Industrial Farming Killing Insects Rapidly, UK Prof Claims

The 1.1 million known species of insect comprise more than two-thirds of all known species on our planet. Insects pollinate roughly three-quarters of the crops we grow, including most of our fruit and vegetables, such that many of us would starve without them.

Photo Insert: The chemical that kills grasshoppers is used commercially to kill various butterflies, moths, beetles, flies, and termites, and it is highly toxic to bumblebees and is likewise toxic to many plants.

They also pollinate the large majority of wildflowers; recycle dung, leaves and corpses; help to keep the soil healthy; control pests; and much more. They are food for numerous larger animals such as most birds, freshwater fish, frogs and lizards. Ecosystems would grind to a halt without insects, Sussex University Prof. Dave Goulson reported for Truthout.

In Germany, the biomass of flying insects fell by 76 percent in the 27 years to 2016. In the US, monarch butterfly numbers have fallen by 80 percent in 25 years. In the UK, butterflies have halved in abundance since 1976.

The famous American biologist Paul Ehrlich likened the loss of species from an ecological community to randomly popping out rivets from the wing of a plane. Remove one or two and the plane will probably be fine.

Remove 10, or 20, or 50, and at some point, that we are entirely unable to predict, there will be a catastrophic failure, and the plane will fall from the sky. In his analogy, insects are the rivets that hold ecosystems together.

Clearly, the industrialization of farming, particularly the move toward large-scale monoculture cropping dependent on a blizzard of pesticides, is playing a major role. In 1962, Rachel Carson warned us in her book “Silent Spring” that we were doing terrible damage to our planet. She would weep to see how much worse it has become.

The problems with pesticides and fertilizers Carson highlighted have become far more acute. Some of these new pesticides, such as neonicotinoids, are thousands of times more toxic to insects than any that existed in Carson’s day.

The US in particular has an especially gung-ho attitude to pesticides, with US farmers accounting for nearly 20 percent of all global use. About one-quarter of the pesticides used in the US are now banned in the European Union due to concerns over risks to human or environmental health. The US allows several pesticides now banned in China and Brazil, neither of which is famed for its sensitive approach to environmental protection.

The Rocky Mountain locust may be extinct, but other grasshoppers are still common in the same area, and occasionally there are outbreaks that spill out into surrounding states. The grasshoppers eat grass, competing with livestock and hence impacting ranchers. One such outbreak occurred in the summer of 2021, prompting the federal government to fund aerial spraying of about 1 million acres of rangeland in Montana and neighboring states with an insecticide, diflubenzuron.

Those responsible for this decision argue that the chemical does little harm to other insects, but this is clearly nonsense, since elsewhere the same chemical is applied commercially to kill various butterflies, moths, beetles, flies, and termites, and it is highly toxic to bumblebees. The chemical is even toxic to many plants.

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