Terry Daynard | Genetic Literacy Project | August 6, 2018
In about 1980, I visited several International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) research sites in Mexico. The trip included a tortuous drive to a low-elevation research station near Poza Rica. As we rounded one bend, I vividly remember seeing an ejido farmer hoeing weeds in his half-hectare corn field. “He is always there,” I was told, day after day under the hot sun. When he progressed to one side of the field, newly emerged weeds already needed hoeing on the other.
What a tedious task I thought, as I compared that to my own corn fields in Ontario. For me, one spray application at a cost of about $20 per half-hectare, and less than 5 minutes of field work, meant near weed-free conditions for the whole growing season.
Efforts to control pests are as old as farming. With weeds at least there has always been the option of hand-pulling, hoeing, and/or small cultivators pulled by animals (more recently, tractors). Diseases and insects were worse because mechanical control was usually impossible and high pestilence meant extreme crop losses, and often starvation.
John Unsworth in History of Pesticides states, “The first recorded use of insecticides is about 4,500 years ago by Sumerians who used sulfur compounds to control insects and mites.” Over the millennia, lots of approaches have been tried.........To Read More.....
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