Learn About Our Farming
Protecting Our Food Supply Through Safe Practices
For those consumers who are not aware of life on the farm in Monterey County, the use of crop protection tools (pesticides and herbicides) along with fertilizers might be a bit confusing or even concerning. But for our Monterey County farmers who grow our fresh food products, these tools are essential to raising healthy, abundant, and marketable crops while caring for the land that sustains year-after-year production.
Let’s dive into why farmers utilize crop protection tools and fertilizer inputs, and how these play an important part of feeding a growing population, both across our nation and around the world. Farmers are growing these crops using the most ethically, safe, regulated, and sustainable practices to protect our environment and our soil resources.
Monterey County farming operations use both organic and conventional practices, with new regenerative practices mixed in. There are over 73,000 certified organic production acres in Monterey County, comprising amost 20% of the overall production value.
California has the most extensive regulatory structure of any state related to the use of crop protection tools; modern crop protection products go through extensive scientific testing before certified for field use (“Health and Environmental Effects of Pesticides,” National Library of Medicine, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). These modern chemistries are friendlier to the environment and wildlife, replacing older chemistries that were harsher to both.
All growing crops need a fertilizer boost; as crops grow, they pull nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and some heavy metals from the soil. These are essential for crop health just like vitamins are important to the human body. Soils alone cannot replace these nutrients quickly to support healthy plant growth, so farmers must supplement their soils with fertilizer to replenish what a crop takes up while growing (“Organic vs. Synthetic Fertilizers,” EOS Data Analytics, www.eos.com). This is the simple agronomics of producing a healthy food crop.
Protecting our crops is also protecting our nation’s food supply. Similarly to how weeds can choke out the best of backyard gardens, they tend to overrun our agricultural fields also, robbing soil of nutrients and moisture from the crop. Herbicides allow farmers to protect their fresh food crops from these invasive weeds that would otherwise reduce product quality and yields per acre. Similarly, insecticides protect crops from unwanted and destructive pests that can eat, infect, or damage the crop to the point where it cannot be harvested for market.
Without crop protection tools, a CropLife report estimates that crop yields would decrease by 30% to 40% globally due to pests and diseases (“How Insecticides Are Shaping the Future of Agriculture,” CropLife, www.croplife.com). Crop protection tools help farmers to reduce the food production losses in the field by yielding more food per acre, thus using less acreage to grow fresh food crops. Beyond improving yields, crop protection tools help reduce labor and fuel consumption per acre, simply by reducing the number of passes through a field by tractor or farmworker (“Why Farmers Use Pesticides and Herbicides,” Nebraska Corn Board, www.nebraskacorn.gov).
There are two types of fertilizers available to farms:
- Synthetic fertilizers that are made in a laboratory that offer quick and targeted nutrients to growing plants (commonly known as conventional farming).
- Organic fertilizers that come from natural sources such as compost and manure, both acting more slowly in soils (commonly known as organic farming, which requires a certification process).
While organic fertilizers are the choice of some farms, these are typically less efficient and more expensive as a crop input. Both conventional and organic farming have a place in today’s food production system and retail supply chain markets.
“Many farming operations grow both conventional and organic crops, to fill the marketplace needs,” notes Norm Groot, Executive Director of Monterey County Farm Bureau.
Farmers aim to strike a balance when utilizing crop protection tools and fertilizers. First and foremost, these tools are expensive to apply to growing crops; the bottom line is impacted with each application. Farmers aim to optimize production practices that limit the use of these inputs and their costs. The balance comes when growing to meet the demand of the marketplace is also protecting the natural resources for future crop production as the generations progress.
Farmers are indeed the environmentalists when balancing their working lands and producing a crop yield for market. If the soil suffers, so does future production, and a farmer’s livelihood.
Many crops grown in Monterey County rely on fumigants for a healthy start and lifecycle. To control soil pests and diseases, which are prevalent in fresh food crop production, farmers utilize fumigants prior to planting new crop cycles. It’s important to note that farmers and their families live, work, and go to school in the same communities where they farm; producing crops safely includes protecting their employees, neighbors and the environment. Learn more about the use of fumigants here.
Investing in soil health, irrigation efficiency, crop rotation, conservation tillage, and new practices and technology is not just good environmental stewardship, but an investment in good business. Farms need to stay financially viable and yield a return on their investment in each year’s crop production; this provides the capital to invest in new equipment, technology, and practices.
The consumer needs to understand that crop protection tools and fertilizers are not a short cut to a healthy yield; these are the tools to a complex, thoughtful, and intense approach to modern farming in Monterey County. Farmers live on their land, care deeply for that land as prior generations have demonstrated, and that land feeds us all. The testimony is found in the success of our farms over the past 160 years here in Monterey County.