FAYETTEVILLE — Taking pest control chemicals out of agriculture would lead to increased use of valuable natural resources and an attendant rise in greenhouse gases, according to a study born of three years of data collection.
“The consequence of not having access to these pest controls would be that it would take more land, more water, more greenhouse gas emissions and more energy to produce the same amount of crops,” Marty Matlock, professor in the department of biological and agricultural engineering, said in a Food, Farms & Forests podcast. “We’re going to have to make sure we have enough to produce enough with the land we have.”
Matlock is part of a team of Arkansas and Colorado scientists who calculated the impacts of taking chemical pesticides out of agriculture for the nation’s top three commodity crops.
As the global population grows to 10 billion in the coming years, the report showed that chemical pesticides — including insecticides, herbicides and fungicides — will be critical to producing the food and fiber we need with the current available land and resources.
Matlock teaches ecological engineering and conducts research as part of the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. He previously served as the executive director of the University of Arkansas Resiliency Center and served as a senior advisor to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.
He and four colleagues conducted a cradle-to-farm gate life cycle assessment on the nation’s three largest commodity crops — corn, cotton and soybean — which account for about 70 percent of the nation’s agricultural lands spread across the U.S. Midwest. A life cycle assessment considers everything required to produce something and quantifies it per unit of yield.
The life cycle assessment investigated the removal of chemical pesticides in the crops with four primary impact categories: short-term (100-year) climate change, fossil and nuclear energy use, land use measured as land occupation and biodiversity, and water consumption.
Results
The assessment showed the most significant impact of no chemical controls was on soybeans due to insect pressure leading to yield loss. The second and third most significant impacts were weed pressure in soybeans and insect pressure in cotton. Corn had the most loss from a lack of weed and insect control. Adding cover crops to the rotation did not significantly change the four primary impact categories compared to the baseline, indicating that cover crops do not increase these sustainability metrics. However, the researchers did not include expected benefits of cover crops like soil health values as a primary impact category.
Compiling the information needed for the life cycle assessment called for collecting data on six growing seasons at the county level in the nation’s top agricultural producing states for each commodity crop. The scientists simulated fields of operations across 40 archetype production systems for each crop using the Agricultural Policy Extender model, also known as APEX.
Matlock said pesticides are heavily regulated in the United States for user and consumer safety. Still, their study focuses solely on the impacts of removing chemical pesticides from the three commodity crops.