TEXAS FARMING TRADITIONS AND ALTERNATIVES

What is the true price of today's cornucopia?

Modern agriculture has invested heavily in agricultural chemicals (paying out about 1/3 their total ranch and farm revenues for pesticides and chemical fertilizers).

For instance, Texas used about 29 million pounds of pesticides in 1994, predominantly on cotton, sorghum, corn, pastures, peanuts, rice, and vegetables, but also on non-targets, including farmworkers, foods, and groundwater (traces of atrazine, a common herbicide have been detected in treated drinking water in over 60 public water supply systems, which together are estimated to serve over 4 million Texans).

There is hope that genetically modified (GM) crops will allow lower use of chemicals. They are certainly being widely planted (about 1/4 of all US cropland is planted with GM crops, and roughly 60% of all non-organic processed foods sold in US supermarkets have some GM ingredients). However, agricultural genetic engineering appears to involve more, not less pesticide generation: 71% of total GM plantings are currently herbicide-tolerant crops, while 22% were engineered to emit their own pesticide.

There is also hope that organic agriculture will provide an alternative. In fact, organic food sales have been increasing at a rate of 20% per year, and Texas is home to 90% of the country's organic cotton growers. However, in December 1997, only 104 Texas organic farmers were certified, down from 180 in 1994, and a miniscule number compared with the 205,000 farms in Texas in 1996.  Research on organic agriculture is low as well, garnering only 0.06% out of all land grant college R&D acreage, and 0.1% of all federally-funded agricultural research dollars in 1995.

What is the realistic alternative to continued use of pesticides, either chemically or genetically derived? Some believe that we should simply accept certain pest losses and forego costly and harmful pesticides, since losses have ranged around 20% both before and after the wide introduction of agricultural chemicals in the early 1950s.