony Collapse Disorder

d. How can we quantify the causes of the problem and the impacts of the problem?

Pesticide Using Farmers: Cost of the most common pesticide, how much pesticides the average farmer uses annually, the percentage of farmers that practice monocropping, the average yield for farmers who practice monocropping vs. farmers who don’t practice monocropping, how much pests account for in terms of crop loss

Public: Annual consumption of produce in the U.S., U.S. population growth, produce demand in the U.S., how much the U.S. consumer spends on produce annually.

Pesticide Manufacturers: The price of pesticides, percentage of farmers that use pesticides, how often farmers purchase pesticides

Pests: Percentage of farms with pests, percentage of crops pests consume on farms that use pesticides vs. farms that don’t

Grocery Stores: Annual purchase of produce to stores annually, percent of profits from produce

Organic Farmers: Average organic farmer salary

e. Who is already working to address the problem and what are they doing?

Exacto Inc.-Created Synthex DC 5 AMS, a combination of herbicides designed to help ease herbicide resistance

Organic Farmers- Don’t use pesticides and so avoid the problem of pesticide resistance

Beyond Pesticides- Program working to rid  the world of pesticides “by identifying the risks of conventional pest management practices and promoting non-chemical and least toxic management alternatives. The organization's primary goal is to effect change through local action, assisting individuals and community-based organizations to stimulate discussion on the hazards of toxic pesticides, while providing information of safe alternatives.”

f. Select a root cause of a driver of the problem you identified that you will address moving forward in the 7-step process.

Monoculture farming requires pesticide use.

3. Envisioning the problem in 5, 10, and 20 years

5 Years

It’s been five years and the issue of pesticide resistance in pests is becoming less of an issue. Farms all over the United States have come up with a few solutions to help aid the problem, though it is far from eradicated. Farmers are realizing that pesticides are just going to keep costing them more and more money, so many farmers have turned to organic farming.

Since these solutions took a while, the price of produce has gone up and the public is not as satisfied, pesticide manufacturers are not making as much money since there is less demand for their products, and pests are not required to have immunity to pesticides to survive, so there is a mix of resistant and non-resistant pests.

Bees have also been making positive progress. Colony Collapse Disorder has become less common since many farmers have turned to organic farming, and if they haven’t they have at least have stopped monocropping which has provided the bees with more to choose from.

10 Year

            It’s been ten years since the problem with pest resistance was beginning to be solved and things are much better. Farms in the United States have come up with a variety of solutions so that pest resistance isn’t such a problem. Most farmers are organic so that a bug’s resistance doesn’t even matter, but some farmers still stick to pesticides.

Regardless of whether or not the farm uses pesticides, most farms now practice having refugia on their farms. This is where there is a section separate from the important crops on the farm that provides as a distraction from the important crops so the pests don’t eat as much of those.

As a result, the price of produce has decreased to the public’s relief, so many people who didn’t originally have access to nutritious food now have access to it. Pest resistance is less severe on pesticide using farms and not important on organic farms, so pests are still thriving, though pest manufacturers are making less money than ever. In the opposition, farmers are making more money, leading to less debt and stress on their part.

20 Years

            It’s been twenty years since pest resistance began to really be solved, and things are steadily improving. Pest resistance is hardly important on farms anymore and people are able to move on to more pressing issues.

            Produce prices have remained about the same due to farmers not having to buy pesticide costs but gas prices for transport have increased. Farmers are still making more money, pests have a constant food supply, and pesticide manufacturers aren’t making as much money. Overall, solving pesticide resistance would be beneficial for many people in many different ways.

4. What could we do about the problem and why would we do it?

a. Who is already addressing the issue of monoculture & what are they doing (local & global)?

African Journal of Food Science and Technology: Testing out refugia, which is basically where you have your crops you intend to use, and of to the side of your field you have a smaller section for the pests to run rampant in. This way there is less pesticide resistant bugs on the normal field, so if you spray it with pesticides and the immune bugs reproduce, there is less immune pests than there would be if there was monocropping.

Matina Donaldson-Matasci: Social insect behavior researcher at U of A who proposes that we

“convince farmers to plant a wider variety of crops and let weeds grow on crop margins, and persuade landowners to maintain wild habitat near agricultural land.” because monocropping badly affects bees.

b.Similar root causes of other problems in other places and things being done I could learn from

Extraction of minerals from soil is a problem in farming as well. The nutrients from the soil  on farms are less every round of crops. The root cause of this problem that can be solved is that the soil isn’t getting a break from crops so the nutrients deplete for the next round. One of the solutions to this is crop rotation. In crop rotation the field is divided into four parts, three are used immediately to grow three different types of crops, and the remaining one is the “resting field”. After the three fields’ crops are harvested, the crops rotate over one plot so that there is a new resting field each time. From this we can learn that instead of monoculture, we might also want to consider using more than one crop.

Another problem has been Colony Collapse Disorder in bees. One possible root cause has been a type of pesticides called neonicotinoids as well as monocropping. It has been suggested that these brands of pesticides quit being used and that farmers plant flowers around their crops as the bees need flowers to survive. From this I learned that bees are also something I need to take into consideration when developing my strategy.

c.Gather information from stakeholders on what they think should be done to address the root cause (environmental, social, economic)

d.Strategies

• Companion Gardening: Farmers would plant other plants amongst their plant they’re going to sell. This would ensure that the pests would have more things to go after and pesticides would not be needed. This would also encourage pollination and help repel pests if certain strong herbs were planted.
• Refugia: Refugia would maintain a separate area off the farm where pests could go to feed. Not all pests would go, but this would divert some away and cause less damage. Pesticides could still be sprayed on the original field and since there’s less pesticide resistant animals, and therefore they would breed less resistance into the next generation.

e. System to quantitatively evaluate strategies to align with vision (positive economic, social, and environmental)

• Economics: How much money it will cost the farmers per year, how much money it will be compared to the normal cost of farming per year, how much the farmers can afford to spend per year, how much crop will this new process yield per year.
• Social: Visitors to the farm within a year compared to a year when this plan was not in place, how much extra time (if any) do the farmers have because of the new plan.
• Environmental: How much (if any) pesticides will be used with this plan within a month, how many pesticide resistant bugs will this leave on the farm after a year, how many bees and butterflies will there be on the farm after a year.

f.Pick a strategy

I pick using companion gardening.

5. What will we do about the problem and how will we accomplish this?

• For this problem we need to implement the selected strategy on a farm that does not currently practice companion gardening. We need to figure out which plants of theirs are being eaten by pests and suggest compatible plants that will repel the pests. If they use pesticides, we need to encourage them not to do so and explain how companion gardening works. We will also encourage them to plant flowers within the farm to help promote bees to help with natural pollination.

a. What resources do you need and how will you use these resources?

We’re going to need a farm that is having trouble with pests and compatible plants and flowers for their farms to use. If we need to help plant, we will need soil as well.

b. Who in the community will you be involved with and how will you be involved with them?

I contacted Crooked Sky Farms and Maya’s Farm but neither replied so I need to try to get in touch with some others.

c. A specific timeline indicating who will be doing what and when?

Yosin, Luis, Brandon, and I were going to go to a farm to try to get them to practice companion gardening, but none of the farms responded, so we ended up trying to get people to do companion gardening on a smaller scale. We plan to go to Fry’s and try to interest people in our flyers on companion gardening and convince them to practice it on their own.

d. A way to evaluate how well your strategy is working and a plan to implement the evaluating of your strategy and any revisions/changes you will need to make if things are not working?

·         How many people agreed to begin practicing companion gardening or inform other people of it: the whole purpose was to get people to garden by themselves so that we could reduce all of the negative impacts caused by pesticides and monocultures.

If things are not working, we will use our guidelines listed above to help get us back on the right track and communicate with the people we are working with.

e. A detailed plan for how your strategy will be sustained into the future?

We hope that in the future we can actually work on a large scale and get farmers to practice companion gardening, but for now we influenced around eleven people to practice companion gardening and inform their friends of it. This strategy can be sustained into the future because we gave the people we surveyed charts on what plants go well with what so they can plant and all the negative impacts of monoculture and what companion gardening can do for them.

7. Reflect and adjust

For our implementation to solve our problems, we decided to try to get people to support and practice companion gardening which is a form of organic farming, by passing out flyers on its benefits and a chart that showed many types of produce that work well with one and another; for the implementation we went to a Fry’s on 67th ave and Camelback on April 26th. Some people didn’t want to talk to us, but some were open to asking questions and giving their own input on companion gardening and other environmental issues *cut to interview with Joy*

          We hoped that by doing this, we could get people to plant their own gardens and reduce the use of pesticides on farms or home gardens, reduce pesticide resistance in pests, reduce occurrences of CCD, and severe invasive species problems on farms. We might have only influenced a little over ten people that day, but we have hope that this can lead to something bigger. After all that is 10 more people that know more about companion gardening then before we started our implementation.  

We also created a survey to help us see if what we were doing was helping people to understand what companion gardening is, and also to see how many people already knew what companion gardening was before we talked to them. We asked them a variety of questions and here are our results:

As a group we started separately, but through connecting our problems through the lense of biodiversity, we were able to work together to try to lessen an issue.  We started on the level of individuals to try to spread the message of the need of biodiversity on farms and change the opinion of the people. We might’ve changed a few minds. But we feel to really make a difference; we need to take this project to a grander scale. To do this we could advocate for actual change on farms by showing them statistics of what people think of companion gardening and all the benefit it could do to their farm.