Effects of halving pesticide use on wheat production

Abstract

Pesticides pose serious threats to both human health and the environment. In Europe, farmers are encouraged to reduce their use, and in France a recent environmental policy fixed a target of halving the pesticide use by 2018. Organic and integrated cropping systems have been proposed as possible solutions for reducing pesticide use, but the effect of reducing pesticide use on crop yield remains unclear. Here we use a set of cropping system experiments to quantify the yield losses resulting from a reduction of pesticide use for winter wheat in France. Our estimated yield losses resulting from a 50% reduction in pesticide use ranged from 5 to 13% of the yield obtained with the current pesticide use. At the scale of the whole country, these losses would decrease the French wheat production by about 2 to 3 millions of tons, which represent about 15% of the French wheat export.

Understanding the Effects of Sublethal Pesticide Exposure on Honey Bees: A Role for Probiotics as Mediators of Environmental Stress

“…Thus, a solution is needed to limit these off-target effects. Naturally, by completely removing pesticides, honey bees would no longer be exposed to them, but this solution may reduce crop yield and burden the food supply (Hossard et al, 2014). Another idea is to circumvent pesticide use by mandating better farming practices that reduce damage from pests (Lechenet et al, 2014).…”

Social–ecological experiments to foster agroecological transition

“…This is also the case for long‐term field experiments such as the Broadbalk or Park Grass experiments in Rothamsted, UK (Johnston & Poulton, ), or Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Müncheberg, Germany (Dalchow, Bork, & Schubert, ). Other field experiments have been set up for testing whole cropping systems (Debaeke et al, ; Hossard et al, ), but have necessarily been limited to comparisons of complete cropping systems rather than controlling the variation of each individual factor. These experiments rely on a simplified view of the agroecosystems and are usually conducted with few replicates (Sebilo, Mayer, Nicolardot, Pinay, & Mariotti, ), impeding the generalization of the outcomes.…”

Agrowaste bioconversion and microbial fortification have prospects for soil health, crop productivity, and eco-enterprising

“…Public concerns over adverse impacts of external chemical inputs on the quality of produce, farm soils, water and environment are rising (Bohlke 2002;Aktar et al 2009;Mohanty et al 2013;Hongsibsong et al 2017). This has raised questions as to whether the present agricultural production system is able to provide quality food for all-over longer term (Hossard et al 2014;Pradhan et al 2015). Therefore, many countries are now taking initiatives to reduce the use of fertilizers and pesticides in the food crop production system (FAO 2017).…”