I just finished reading The War on Bugs by Will Allen (not the Will Allen of Growing Power - a different Will Allen) and I can't recommend it highly enough! This was a book that Allen was uniquely qualified to write. He grew up on a farm, and then went into the Marines where he was an atomic, biological, and chemical warfare paramedic. Following his years in the Marines, he went to college and - as part of his education - did research in the tropical forests of Peru, living among forest farmers. He says, "The ability of these [Peruvian] farmers to produce surpluses without chemicals in an environment ravaged by pests started me thinking that maybe the miracle chemicals that the sales men pushed were not so necessary after all." After college, Allen went back to farming. Upon taking a pesticide and fertilizer applicator's course at a local college, he found out that the chemicals commonly sprayed on farms were "modified versions of the nerve poisons and antipersonnel weapons that I learned about when studying chemical warfare in the Marine Corps."

So - with his firsthand observations of food grown without chemicals and his knowledge of the toxicity of common farm chemicals - Allen went to work finding out where our dependence and trust of pesticides came from in the first place. His findings actually surprised me. I knew part of the picture, which I wrote about in my own book. I don't think my book was inaccurate, but Allen fills in a lot of details and really makes it clear what happened and how.

 So where did the trust and reliance on farm chemicals come from? Advertising in farm journals. Going back before the days of the internet, radio, or TV, farm journals were popular. At first, in the early 1800's, farm journals promoted ecological methods of farming and they did not contain much in the way of ads. Over the course of the 1800's, the journals gradually began increasing their use of advertising. And, of course, much of what they advertised were the latest and greatest farm chemicals. The ads they accepted influenced the content of the journals, as they did not want to write anything that upset their advertisers. In essence, these farm journals became essentially produced for the purpose of making money from advertisers and promoting those advertisers products. Thus, methods of farming that required no outside inputs were not of value as they could not be advertised by a for-profit corporation.

Farmers are not a homogeneous group, and from the start, some were more accepting of chemicals than others. But on the whole, at first, farmers were not terribly interested in buying things to replace processes and products that they could obtain for free. Then came Peruvian guano.

In 1804, Alexander von Humboldt found that Peruvians traditionally used well-composted bird poop from nearby islands. He brought some of this back to Europe and proposed that Europeans could make money by mining and selling it. Which they did, beginning in the 1820s. The important thing to note about the guano is that it actually worked quite well as fertilizer. With farmers still skeptical about buying farm inputs to replace previously free inputs like manure, this was key. It gave advertisers a foot in the door to establish credibility among farmers.

Peruvian guano was in fact so successful that it was gone within a few decades. Often advertisers would claim a product was Peruvian guano when in fact it was a diluted mixture that might have contained no guano at all.

Another turning point in chemical agriculture came in the 1830's with the work of German industrial chemist Justus von Liebig. We have Liebig to thank for the idea that only N, P, and K matter in our soil (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium). He specifically dismissed the idea that organic matter was an important component in soil. Liebig didn't care much for the experience or expertise of actual farmers - he thought that work in the laboratory was much more valuable. Farmers at the time thought that he was doing "book farming" (as opposed to real farming) and they did not adopt his ideas. However, he had students who came back to respected American universities, carrying his ideas with them. This illustrates the beginning of a rift between those who favor organic farming and the government, major universities, and farm journals, who were much more accepting of Liebig and his ideas about scientific farming. The late 1800's saw a populist movement among farmers that included a rejection of toxic chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. The turning point came in 1894 when an economic crisis hit.

After Peruvian guano ran out, a number of industrial wastes were peddled as new fertilizers. Corporations kept looking for a new mixture of minerals that would equal or beat the fertility of Peruvian guano. Allen says, "No mined or synthetic fertilizers could replace the rich materials produced in the natural Peruvian laboratory of composted seabird deposits or composted manures from the farmer's livestock." The use of industrial waste as fertilizer continues today, by the way. 

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