Ecosystem Diversity Prevents Insect Pressure with Jonathan Lundgren

The question that I always ask farmers that come up to visit is how often can you lose a crop and make more money than the neighbors do? And the answer is every single time when you're farming regeneratively Hi friends, I'm.

John Kempf, hosting this podcast. I am passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce fruit of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. There are many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems and how to develop regenerative agriculture systems. However, much of this knowledge and this information is scattered. It's found all over the place. Some of it has been published in peer reviewed publications, but there are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that has not been published and that hasn't been shared with many people. I started advancing EcoAgriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agricultural systems become adopted globally and become the mainstream, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared to. To help achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone while we have developed products at AEA that embody the principles of regenerative agriculture systems and make them easier for growers to apply this knowledge and these principles can be applied anywhere and when they are applied properly, they will always increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or ideas, topics that you would like for me to discuss, Please connect on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where my username is visionbuilder7 or you can also email me@john kempf.com I would very much like to hear from you and to hear your feedback. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and thank you very much for listening. Enjoy the show.

Words and phrases are powerful. Think about the phrase food allergies. Why have we come to accept as normal that people should be allergic to food? In this episode, Jonathan Lundgren brings a similar phrase to food safety. Jonathan brings an interesting perspective as a professional evaluator of pesticides and genetically modified organisms in agriculture ecosystems. We talk about how we have the potential and the capacity to develop agriculture ecosystems that are incredibly resilient and can produce crops that are completely resistant to insect pests that are present in the field I'm here with an agroecologist, entomologist, very respected researcher, and someone whose work I have been reading and following for some time. I'm very honored to have him here. Jonathan Lundgren. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast. We're very excited to have you. Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Jonathan, you've done some very interesting work looking at agroecology and the ecological implications of pest management strategies and some of the tools that we use today. You've had a really interesting journey. What are some of the memorable moments that led you to the spot where you are today? Can you tell us a little bit about your journey and your pathway? Sure. I was trained an entomologist, and a lot of times scientists are trained to focus in their study area and within their particular group to specialize. And I was no exception. I'm a predator ecologist, I guess, and I really studied. I really like lady beetles, so ladybugs as good predators, and we would study those. But the deeper that I dug into those, that organismal level, I started to ask questions that couldn't be answered at an organismal level. And so that forced me to start to expand my thinking about the research that I was focusing on and including more of. An. More of a community approach. And then the more I focused on insect communities, the more I realized that in order to answer some of the questions that we needed to be addressing, it required that I'd not just think about entomology anymore and start learning more about the agro ecosystem in general. And I still study insects an awful lot of. But I realize now that they're just. They're a good learning tool for telling us about the greater system rather than being an entity in themselves or isolated. When you speak of insects as being an indicator of a greater system, what are they telling you? What have you observed that surprised you? One major change in my thinking that kind of gets at your question is realizing that I can't be focusing on one particular group of insects. We all want, you know, a dipstick to tell us whether our practices in soil health are working right. What I came to understand the more we researched this topic is that insect communities were an entity that we needed to be focusing on rather than individual indicators. Insect communities were so dynamic, and they changed pretty dramatically. But at the same time, all of those changes were really representing key niches. The diversification of that community allows that community to function as we change the habitat or the farmland, you know, so that there's always somebody sitting in each piece of the puzzle. And that's where biodiversity really comes into play. That was what was so surprising, just how important biodiversity within our agro ecosystems really is. We need life in all of its forms, don't we? That we do. What. What did you observe that really drove this point home for you? We started at bioinventory cornfield. A lot of the work that I did when I first started with the usda, I began my career as a scientist with usda. I swore that I wasn't going to work on corn because everybody, a lot of entomologists worked on corn at the laboratory that I was working on. But then. And it was always this crop that, you know, I just like, oh, geez, you know, I want to work on something different, you know. But the more I dug into it, I look back at a career of 20 years in entomology and in ecology now, and it's like, God, a lot of that was working in corn. So corn has been the system that really opened my eyes to the importance of diversity. And what happened was that we kind of landed this little grant to study communities in corn, like insect communities, and how landscapes affect those communities and the resilience of those communities to invasive species in cornfield. And one thing led to another. We led this whole team. Part of it was entomologists, and then the other half was these economists from all over the world. My colleague in the project was an economist. We went out, we surveyed these 53 corn fields all over eastern South Dakota and every cornfield. We applied the same method. Then we looked at all of the species that were living on corn plants, all of the insect species. We collected them up, and then we brought them back to the lab. And it was this huge, monumental effort. Right? This was a lot of work. Ended up identifying, by the end, probably hundreds of thousands of insect species or specimens down to species level. Tons of work. And the more I dug into it, the more I. It opened my eyes to the fact that this has really never been done before. I mean, entomologists always just focus on the pest and maybe a couple of key natural enemies of the pest. But we've never really looked at the actual community in itself in all of its glory, because it is. It's so much work to get this data. But we did it. And in looking at the data, the patterns in the data became so clear that when we had more insect species within a cornfield, there just wasn't pests. We did not have pest problems anymore. And at the same time, there was a couple of other Papers that were starting to come out that were suggesting that this diversity was. Or lack of diversity was really important in creating pest problems. And then I look at the system and how we produce our crops right now. If diversity is what we're after, that man, our production practices are just absolutely perfect for creating pest outbreaks. Yeah. I can completely relate with your desire to not work with corn because it's a dominant crop, it's well studied to some degree, and it's a relatively simplistic crop compared to growing, say, tomatoes or peaches or nectarines. But to your last comment, it's such a dominant crop in such a broad region throughout the Midwest. I mean, in the state of Iowa, any crop that is not corn or soybean is considered a specialty crop. Alfalfa hay is a specialty crop, as are oats and everything else. Isn't that amazing? That's pretty amazing. I kind of. I can justify working on it in my own mind by just saying, well, if we can make changes to corn, think of the footprint geographically that we would have in terms of changing landscapes and stuff like that on our own farm. I don't grow corn, so. And I. And I don't advise people to grow corn either. Yeah. The reality is that for many growers today, it makes very good economic sense to grow crops other than corn. But that's. That's another conversation. You, you mentioned that when you had increased insect diversity and a diverse population of insects, you had no pest pressure. What do you believe the mechanisms are for producing that shift? We've known that putting up more plant species into a habitat tends to result in fewer pests. And there's two general hypotheses for what drives this, and they are the natural enemies hypothesis, which says that as you increase plants, you increase the number of predators of pest species, and so that predation ends up being a downward pressure on the pest populations. And then the other idea, resource concentration theory, which is by including more plant diversity into a system, that you are diluting your focal crop within the vegetation community. And so maybe it's more difficult for the pests to find or it changes the plant in some way. I think both of those are probably at play within that study that showed that insect diversity was really important. But I think that it's so much more. More complicated than that. Scientists are just like everybody else in that we like to categorize things and we like to control them and we like to manipulate them and feel like we have, at the end of it, some intimate knowledge of what's going on. But the reality is, within an ecological system, and I've been working in it for a long time, the complexity become so staggering that I don't think that we can understand all of the mechanisms that are driving this. And that's a humbling experience for a scientist to have to admit that at some level we just have to get the hell out of the way and observe these systems rather than going out to our research farm and picking out every mechanism that we can think of as, you know, the quote unquote experts. What I ended up doing that was really important in my career and in us coming to these conclusions is I just started to go out to the farmers that were leading this regenerative agriculture movement and looked at what they were doing. I wasn't interested in controlling their farm. I just wanted to observe. And that's the way science used to happen, isn't it? Scientists would go out and they would observe the natural world and they would use that as the basis of developing hypotheses that then they could test. And nowadays science has totally shifted, right? Nowadays the scientific expert who's, you know, got their PhD and all of the pieces of paper that says that they're really bright, they sit down behind their computer and they write, you know, the sexiest grant proposal that they possibly can. And there's a total disconnect more often than between the science that ends up happening and the real world that ultimately farmers are living in. And so it's been a real challenge for us to innovate our food production system using science. It's a challenge for some growers as well. There are certainly some growers who are exceptional at being observant and seeing what is happening. Many farmers are very connected to their farm and what's happening around them in the natural environment. There is an incredible complexity. It's beyond the capacity of most of us, or perhaps any of us to comprehend all the interactions that are happening inside of a plant and with all of these various organism communications back and forth by whatever mechanism and by whatever means. But the beauty, the beauty within all of that complexity, and we can take comfort in the fact that it was designed to work, it's been developed to work, it works extremely harmoniously. To the point that you made earlier, is that in many cases, perhaps we just simply need to get out of the way and allow it to function as it was intended to. To me, it's humbling and it's also so exciting because when we kind of release that and we just start appreciating the Beauty and that sense of wonder at the natural world. My God, what an invigorating thing. You know, it is indeed. Earlier in our conversation, you mentioned the ecological implications of pest management and some of the tools that we use today. I'd love to hear a bit more about that. What, what are the impacts on our agriculture ecosystems of the pest management tools that we're so widely using today? And how can we, what are possible alternatives? What can we do better? Right. My research focuses on two general areas. One is risk assessment of pesticides and genetically modified crops and basically farm management practices in general. And then the other half is working on developing sustainable systems. So I've got quite a bit of experience in understanding the ecological risk assessment and the framework that we use for trying to determine whether a particular agrochemical or something is safe or not safe. I've advised, you know, the US epa. I've been on advisory panels for the European version of the epa, Brazilian government, you know, the United nations and their conference on biodiversity. And I, after 20 years of studying this, I can honestly say that when you look at the side of a jug and it says that it's safe, that is meaningless. You can go out and you can buy something off of the shelf and it's labeled and it's regulated. Nobody is watching. Nobody is watching. Risk assessment is incredibly hard. It's incredibly hard. And we can get closer to the mark with scientific approaches to risk assessment. But again, when you understand the complexity of the natural world, I mean, my God, right now, just for pesticides, there are a couple hundred different pesticides where the active ingredient is registered with the epa, and that's where most of the assessments are. You know, the safety assessments are focused is on those active ingredients. But whenever you add an adjuvant, maybe it's a sticker or a spreader or defoaming agent or, or whatever, it changes the toxicology of that active ingredient such that the risk assessment that you're actually performing on that active ingredient really does not hold much weight anymore. And when you think about all of the formulated products, there's 20,000 formulated pesticides in the US and each of those pesticides would require an ecological risk assessment independent. Each of them. Where's the budget for that? Yeah. And in addition to that, farmers will in many cases add additional adjuvants or spreader stickers or whatever the case might be in the, in the spray tank in addition to whatever's in the jug. That's right. And it changes everything. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have, you know, agrochemical, be they herbicides, be they fungicides, be they insecticides, I understand the utility of these things, but I think that we need to have a hell of a lot more respect than we do right now. The counties, my county in particular, should not be using a fire hose to be spraying the weeds on the road margins to kill thistles that may or may not be there. You know, just to burn up product. Come on. I think that farmers, when they buy a bag of seed and the seed isn't a natural color, it's either purple or blue or pink. Those are neurotoxins that they're putting onto their field. And very little of that is actually getting into the plant. Most of it is getting into your soil. And so when we start to think about what causes the pest and if it's a reduction in biodiversity, almost instantly when you buy a jug, you are counteracting nature's ability to. To fight that pest. You are causing pest problems that then you have to buy another jug in order to control. And it's this wicked treadmill that just keeps spiraling. So a couple of thoughts that emerge from what you've just shared. The first one is when you say that nobody is watching. What are the ecological implications of that? What I'm hearing you to some degree day is that we don't even understand the implications that these materials might have on soil health and ecosystem health. We don't have the first inkling of what the implications of these things, be it glyphosate, be it neonicotinoids, be it propoconazole, or be it the adjuvants, which sometimes are more toxic than the active ingredient in terms of its ecological effects. And we're not just talking about the soil, right? We're talking about human health problems. Farmers have the highest suicide rate of any career at this point in the US and we know that pesticide use is linked with depression. The science has been done on that. I mean, are we killing ourselves? Many of these agrochemicals, in my understanding, are also very exceptionally potent endocrine disruptors and estrogen stimulants. And they affect us and the natural world in many ways. The moment you begin talking about endocrine disruption, I mean, that shapes who we are and our personality and our thought patterns in ways things we don't fully aware of. But when you think about the cancer profile and cancers of various organs in the endocrine system or the reproductive system and the way that that has shifted, not just among farmers, but in general population, it leads me to ask the question 40, 50 years ago, perhaps 60 years ago, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, breast cancer, testicular cancer, prostate cancer, etc. All these that are connected to the endocrine system and the reproductive system were relatively small proportion of cancers. They were single digit percentage points. Today they're a majority when taken in aggregate. So will we ever determine whether pesticides are the cause of that? I don't know. I mean definitively the cause of it. I don't know. I think there's evidence that would support that. The carcinogenicity of various agrochemicals. Do we know that that's. Is that all? I don't know. That would cause these patterns that we're starting to see within our society. I'm not sure. But boy, my eyes are and ears are wide open. And if I can get away on my own farm without that stuff, then I'm gonna do my darndest to do that. And I think that perhaps more importantly, and this is the way that I kind of say it, I don't try to make it an ideological decision. You know, what if I can eliminate an input cost from my farming? That's just a good business decision. And so if I get up there and I tell farmers, you know, there's another way and it's probably going to save you money. And these other farmers are the ones who figured it out. That just makes a hell of a lot of sense, right? It does. So what, what is that other way? How do we develop agro ecosystems that reduce the need for insect management products and other agrochemicals? The regenerative farm movement is doing a heck of a good job of it. There's some principles that link these systems that are occurring all over the world. I've heard categories of these principles here, there and everywhere. I think fundamentally reducing or eliminating tillage from your operation is the first step. Never leaving bare soil is the next. Increasing plant diversity whenever possible on your field, be that crop rotation, be that, be that field margins, be that intercropping, interceding cover crops in your, in your crop rows. Those are all great practices that work. And then finally integrating animals and crops together in the same place at the same time. When a system has these elements, they don't have pests. That's a pretty, that's a really big statement. I think that is a resilient system. I can give you an example. I mean, so we have a field that's 12 years. No, till I didn't inherit a Farm that had degraded resource. I think it had been sprayed with 2,4D and dicamba to eliminate weeds. But otherwise it's had perennial grass cover for a long time. We had some weeds out there, right? I did use like maybe a half to a quarter rate of roundup or glyphosate in order to manage to just push down some of that vegetation. And then I plant our cash crop directly into that. It's an annual cash crop that's put into perennial grass cover. We use our. Until I had livestock, I didn't understand how I was going to control those, those weeds in any other way. And this spring I ended up high intensity grazing down that weed cover and then we planted directly in. I think when my flock is big enough of these hair sheep, I don't think I'm going to need herbicides anymore. So in that case, I'm actually seeing a problem, pest problem, right. That we're supposed to react to. I look at that pest problem as an opportunity. So when we had some farm tours, we had a tour of South Africans last year and they were, they're like, gosh, you got some weeds out here. I'm like, where? I don't see any weeds, I see forage. Right. I love it. And when you change your perspective on things, then, then you've got real opportunities when you don't negate the tools that you have in your tool belt. Well, I'm a cropper. I don't, I don't raise livestock. That's, you know, that's. Well, you know what, then you're eliminating a really valuable tool from your operation. Speaking of changing perspectives, I've observed that many growers and researchers shift their perspectives over time as they're on this journey. What is something that you believe to be true about modern agriculture that is different from the mainstream view as your perspective has shifted? When I got into entomology, I was adherent to the pest management principles, right? Like you go out, sample your fields, you wait until the pest reaches a certain density and then you react. What I discovered or was taught by farmers, regenerative farmers, is that if you design your system right, pest management should not be a reactive process. Pest management is a proactive process. You design a system correctly, then you don't have pests anymore. And if you have a pest outbreak in your field, that means that you're doing something wrong. That's a very, very different philosophy than you get from just about every extension agent or office, but also much of the infrastructure. So much of our current scientific Infrastructure is bent on making a broken system work, make it work, figure out how to take this system, change it ever so slightly so that farmers will adopt it on a huge scale and it'll get them by for a little while longer. Genetically modify the plants, you know, do that. Here's some seed coating. This will be easy to use and it'll make the system work. And then ultimately the system always re breaks. And what I was taught very recently is that we need to stop supporting a broken system and we need to reinvent how we're thinking about agriculture. It is intriguing how entrenched the current model has become to the point where it's become dogmatic and no longer is considering new ideas and new inputs, as might have been the case a number of decades ago. On a couple of occasions, you've mentioned that in addition to pesticide evaluations, you've also done evaluations of GMOs, and you've mentioned seed coatings a couple of times. I'd love to hear your perspective. What are the things that you've observed and learned about GMOs and how they impact ecosystems? Is there a role for genetic modified organisms in regenerative agriculture ecosystems? You know, I'm not fundamentally against genetically modified organisms any more than I am many other of the tools that are put out there to support the current system. I think that GMOs, seed coatings, pesticides in general, they're a symptom of a greater problem, and that problem is a simplification of our food system. So in my view, I guess I'm against GMOs because I just don't think they're needed. I think if we were to solve the underlying issue, which is a simplified system where it's all monoculture, thousands of acres of a single plant species that's genetically limited and selected to produce only large seeds, or maybe there's a few other small characteristics that we decided we wanted in that particular organism. Since we went down that road, we just predisposed ourselves for pest outbreak after pest outbreak. And really, within that context, if that's your system, dead soil and a monoculture, then you know what? You are absolutely reliant on agrochemicals and genetically modified organisms. That's the only way to produce, I think, efficiently within that system. But if you suddenly look at one of your neighbors who's farming regeneratively, and you see different approach, a different philosophy towards producing food, suddenly it's really empowering, right? Suddenly you're keeping more money on your own operation. Rural communities keep more money in their own communities. We suddenly have opportunities for stacking enterprises and industries that keep our kids back out on the farm. We're growing healthier food. Everybody wins in this situation. To me, that was something that's worth fighting for and changing my entire life and career trajectory for. One of the pieces that is really inspiring to me is understanding that we have such tremendous untapped genetic potential in the crop genetics that we have available today and have had available for the last 40 years that we have not yet tapped into, and speaking with experts and scientists in the field, Don Huber and Jerry Hatfield and many others, the implication, and in some cases the explicit statement, is that the reason we have this untapped genetic potential that we have failed to realize is because of our agriculture, ecosystems and our soil health. You can only push yields to a certain threshold by applying more nutrients and pesticides. You can't get past that point until you change the system. So there's all this discussion around needing to feed a rapidly growing world population, and there's a lot wrapped up in that, considering food waste and inequal distribution, et cetera, et cetera. But even leaving those issues on the side, it is very inspiring to me to think that just as an example, in fruit and vegetable production, there are some crops where yields have increased.