Today I am talking about pesticide side effects
and specifically how it relates to the soil
food web.
People are often talk about pesticides and
herbicides.
Really a herbicide is a kind of pesticide.
"Cide" means to kill, so a pesticide is just
anything that's meant to kill a pest.
So all of these are pesticides.
So insecticides are meant to kill insects,
fungicides are meant to kill fungi, herbicides
are meant to kill plants.
piscicides for fish, miticides for mites,
and we have other ones, too - bactericides,
avicides for birds and on and on.
But there are side effects and this is what’s
important to realize.
When I was young and stupid, I used to spray
fungicides on our golf course greens.
Later when I got researching, I found that
these fungicides are very toxic to fish, and
what I’m now seeing is that basically all
of these are toxic to everything to some degree.
So if I spray an insecticide onto my plants
in order to kill any insects that come along,
it's probably not gonna kill the plants, but
we certainly know now that it disrupts the
plant processes and causes problems and actually
does makes the plants sick.
Same goes for everything.
Fungicides, too.
I’m sure insecticides have an effect on
microorganisms.
We know this.
So manufacturers of these pesticides talk
about how the soil food web will break them
down.
They don’t use that term soil food web but
they say they will get broken down by microorganisms,
and that is probably true to a degree.
Microbes are pretty resilient.
There are some that are really tough and they
can break down toxins and that’s great.
But the problem is when we keep spraying these
things over many years, they just slowly kill
more and more microbes.
If you have a neighbor, it can be fifty miles
away, a farm outside the city.
If they are spraying pesticides, those are
coming in through the wind, traveling and
they’re getting onto your property.
Industry, pollution - that causes problems
for the soil food web.
When it rains, pesticides come in.
Actually, pretty tremendous amounts of pesticides
come in rain and they can come from thousands
of miles away.
So I’m not trying to scare you in saying
that we all have pesticides all over us and
we are all going to die or anything.
All I’m saying is that pollution and toxins
are pretty prevalent in our environment and
they have an effect on the whole soil food
web.
There's no such thing as an insecticide that
only kills insect and doesn’t hurt anything
else.
So what this means for us, obviously most
of my viewers and readers already don't use
these pesticides, so I don’t have to tell
you about that, but if you do, I hope this
maybe just gives you a different point of
view.
If you don’t want to hurt your plants, you
don’t want to be spraying insecticides and
fungicides on them.
But more importantly for everyone, now that
we know pesticides are always coming in our
organic gardens a little bit even just when
it rains, our job is to really cultivate that
soil food web with compost and compost teas
and effective microorganisms and mulching
and in just general creating health in the
garden, creating a really vibrant ecosystem.
And that way they’re gonna be able to handle
a little bit of toxins.
And they do a fantastic job when you have
a really diverse healthy soil food web, of
breaking down toxins even converting those
toxins into more nutrients, saving them from
our water ways and from the food in our vegetable
garden and all that.
So, I just wanted to talk about pesticide
side effects today, and really just say the
ultimate goal for us is to work on that soil
food web and of course that’s what I talk
about on my website.
