Are we falling into the trap set up by anti-pesticide lobby by advocating agro-ecosystem analysis (AESA)-based approach for pest management?
Sometime back, I commented upon the zero budget natural farming that lets crops grow naturally with least material intervention, more particularly bereft of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. The advocates of organic farming or natural farming believe that nature balances itself over the period of time and produces enough for its inhabitants. They do recommend the decoctions of urine, cow dung, fermented products that include extracts of plants that grow in wild, plant extracts per se, often in-edible for human consumption. Unfortunately, these products have never been tested for their safety to humans and animals, nor their impact on environment talked about. Being natural, these are assumed to be safe. Of late, these products are pushed under the pretext of agro-ecological engineering or agro-ecology as a basis of crop pest management. It is well known that agro-ecology is a basis of farming, and crop resilience has limits of growth if ecological parameters are stretched far and
