Abstract
BackgroundSelection of pesticides with small ecological footprints is a key factor in developing sustainable agricultural systems. Policy guiding the selection of pesticides often emphasizes natural products and organic-certified pesticides to increase sustainability, because of the prevailing public opinion that natural products are uniformly safer, and thus more environmentally friendly, than synthetic chemicals.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe report the results of a study examining the environmental impact of several new synthetic and certified organic insecticides under consideration as reduced-risk insecticides for soybean aphid (Aphis glycines) control, using established and novel methodologies to directly quantify pesticide impact in terms of biocontrol services. We found that in addition to reduced efficacy against aphids compared to novel synthetic insecticides, organic approved insecticides had a similar or even greater negative impact on several natural enemy species in lab studies, were more detrimental to biological control organisms in field experiments, and had higher Environmental Impact Quotients at field use rates.Conclusions/SignificanceThese data bring into caution the widely held assumption that organic pesticides are more environmentally benign than synthetic ones. All pesticides must be evaluated using an empirically-based risk assessment, because generalizations based on chemical origin do not hold true in all cases.
Highlights
A public call for sustainability in agriculture has resulted in numerous government initiatives to develop environmentally friendly agricultural practices [1,2,3,4,5,6]
environmental impact quotient (EIQ) relies on data which is commonly available on MSDS sheets, incorporates the application rate of a pesticide, and is not site or pest-specific, so it provides a less biased estimation than other pesticide ranking systems used to quantify environmental impact [15,30]
We found a clear inverse relationship between field selectivity and EIQ for insecticides tested in this study when applied at field rates (Fig. 3), suggesting that EIQ rankings are relevant predictors of at least some in-field parameters for environmental impact, and our results strongly support the continued use of EIQ for ranking pesticide impact
Summary
A public call for sustainability in agriculture has resulted in numerous government initiatives to develop environmentally friendly agricultural practices [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Conventional and integrated agriculture is not as simple as it may initially appear [13]: each system is characterized by a suite of practices which are ideologically, rather than empirically defined [12], these systems are not mutually exclusive from each other [9,12], and vary from region to region depending on regulations [14]. Because of these variations, generalizations about the overall sustainability of one system over another are never universal [11]. Policy guiding the selection of pesticides often emphasizes natural products and organic-certified pesticides to increase sustainability, because of the prevailing public opinion that natural products are uniformly safer, and more environmentally friendly, than synthetic chemicals
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