By understanding population ecology, lifecycles and habitat, farmers can guide ecosystems toward balance instead of fighting endless outbreaks
By now, most of you reading this have realized that the cavalry isn’t coming to save the day. The silver bullet — a shelf-stable, miracle-in-a-jug pest-and-disease cure that turns fields into advertising photos doesn’t exist. Anything that might seem like a “miracle cure” seems to throw side effects all over the place: paperwork, licensing, specialized equipment — and all of that costs money.
Those of us stubborn enough to have worked through the years to create diverse and complex systems have stayed in the game. We’re not the “poor, suffering farmers” that you see on the news. We’ve noticed something: ecosystems don’t really have pest problems. They don’t really have disease problems. They have balance. It’s the increasingly sterile monocultures that have the problem.
Just ask any of the old-timers at Acres U.S.A. We may grow grains, dairy, produce or poultry — we’re all different — but all of us have noticed pest and disease issues declining the longer we practice ecological agriculture. In eco-agriculture systems, our job isn’t to control nature but to learn how it works and then to relate with it, intensely and intentionally.
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