From my understanding:
– pests don’t have perfect tolerance to pesticides, it’s just that some members of the species happen to be somewhat better at metabolizing the active substance found in the pesticide
– the active substance is only a small percentage of the pesticide, most of the pesticide is some kind of carrier oil and other inactive substances.
So, what prevents the manufacture of pesticides with much higher concentrations, much higher than any member of the pest species could ever metabolise? I understand that in open-air crops there might be considerations about collateral damage to bees etc, but this doesn’t explain why such high-concentration pesticides aren’t a thing in greenhouses.
In: 3
There’s nothing special about pesticides that make them only kill ‘pests’; after all, that’s an arbitrary definition we put on things we don’t like, just like weeds. Pesticide is basically a poison that’s just at a low enough potency/concentration that it’ll only *really* hurt insects, but if you up the potency suddenly it starts harming other animals like birds, native wildlife, or even us. This was the issue with DDT: sure it killed the hell out of bugs, but it fucked up birds exposed to it (or that ate bugs poisoned by DDT) and caused birth defects.
People also don’t have perfect tolerance to pesticides, and it defeats the point of growing the produce if it’s inedible in the end.
Pests are insects or animals that have a detrimental effect to the crops or to our houses etc. The important part is that they are insects or animals, and WE are animals too.
So the majority (if not all) of the pesticides that are designed to kill insects and/or animals, kill us too if we ingest quantities of them that correspond to our body weight. Everything is in quantities that are just about enough to kill small insects or small animals (mice, etc.), and larger quantities become dangerous to humans and bigger animals.
Stuff that’s released to the environment, whether it’s trash, carbon dioxide, smoke / smog, or pollution, it doesn’t go away. We need water, we need air from the environment, and the plants we grow for food suck toxins out of the ground and out of the water and store it inside themselves, then we eat these plants and we get the toxins in OUR bodies.
Pesticides are toxic chemicals, and the more they’re used, the more they end up in our bodies to cause cancer, sickness, and/or death. Higher concentrations are bad.
because they’re not only bad for pests, but also us. and pretty much everything else.
you generally dont want them in concentrations that are so high they dissipate before you harvest the plant.
also at a certain point it isn’t cost-effective to increase the dosage 10 times to kill another 0.5% of pests.
Latest Answers