‘Green lacewings’ is one of the names commonly given to the insects of the genus Chrysoperla, in turn a member of the family Chrysopidae (remember, it’s kingdom – phylum – class – order – family – genus – species), called ‘lacewings’ because of their delicately ornamented wings, which are translucent and present a complicated pattern that resembles lace. Lacewings, and especially green lacewings, can be some of the most ferocious predators of damaging insects that there are; especially since they are generalist predators: they’ll eat everything from mealybugs to spider mites and grasshoppers. They are predators only at their larval stage, becoming harmless nectar and pollen eaters once they reach adulthood. Far from becoming useless, though, this is the stage of their lives when the attention of the organic grower shifts towards giving them a space to live and lay the eggs for the next generation of lacewings. They’re also pollinators at this stage, thus doubly benefitting the crops. An adult specimen of Chrysoperla carnea. One single larva of lacewing insects can eat up to three hundred aphids during its lifetime, which means that just ten larvae can consume three thousand aphids; a hundred larvae, thirty thousand; and a thousand larvae of lacewing insects can consume the incredible amount of 300,000 aphids over the course of two or three weeks. Each adult can lay around 200 eggs, so the math adds up to a rather quick control of any soft-bodied insect pest, as long as the environment is diverse enough with other sources of food to actually sustain the lacewings across generations. Otherwise, augmentative techniques for their usage will have to be applied (though they’ll probably still be very much worth it!). A larva of Chrysoperla carnea (imagine seeing that coming towards you as an aphid!) AGENT PROFILE Common name(s): Green lacewings, common lacewings. Often-used species: Chrysoperla carnea, Chrysoperla rufilabris. Type of predator: Generalist. Potential damaging effects: None registered. Interesting literature on its usage: Against sucking pests of tomatoes (2020), against the parasite of olive trees Saissetia oleae (2020), against mealybugs that attack cassava plants (2017), against the Brazilian species of thrips Enneothrips flavens (2014), against lettuce aphids and western flower thrips (2013), against the whitefly Enneothrips flavens (2008), a methodology of its application in the field (2016).

According to a recent study, we live a world that is seeing an ever-growing concentration of farmland into fewer hands: around 70% of the currently cultivated land is being owned by the top 1% of all farms, while, in contrast, 80% of all individual farms have land of two hectares or less, and operate only around 12% of the currently cultivated land. Here's a general graph of that, taken directly from the study: It may seem like this is a natural economic process by which larger farms tend to swallow the competition by offering better prices to the consumers, which they can allow themselves because the reduced costs of a more efficient production structure. But think again: that small 12% of all cultivated land produces 35% of all the world’s food. The other 88% of land, meanwhile, produces a much less impressive 65% of all the food we eat. This actually correlates to a well observed inverse correlation between farm size and farm efficiency, though experts can’t quite place their fingers on the direct causes behind that. Given all of this data, it’s evident that keeping small farms in business is key to preserve food safety and reach the Second Sustainable Development Goal of the United Nations: zero hunger by 2030. And here’s where conservation agriculture comes into play, by directly giving many major advantages to small farms, of which we can outline three as good examples: 1) Lessening costs and reducing labor input in the long run by aiming to increasingly develop the fertility of the soil instead of simply pumping it away through the traditional methods of exploitative agriculture. Conservation agriculture aims to reduce the recurrent costs of fertilization, and thus increase the medium and long-term profitability of agricultural operations while also doing away with the labor costs of tilling the soil and intensive weeding by replacing both of these operations with the smart usage of cover crops, among other novel techniques. 2) Making them more resilient to climate change by improving the capability of the soil to absorb and store water (thus helping to prevent and even reverse desertification), avoiding the salinization of the soil that comes from the intensive usage of inorganic fertilizers and preventing the erosion of the soil by wind and water through a constant maintenance of a vegetable cover. Farms that operate according to the principles of conservation agriculture and also use organic fertilizers have the added benefit of developing a soil ecosystem of bacterial probiotics and mycorrhizal fungi, which adds an extra layer of protection against drought, disease, erosion and nutrient depletion. This study from 2020, which also explores the benefits of conservation agriculture for preventing soil erosion, presents these two possible worldwide projections of water-caused soil erosion for the next few decades, to a good extent aided by climate change: 3) Increasing availability of loans and credit, a benefit unknown to many, is actually present in major countries such as the United States, where the Department of Agriculture offers loans of up to 1.75 million dollars to farms who need funding to undertake a conservation project in their land (see here for a quick explanation of how that works!). Meanwhile, in the European Union, and in some cases to an international extent, similar initiatives are managed by the European Agricultural Fund For Rural Development (EAFRD) and the Agricultural Financing Initiative of the European Development Finance Institutions (EDFI AgriFI). These benefits are just the tip of the iceberg that help balance the sometimes higher, or relatively high costs that the adoption of conservation agriculture in smaller farms implies. In the end, who wouldn’t have a more resilient, profitable farm and better credit to attain that? One thing is sure: even though this article ends here, the benefits of transitioning to conservation agriculture surely don’t.

Possibly the biological pest control agent by excellence, ladybugs have become a staple in the market of insects used to combat plagues, especially for their role in the control of aphids. But ladybugs, the members of the insect family Coccinellidae, can feed on a wide range of plagues that go from caterpillars and beetle larvae (genus Coleomegilla of ladybugs) to mites (genus Stethorus) and whiteflies, thrips, mealybugs, and psyllids. About 90% of the species of this family are beneficial to crops, with the remaining 10% being either neutral or, very rarely, damaging under some circumstances. All of these damaging ladybugs are known to belong to the same subfamily, Epilachninae, however, and so when the ladybugs are used as a biological agent of pest control the species to be released are carefully selected to be entirely carnivorous or almost entirely carnivorous, to make sure that they do not harm the crops that they are supposed to protect. Two ladybugs: Henosepilachna guttatopustulata (left), a common pest of solanaceous plants, and Coccinella septempunctata (right), a major agent of biological pest control. The ladybugs like the left one comprise less than 10% of all the species of this family. Since ladybugs are predators both as larvae and as adults, and since some species have adult individuals that overwinter before the first frosts and reemerge on the following spring, the number of damaging insects that one of these can eat is astounding: up to five thousand aphids alone per ladybug. If a thousand lacewings could eat 300,000 of those over a few weeks, ladybugs can eat up to 5,000,000 (yes, that's five million aphids!) over the course of one or two years. This can effectively solve plague problems over the whole growing season, rather than during the limited time in which other agents of biological pest control are in their larvae stage. This also highlights the importance of implementing a conservative model of pest control species introduction, in which the insects are not merely released by the thousands each year, but actually stimulated to establish and reproduce in cropland areas. Since one single ladybug can lay over 300 eggs during her life, establishing a permanent population of ladybugs can really pay up over time. The life stages of ladybugs. They are highly predatory in both the larval and adult stages. AGENT PROFILE Common name(s): Ladybugs, ladybeetles, ladybirds. Often-used species: Depending on the region, native or long-established species are almost always used. Type of predator: Depends on the species, some are generalist and some are far more specialized. Potential damaging effects: None registered from any species outside the Epilachninae subfamily. Interesting literature on its usage: A general overview of these insects (2014), a general review of their usage against soft-bodied insects (2017), a review of the use of exotic species, with an interesting subsection discussing the importance of biodiversity in the landscape to ensure their establishment and efficacy (2020), a review of their use against aphids in particular (2015).

Organic agriculture is a different sort of business. It is, of course, still a business, where profitability and productivity matter (how could they not, when feeding human beings is the end goal?) but it is a business of a different kind. That difference comes from its end goals: while the average view of a business makes it responsible to its shareholders and its customers, the view of organic businesses makes them responsible to their shareholders, customers and the society at large. They are responsible to the whole planet, and their responsible land stewardship practices are a display of that. It could simply be said that organic businesses do not aim to externalize their environmental, social and public health costs: they aim to have no such costs at all. Based on this inherent ethical outlook of organic agriculture, it makes sense for all organic businesses to have a set of common principles; guiding values that can articulate what the label ‘organic’ means at a global scale. The IFOAM (the umbrella organization that gives an international, common voice to organic agriculture) has sought to do just that, by producing a list of four main principles that can be said to represent the ultimate aims of the organic movement as a whole. The first of those principles (the rest of which we’ll explore in future entries) is health. Health understood not in the narrow sense of not being sick, but instead, as the IFOAM defines it, understood as: …the wholeness and integrity of living systems. It is not simply the absence of illness, but the maintenance of physical, mental, social and ecological well-being. Immunity, resilience, and regeneration are key characteristics of health. The commitment to health of organic agriculture is thus not only to the health of the people it feeds (which it also fulfills, by putting healthier food on the world’s tables), but also to the overall health of the societies in which it exists and the ecosystems within which it works. It commits itself even to the mental well-being of those that know, by its responsible (and accountable) commitment to this and the rest of its principles, that it is a system for producing food that will not harm the very humanity that serves as its end goal. The health of these organic heads of cattle is no less important for the farmer than the health of the soil they live in, of the people that are going to be fed by them, or of those who simply live near this land, and who might be affected by inadequate management practices. Health is a complex concept, and organic agriculture aims to embrace that complexity. Of course that, using such a broad definition, health as a principle for organic agriculture cannot be fulfilled without paying attention to other values as well. Ecology, care and fairness – none of them can truly be left out.

When promoting policies that support and stimulate organic agriculture, one common criticism is heard: that organic agriculture lacks the potential for scalability; that, in spite of its environmental and social benefits, it is unable to ensure enough food production for everyone in the world to be fed. While there’s a mainstream assumption that organic systems of food production result in lower yields, there is a couple of corresponding questions that, being hardly mainstream, are hardly ever are answered: Are the world’s soils already producing food at maximum capacity? Does our current food production reach the levels required to feed everyone? The answer to the first question is negative, and the second is positive. The world is already producing enough food to feed everyone, and the world’s soils are not producing as much food as they could. This last answer to that first question is, in fact, one of the strongest arguments in favor of worldwide adoption of organic agriculture – especially in the world’s poorest regions. Organic tomatoes grow using traditional zaï techniques in the village of Vathaba, Guinea, where a serious problem of chronic malnutrition affects up to 40% of the country's population. Not only is the claim that organic agriculture gives lower yields an oversimplification (on which crops? In which regions? During which periods of the year? Using Integrated Pest Management techniques or not?), but it is an outright wrong claim in zones of the world. Nearly fifteen years ago already (in 2007), a study by the University of Michigan found that, by reducing the average input costs, stimulating soil preservation and formation, and using nitrogen-fixing Bacteria cover crops in crop rotation, organic agriculture could rise the agricultural yields in developing countries by 80%. In a world where enough food is already being produced but not enough food is being distributed, increasing food production in the areas where it is most needed could provide a basis for eradicating hunger, one of the Development Goals of the Millennium. It could also bring a lot of economic benefits to producers in those same developing countries, by reducing their expenses and increasing the economic benefits that they extract from their land. The FAO speaks along the same lines, though giving a lower estimate (that it’s still significantly higher than the present distribution): Conversion of global agriculture to organic management, without converting wild lands to agriculture and using N-fertilizers, would result in a global agricultural supply of 2640 to 4380 kcal/person/day. Sustainable intensification in developing countries through organic practices would increase production by 56 percent.

Seen from the outside, agriculture may seem to be a magical process: things are planted in the soil, cared for during a season, and food is harvested eventually: from useless dirt, the world is fed. But when farmers go into their fields and harvest the year's crop of wheat, peppers, or watermelon, they know that they're not creating food out of anything. They know what came into their field (the work they put in, the bio-manure they brought as fertilizer, the insecticides they introduced for pest control), and understand that agriculture is not an operation of creation but of transformation. Food does not spring out of the ground: raw resources are transformed into food through a lot of work, and a lot of brainpower. And the root of this transformation happens within the plants themselves, who take nutrients from the soil and energy from the sun and support seven billion people and the whole of life on earth. But plants were not made by human beings: they appeared through natural processes millions of years before the first mammal even stepped a foot on our planet. As such, they are regulated by processes that were not made by us; we human beings merely channel and instrumentalize those processes to feed ourselves. Same as the natural processes underlying soil fertility, water availability, nutrient retention, soil structure maintenance, pest control, and even seed saving: all of them were active way beyond human beings began harnessing their power for their benefit. The basis of agriculture is, thus, ecology; the principles and processes that guide how ecosystems work. There is no agricultural activity that is not based on ecological processes: there is just agriculture that is consciously based on them and that, as such, becomes sustainable, and agriculture that unwillingly goes against ecological processes and, as such, is unsustainable and leads to hunger crises and environmental troubles of all sorts. Organic agriculture is agriculture practiced through the most scientifically-informed techniques for managing agricultural land as an ecosystem. It is a system of practices that collaborates with, rather than fighting against, the very natural processes that gave origin to live on earth — as such ecology is another of its principles, alongside health, fairness, and care. In fact, it might be said to form the basis of them all. A quick glance at the myriad natural processes underlying soil degradation, which organic agriculture takes into account to prevent the loss of fertile soil, gives a good impression of the connectedness of agriculture to ecology as one of its foundational principles.

According to a recent study published by a team of researchers from the universities of Westlake and Copenhagen, it turns out that flowers can range from outright necessary to very useful in maintaining a steady supply of predators for the control of plagues in agriculture. Flowers and floral products (which includes pollen and sugary water, used as a replacement for nectar in the absence of actual flowers) greatly help increase the survival rate, longevity, and fecundity of predatory and parasitoid insects, according to a review of 628 trials done across seventy different other studies. In short: the introduction of flowers in monocultures is a decisive step in establishing a conservative system of biological pest control; a system of control agents that remain, survive and reproduce in the fields where they are released. In order to effectively introduce flowers and floral resources, some methods offered by the authors from existing literature include planting floral strips that cross monocultural fields, the application of a spray solution consisting of a mixture of sugar and pollen, and the selection of flowering species that are specifically suitable to sustain the desired predators without serving to increase the pest population. Not only did this affect positively biological control agents that are not predatory during a part of their lives (such as hoverflies and lacewings, that become nectar and pollen eaters upon reaching adulthood, and as such depend on flowers to complete their life cycles and reproduce within the field), but it also benefits lifetime predators such as spiders and ladybugs, which can feed on floral products when prey is scarce and are far more abundant in floral strips and their vicinities. A perennial flower strip in the Netherlands, at the border of an arable field (photo courtesy of the University of Amsterdam). All of this points out the need for experimentation and further study to determine the best flowering species for each individual case, and in general to test the inclusion of more flowers in the fields. Furthermore, this seems to make a stronger case for companion planting, a severely understudied area of agriculture and the subject of our upcoming articles. In short, definitely, a study that's worth a read.

Whenever a good is produced (let's say, an airplane, a coffee cup, or, for the agricultural sector, a pound of tomatoes or a single tomato) the process of production itself has consequences for the whole of society. This means that a whole lot of people who didn't agree to be involved in the consequences of that production receive the consequences of the production nevertheless. The name that economists have for that burden is an externality, as in the externalization of a cost: you take the whole of the benefits, and somebody else (or everyone else) pays part of the costs. A good example is in the unrestricted usage of inorganic fertilizers. Someone may consider it cheaper to go above and beyond with their fertilization, just to make sure the soil is really soaked with that sweet nitrogen, and they'll certainly reap the benefits for that in the form of a high-yielding harvest. But after the first rains of the season, a good deal of those nitrogen-heavy fertilizers will wash up to the closest bodies of water, and they'll become everybody's problem—everybody but the farmer's, or everybody and the farmer's at the very least. A whole community that doesn't directly profit from the actions of the farmer still has to pay for part of the costs that derive from his business. That exactly is what has been happening in the whole world, but scientists and economists have only recently begun to calculate the impact of the many externalities of agricultural production as a whole (such as in the impact on the water quality of the United States, for example). For organic agriculture in particular, a calculation of the actual externalities of traditional practices of farming could mean a complete revolution in the market. With the increasing popularity of carbon taxes (between 2005 and the present, nearly 50 new initiatives for carbon taxation have passed in places as diverse as Australia, South Africa, the European Union and China), a 2020 German study by a team of researchers from the universities of Munich, Greifswald and Augsburg that suggests reverting the payment of externalities to agricultural producers could begin the process towards tilting the market share in favor of organic produce. Though currently held back in their competition against non-organic foods by the lower prices of these, an internalization of the agricultural externalities of traditional food production could result in something like the following graph (fig. 2 in the article): The cost of conventional foods could rise as high as 146% for meat, 91% for dairy and 25% for plant-based produce. Even if LUC (land-use change) surcharge were eliminated, organic produce would still be cheaper overall. But wouldn't this increase in the prices of food revert ultimately to the consumers? What would happen to meat producers? And why can't we just keep at it with our current system? From these questions, the last one is the easiest to answer: these are costs already paid by the government, and indirectly by the taxpayers. As the cost of dealing with these unaddressed externalities rises (as rivers get more and more polluted because farmers keep spraying their fields with inorganic fertilizers, as they believe the government will have to clean it up), these will have to be paid by someone, and the fairest way would be for the polluter to pay them. As for the first two, why not read the article? After all, it's right here.

It would seem counterintuitive that emphasizing nature would foster deeply human values – at least, from the perspective of human beings as different or separate from the natural world. This is the perspective of most of the modern agriculture, one in which the soil is there to be exploited for the production of food, and only secondarily and for that purpose it is fed inorganic nutrients in large quantities; large enough to overflow with them and send those nutrients into rivers, ponds, and seas. A study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, however, suggests that behind alternative practices or agriculture lies an altogether different set of human values. In Empathy-Conditioned Conservation: "Walking in the Shoes of Others" as a Conservation Farmer, a research paper published by the University in 2011, researchers found that the main motivation behind adopting tillage conservation practices among farmers was an unexpected one: empathy. As this early summary of the research indicates, even though a potential increase in profits, the education received by farmers and the financial support of the government were counted among the variables that influenced whether the farmers adopted conservation tillage practices, a change in these influenced the probability of adoption by around 1% or less. In contrast, having an empathetic mentality (which the authors describe as “tempering the pursuit of self-interest with shared other-interests”) was the single most influential variable, increasing by around 10% the probability of adopting these techniques. The Blue River in Nebraska, looking downstream. The farmers that take care of the lands on the margins of this river formed the basis for the study's sample. The study, which used as a sample the farmers around Nebraska and Kansas, in the United States, that had lands surrounding the Blue River, found that empathy played a role depending on how much the farmers regarded that leached soil and nutrients, coming from lands managed without the adequate conservation practices, affected their neighbors downstream. When farmers realized how their neighbors downstream were being affected negatively, the majority of them received a strong motivation to implement conservation practices, which in some areas led to an adoption of no-till or low-till management schemes is up to 90% of all farms. To the authors, this is evidence of how “farmers pursue a joint and interdependent own-interest and not only self-interest as presumed in microeconomics”. To policymakers, it should make one thing clear: deeply human values such as empathy are key for the widespread adoption of organic agriculture, as a responsible and sustainable way of producing food for the world. Though economic benefits are certainly a motivation to switch to organic land stewardship, there are otherwise neglected benefits and values that must be brought into the calculations underlying a massive adoption of organic agriculture.

Every year, millions of gallons of synthetic pesticides are applied to crops worldwide, with a well-known negative effect on the quality of the final product as well as on the quality of the surrounding ecosystems. The reasons behind their intensive use are the same behind the usage of synthetic fertilizers: convenience (real or assumed), a lack of viable alternatives, and a strong cultural and educational bias in favor of their use. But this is all changing, and changing fast, with the diversification and massification of biological means for pest control: in a 2017 paper, a team of researchers from the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain found that while the synthetic pesticide market was consistently growing at a yearly rate of 5-6%, the biological control market was exploding at yearly growth rates of 10% before 2005, and 15% afterward. In light of these recent developments, it’s important to get an introduction to the three fundamental forms of biological pest control: classical techniques, augmentative techniques, and conservationist techniques. In each of these three techniques, a species or a group of species is deliberately released in a cropland area to serve as predators of another species, which is acting as a plague. The real variations come from the details. Classical techniques of pest control have been used since the 19th century at least, when the famous American entomologist Charles V. Riley saved the blossoming citrus industry in California from a plague unwillingly imported from Australia (the scale insect Icerya purchase) by willingly importing a predator from the same country, the vedalia ladybug (Rodolia cardinalis). These classical techniques consist in basically this: importing and establishing a foreign predator to deal with a foreign pest. Riley introduced the ladybugs in 1872, and this sight became common in citrus plantations across the state: Augmentative techniques are different, in the sense that they do not seek to establish the predator that is imported as a means of biological control but simply release it in numbers that are large enough to destroy or severely reduce a plague in a determinate moment. Consequently, these augmentative techniques (augmentative precisely because they seek to simply augment the number of predators for a while) are often repeated in regular schedules, much like in the way that seasonal applications of synthetic pesticides are carried out (but still without the many negative effects of such pesticides). The species introduced here as biological control can be foreign or local. Augmentative techniques, however, have one important flaw: they tend to work less well in ecosystems that lack diversity, as most agricultural spaces are. Another team of researchers, this time from Cornell University, noted in a 2019 paper that the efficacy of such methods is greatly influenced by the biodiversity of the areas where they are applied. Conservation techniques of biological control become the solution for these problems, as well as for the repeated cost of releasing predators seasonally. Acting from the standpoint of integrated systems management (seeing agriculture as not the exploitation of space and resources, but as the task of stewarding a system that produces food according to certain inputs, and to the management of certain variables), these techniques of biological pest control try to improve the overall suitability of the ecosystem where the predators are released, in order to allow them to get fully established and working year-round, ideally without a need for further introductions. The need for increased biodiversity in the fields is also tied, perhaps not surprisingly, with the current lack of diversity in the food we grow. Biological means of control are not new, but they are being newly introduced to many farmers and spaces where and by whom they haven’t traditionally been used. Like in conservation techniques for their management, the economic ecosystem is full of opportunities for their establishment, and, consequently, for their growth. So it’s about time we all got acquainted with the critters and microorganisms that save the food we eat – and that’s what we’ll be talking about, in upcoming entries. To cite van Lenteren, Bolckmans, Köhl, Ravensberg and Urbaneja from their 2017 paper referenced above: "Too often the following reasoning is used to justify the use of synthetic pesticides: agriculture has to feed some ten billion people by the year 2050, so we need to strongly increase food production, which can only be achieved with the usage of synthetic pesticides. This reasoning is simplistic, erroneous, and misleading. Simplistic because it ignores a multitude of other approaches to pest, disease, and weed control that we summarize below under IPM, erroneous as sufficient healthy food can be produced without synthetic pesticides (...) and misleading in that it minimizes the importance of a well-functioning biosphere and high biodiversity for the long-term sustainable production of healthy food for a growing human population (...). This short-sighted mercenary attitude might actually result in very serious environmental problems in the near future (...). A more sensible approach to food production is to ask ourselves: (1) how can we create a healthy and well-functioning biosphere in which biodiversity is treasured instead of strongly reduced, both because of its necessity for sustainable food production and maintaining a hospitable biosphere for humans (utilitarian approach), as well as because of our ethical responsibility (ethical approach), (2) how can healthy food best be produced in this well-functioning biosphere, and (3) what kind of pest, disease and weed management fits in such a production system."