How do organic farmers deal with pests?
… Though traditional pesticides may help in evening out the odds, there are other alternatives to combat rootworm despite its adaptation to the corn hybrid. Steiner, for one, has advocated “starving” the rootworm by depriving it of its food source, and advising farmers to rotate their crops from corn.
Crop rotation, however, is not likely to prove popular among farmers who take advantage of some $5 billion in government subsidies per year, doled out regardless of crop prices or yields
Corn is by far the largest recipient of yearly crop subsidies in the US, a policy which has been sustained in part due to corn ethanol production, which critics say is not a viable energy policy, and which has kept the price of corn so low that manufacturers of processed foods in the US habitually replace sugar with high fructose corn syrup.
Organic farmers use a variety of conventional pesticides that are licensed for use under the somewhat arbitrary “organic” labelling regs. Insects, by the way, develop resistance to conventional pesticides just as they do to biotech traits. As a matter of good stewardship, farmers need to rotate crops and employ varied control measures whether they are farming conventionally or organically.
Bt provides an illustrative case. Bt, a soil bacterium that produces bug killing proteins, is a naturally occuring insecticide and historically was widely used as a spray in both conventional and organic farming. It is considered preferable to many other common pesticides because it is highly specific in its effects, is less toxic, and causes little or no collateral damage to “innocent bystander” organisms. Monsanto figured out how to insert the gene for the desired protein into corn, soybean, and cotton seeds. The anti-GMO hysterics have fits about this. But I would guess that not one frenzied activist in a million understands that organic farmers still routinely spray the stuff. And the people who make money off the scare campaigns aren’t going to tell them.
As far as Bt is concerned, the only thing at issue is the delivery system. Engineering the Bt into the plant provides a much more precise, controlled, and limited use; biotech Bt only kills the rootworms trying to eat the plant. One would think that environmentalists would prefer this to spraying Bt, which broadcasts much greater quantities willy-nilly into environment. But that would presume that the activist groups were rational. Or honest. Or technically competent. Or interested in anything other than profiteering from hysteria and fueling left-wing demonologies about Evil Corporations.
My wife wroks with a man who used to certify farms to be organic.
He had a 32 page single spaced list of chemicals allowed to be used on organic crops.
Shot in the dark, but probably a neem oil extract. Some of the newer neem extracts can be fed to the plants to ward off critters that "bite" plants.