Increasing organics demand must start with consumers
Biodiversity tends to take a beating on farmland, the plants and animals which compose it are sometimes at odds with the demands of production. However, there are a growing number of farms across the province accommodating these beleaguered species to the benefit of everyone involved. It’s an undertaking as creative as it is challenging, and few exemplify it better than Wild Rose Farms in Digby Country.
Here are 15 acres in humble production, 0.7 dedicated to vegetables and the rest to hay and pasture. While modest in size, these fields represent a new way of growing food, one as gentle as it is revolutionary. Gilberte Doelle has owned this property since 2006, boasting over 10,000 pounds of produce each year. Her operation is entirely no-till, certified organic and free of any pesticide.
She achieves this by dedicating 10 per cent of her gardens to flowers and herbs rather than vegetables, this sweet-smelling flora attracts carnivorous insects such as parasitoid wasps, hoverflies, ladybugs, pirate bugs and ground beetles, whose only job is to eat the pests threatening her vegetables.
“It’s not big, it’s not fancy, but it
works,” said Doelle.
So potent are these beneficial insects that Wild Rose Farms actively releases them into their fields, and sets up mobile pots of flowers and herbs to encourage their presence in problem areas. What’s more, they plant and maintain four permanent perennial gardens surrounding the farm, offering a regular source of food to everything from ladybugs to the endangered monarch butterfly.
This sort of farming, which makes allies out of enemies, is called biointensive agriculture, and it employs more than just insects. Doelle’s organic certification requires that her fields have generous buffer zones to protect neighbouring properties and waterways from her work, but instead of planting an unimaginative assortment of plow-down plants, she’s tailored these buffer zones to house birds who also make a meal of undesirable insects. In this way, she has replaced the harsh chemicals of traditional agriculture with an interspecies partnership.
“I think my fellow farmers should be looking into these alternatives much more,” said Doelle, “and it doesn’t have to be complicated.”
Crops such as corn could be undersowed with crimson clover, for example, attracting beneficial insects and reducing the need for chemical remedies or the roadways crossing fields could likewise be sowed — still driveable, but now a magnet for the aforementioned predators. It is Doelle’s opinion that practices like these should be encouraged by the organizations and governments overseeing her industry, perhaps by way of tax breaks or incentives, given their potential to save environmental costs down the road.
It is practices like this which give me hope for agriculture, and the myriad species caught in an uneasy co-existence with it. It seems to me many people have dismissed organic produce as a luxury or fad, when in fact it’s our path to a sustainable future, one we should all take seriously.
Yes, organics cost a little more, but I brought this up with Doelle and she made the matter quite clear. Traditional produce might be cheaper on the shelf, but it comes with significant environmental costs which absolutely must be considered. The ongoing collapse of North America’s migratory songbirds comes to mind. Organics cost more because some of Doelle’s land must be dedicated to her sustainable and ingenious pest control.
I’ve never met a farmer who used more pesticides than they had to, and in several conversations, I’ve heard them described as a necessary evil. If organics are ever going to take hold, it must start with consumers creating a demand.
Zack Metcalfe is a freelance conservation journalist, author and writer based in the Maritimes.