Pesticide use on Australia wildlife makes Plague Locust risk worse!

The ABC’s Landline program published an article last week on the rise of Plague Locusts in Australia. This forecast the possibility of the worst plagues since the 1970s. There was something strangely missing from the program, from the mindset of the farmers. Broadly speaking, it is missing from the strategies of farming throughout the continent and much of the world. No-one mentioned wildlife. No-one mentioned nature-based solutions and the effect of pesticide use on Australian wildlife.

The article showed farmers casting pesticide on their land. This was in an effort to suppress the growing numbers of locust young. Farmers are working together with neighbouring landowners, to do the same. It’s not going to work. There have never been any successful efforts by farmers, to suppress locusts using technology.

Pesticides kill soil processes

It’s extraordinary farmers still turn to chemicals as the solution. That same technology created the problem in the first place. The only way to suppress locusts is to recreate populations of terrestrial-foraging birds and reptiles.

In the video, the farmer is seen dispensing emergency. Chloropyrifos 500 is a chemical that even the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) suggests, kill birds and reptiles.

Use of baits to control surface feeding soil insects in agricultural situations … gives rise to avian mortality on occasions when pest availability for bird predation (particularly larger invertebrates) is high … significant but unexplained avian incidents in the Macquarie Marshes (1995) and in Florida, United States (1997) suggest that chlorpyrifos can present particular hazards to birds in some circumstances. Limited observations suggest the occurrence of similar and possibly more widespread incidents in reptiles that feed on contaminated invertebrates.

You can already see the ecological disaster unfolded a long time ago.

The colour and texture of the soil. The lack of natural vegetation and surface freshwater. Undermining of entire populations of bird and animal life. This can be seen when you look at almost any farmland that’s succumbed to intensive chemical use.

Overuse of fertiliser and the perfect storm

The relentless and blunt application of fertiliser introduces enormous amounts of energy into the soil. This burns nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More at a rate ten times faster than it can recover [1]. No farm can exist for long, while that is the case.

Pesticide not only removes a whole pest-reduction service by killing predators but destroy the main mechanism by which soil-nutrients are reintroduced to the land. It’s animals that fertilise soil. A predator like Wedge-tailed Eagle being killed en masse, has untold impact on the integrity of bird and animal populations beneath.

Farmers have created the perfect storm and are trapped on a sinking ship of their own making. At the risk of stretching a metaphor too far, the rats (and all other animals) abandoned a long time ago.

Declining soil fertility world over

We’re in the United Nation’s Decade of Biodiversity because human food security is facing its biggest crisis ever. Within just two or three decades, we will have destroyed our land’s capacity to deliver clean water and fertile soil. Locust plagues are a symptom of the crisis and caused by the impending mass extinctionAnimal life hasn't existed for very long on planet Earth. In the last 500 million years, there have been five mass extinctions, defined as events that wiped out at least 75% of animal life. The Devonian mass extinction is considered to have been caused by the rise of plants on land, which polluted the oceans in the absence of animals. More of wildlife world-wide.

Locust-plagues are impacting every country because on every continent, there has been more than a 50% decline in migratory songbirds in the last few decades.

Migratory animals are essential to farmland soil integrity because animals are the only way to precisely transfer(of nutrients) the thing that sets animals apart from plants, is that they can move. Some of the biggest migrations on Earth every day, are the movement of insects like caterpillars, from the stem of a plant to a leaf and back, before turning into butterflies and transferring the energy elsewhere. Large-scale migration of grazing animals and migratory songbirds moves More, concentrate and amplifyAmplification (of nutrients and energy). Animals consume plants and other animals and in doing so, reintroduce important energy-containing nutrients back into the environment, at even higher concentrations and in patches. Amplification of energy is driven by migration and happens at every scale, from insects moving daily in and out of your vegetable patch, to African wildebeest herds and the seasonal More nutrients and support critical soil nutrientA substance that contains the raw materials for life. At a chemical level, these are contained inside compounds that are absorbed into the body and essential energy-containing molecules are extracted, so that energy can be transformed into other chemical processes that use the energy for living. More cycles. Chloropyrifos 500 even impairs the ability of these birds to migrate. Australian avifauna is dominated by nomadic species that move into fertile areas at the time farmland is most at risk of locust infestation.

The role of wildlife in suppressing locusts

Grasshoppers and locusts are among the most nutritious [2] for birds raising young (even nectar-eating and grain-eating birds will switch to insect prey during chick-rearing). The range and intensity of their animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More is enormous, as we’ve discussed in a few cases already, on this blog (see, for example, the case of Prairie Chickens in North America). Birds, in particular, need to be ubiquitous and abundant, as they used to be.

Locust plagues are the consequence of loss of native birds, possibly exacerbated by drought but we don’t know that, because we’re measuring a system that’s already been damaged to such an extent, that it cannot be repaired. When you’re in a severely leaky boat, there’s no point trying to keep applying patches, or blaming the rough ocean when it takes on water. At some point, it has to be rebuilt. We’re long past the point at which our farmland needs to be rebuilt.

Even if we manage to get climate under control, locust plagues won’t go away, until we restore the imbalance. Meanwhile, the continual use of chemicals will just make things worse and anyone who advises farmers to the contrary, will be contributing to the rapid demise of Australia’s food security. And we can’t turn to science for yet more years of research into what is blatantly obvious. If we’re prepared to ruin everything in the short-term by experimenting with more and more chemicals, why not experiment with nature-based solutions instead? How much worse can it get?

Nature-based solutions start with wildlife

The sheer scale, abundance and mobility of birds, is what makes them the most essential tool farmers have, to recreate soil structure–it’s obvious isn’t it?

Nature-based solutions are the only hope we have left and I wish, somehow, this obvious fact would make it into farming programs and reports. I grew up around farmland and it staggers me that farmers are still being convinced to waste their future on decades of broken promises from agrochemical companies. Instead, every farmer should be employing ecologists and looking to Animal Impact, to rebuild and preserve the integrity of our land.

These hungry pests are jeopardising a bumper crop.

After years of drought, farmers in northern NSW and southern QLD have a new challenge to face.

Full story on Sunday.#abclandline #ag #locust #plague pic.twitter.com/xLhw3005yw

— ABC Landline (@abclandline) February 19, 2021

1. 269.  Amundson, R., et al., Soil and human security in the 21st century. Science, 2015. 348(6235): p. 1261071.
2. Razeng, E. and Watson, D.M. (2015), Nutritional composition of the preferred prey of insectivorous birds: popularity reflects quality. J Avian Biol, 46: 89-96. https://doi.org/10.1111/jav.00475