Why Diversity Fixes Your Pest and Soil Problems

0:00 [Music]

0:11 So there will be a little bit of repeat between this presentation in the earlier one but what I wanted to talk about more was about services remember in six produce things right we can use these as tools and I want to talk a little bit more about that so I'm not going to repeat myself too much you guys already heard about that.

0:38 I think that a lot of this comes down to the question that we all really need to be asking ourselves everybody in this room right: why are you here? There's a lot of ways to make money right. I don't think making money is why you guys are farming right, is that an accurate statement? So there's something else driving you, something else getting you out of bed in the morning.

1:19 I know for me it was: we've come through a real crossroads over the last couple of years where I've had to ask myself that question why. An awful lot, for those of you who may read the news, we made a little bit of a splash with calling out the USDA suppression of science as it pertains to risk assessment of pesticides. And amidst this whole trauma it became abundantly clear that my life would have been a hell of a lot easier if I just said I'm going to count ladybug spots and published two papers a year for the rest of my life. I mean that's what I could have done and had a comfortable career as a federal scientist. But if there comes a point where something else is going on, and sometimes you have to take a stand and stand up for what you believe is right, and this planet is facing some serious crises right now, some very serious problems.

2:37 Climate change, pollution, human health issues, autism, dietary intolerances, yes, many many different things that are going on right now. Many of these issues that we are currently facing are directly tied to how we are producing our food. We are causing these problems. The data is very clear in this matter: biodiversity is in decline. The planet is currently facing the worst mass extinction event the planet Earth has ever experienced. We are losing species at an alarming rate. This is bigger than the dinosaurs. This is not a bee problem, you guys learn about the bees right, I talked about the bees, this is not a bee problem. We are losing entire habitats, wetlands. Let's tile it. I want a farm. I want a farm fence post, a fence post, I want all of that damn wetlands out of.

3:54 Here so I can crop it, boy that's dumb. That is short-sighted folks. We need those wetlands, grassland habitats. What happened to the Prairie? For about 1% of what it used to be, insect communities are gone, going, going. I've been watching it happen. Butterflies, birds, bats, bees. We are losing species at an alarming rate.

4:27 Meanwhile, our food production system currently occupies 40% of the terrestrial land surface of our planet, and it is getting simplified more and more simplified. And the only way as we eliminate the biodiversity from this habitat, the largest biome on planet earth, as we eliminate the biodiversity, what do we do? We replace all of the services that used to occur within this particular habitat with agrochemicals, replacing Mother Nature with technology. What does this look like? It's easy to think about this as you're driving about your own farm, about the landscape as you're driving through, but when you look at it from space, things it's staggering, right?

5:26 OK, what do we have here? What a pretty little picture we've got. Green is soybeans, blue is corn, red is cotton. 9% of our country are 3 plant species. 3. All of them are genetically modified to produce BT. All of them are sprayed with glyphosate, often times multiple times a year. All of them are treated with neonicotinoid seed treatments whether they are needed or not. And all of them are maintained with chemical fertilizers. When you read on the side of a jug before you apply this, warn your beekeeper to move his hives because it's going to kill them. The beekeeper who's living in this matrix is like, where the hell am I supposed to move them to, right?

6:20 Right. This has led to brittle food production systems. This has led to reduced biodiversity. Brittle food production systems that feel every perturbation in markets. So that weird, currently I mean it's about what, 340 or something like that for a bushel of corn right now and it cost $4 to produce it. That doesn't make much sense. Agrochemicals are an addiction, folks. By their death definition, the more you need, use, the more you need. We've been down this road before, first in the early days of insecticides. We use what was called Paris green, the arsenicals. We're still finding those, still same pesticides in our fruit trees. That was replaced, that was replaced by a Nobel laureate came up with DDT, Hermann Muller. They gave him the Nobel Prize for medicine because he discovered DDT, and we sprayed it, man. We sprayed these early chemistry's.

7:34 Everywhere and what did we learn? After about eight years we had pests that were resistant to the chemicals that we were trying to use against them, and we were finding environmental and human health costs. Those chemistries were safe by the best technology that we had to evaluate their safety. They were safe, all right. It wasn't until much later, until our understanding of the natural world and how these chemistries act, did we understand that they were causing problems.

8:15 What did we do? We changed the way that we were producing our crops. We decided some hippies in California decided that it was a bad business decision to kill every bug in your field. Just because you had a pest didn't mean that it was economically viable to kill everything, to pay that money. And it sure did add that you should count bugs before you shoot, called integrated pest management. Know what's in your field first.

8:55 That was a paradigm shift because before that, this was IPM but it was insurance pest management, right? You bought those early chemistries as an insurance policy so you never had to look at those nasty old pests in your field. We recently have undergone a new paradigm shift. Whether you love them or hate them, BT crops were a paradigm shift. You no longer needed to worry about counting insects in your field. You could just buy this bag and the answer is all in it. It's an insurance policy. It's an insurance policy against having pests in your field. You never have to worry about it again.

9:44 Hey, BT worked great. Let's try neonicotinoid seed treatments. Let's put that on there too. We've returned back to these earlier days. We've been down this road. It doesn't work. It works for a while and then we pay for it for decades.

10:07 Because you guys, if you've got a pest in your field, understand that the pest is not the problem. The pest is the symptom of the problem. And if all you're doing is buying a jug in order to kill this particular outbreak without solving the underlying issues, then it's costing you money. That's a bad business decision is what it is. It's an insurance pest man. You are insuring that these seed companies and these chemical manufacturers have fat profits every year, all right? That's what you're insuring.

10:57 What is the problem? Lack of diversity and too much disturbance, right? We learned that in the last talk. Until you solve that problem, you're going to continue to have issues, all right. With that stage being set, let's talk.

11:17 About what biodiversity does. It's loading there it is. Usually I'm the first person to show the pet of the pile of cow poop. Luckily Alan preceded me there. What we're going to talk about now is dung removal. This is an important component of most rangeland systems. Cow poop is great but you need to get rid of it right. Those are the nutrients, that's next year's fertilizers right there.

11:51 Why is it so important? Pasture fouling. As you accumulate dung and it does not degrade, if you do not have the right biological communities in your pastures, then that pasture becomes unusable. If you do not believe me ask the Australians. They imported cows without importing the dung beetles along with them and they had horrible problems. There was actually a biological control effort where they had to search the world for dung beetles that they introduced into Australia in order to get rid of all of their cow crap pests.

12:30 Flies and Helmuth parasites both have a dumb living stage. If you're wondering why you've got worms in your cows, it's because your dung is not being cycled fast enough. You've got, I estimate, you've got about seven days before these parasites and pests end up completing their lifecycle and going back through the generation, the next generation, building up populations rather than reducing. So that's a narrow window we have got to get rid of these paths.

13:07 What to do? How do you get rid of poop? Well this pile of crap was not shot with a shotgun. Those holes are a good sign. If you've got holes in your cow turds, that's a good thing. We estimate the dung beetles alone provide 380 million dollars in services every year just in North America. That's a lot right? That's free, okay? That's free to you guys. They help cycle nutrients, they increase pasture quality, and these pests, they suppress pass.

13:45 So what we wanted to know is just one component of this. One of my graduate students actually, we're asking many questions but this is the one that Jacob's working on that I'm going to present right now. We wanted to know whether insects could control maggots in cow turds. So Jacob went out to a couple dozen different ranches along eastern South Dakota that spanned a range of different production practices including the use of ivermectin or not and we looked at maggot populations but also the insect communities. To do that, he took a golf cup cutter which is not its original intended use do not reveal.

14:32 What we do with their a product to the golf industry please you'll never want to come to blue sure. So then we take the soil core from the turd and then we bring it into the lab where we built this burlazy system. What happens is that we take that poo and soil and we put it into a cylinder and then we heat it up with a light bulb and then all of the insects that live inside of there go down and we collect them into this receptacle down here.

15:02 This by far is one of the stinkiest projects that Blue Dasher has ever done. It got to the point where we're putting in wet steaming cow turds into cylinders we're like we need t-shirts that say 'oops I got poop on the blank' because at some point in time fill in that blank. And at some point in time we have gotten poop on it, right? But we loved it nevertheless. We're crazy like that.

15:35 So this is a question of did ivermectin reduce maggots. So we divided our branches into whether or not they used ivermectin or not and then we counted how many maggots we found in each of these different ranches. What's going on here? It looks like basically there's no pattern at all, doesn't it? What does that mean? That means that ivermectin is not killing your maggots. It's not killing your flies.

16:10 In fact I observed this. I had to, I was watching the herd that we were looking at and there was flies on the cows and I'm like, I turned to Jacob, I'm like this is an ivermectin treated field right? And he's like oh yeah, no this is a pasture that's been treated with ivermectin. I'm like it's not working, it's not working.

16:32 Okay, so this begs the question then, what else can we do, right? If ivermectin limited success in these operations then what else would control it? And we turn to the insect community that was out there. All told, Jacob is now identified more than a hundred and fifty thousand insects. We have identified more than 150 species from cow crap in eastern South Dakota. That's a tremendous diversity of these. Only 25 species are dung beetles.

17:16 So we think about these communities and we think oh dung beetles are important right, and they probably are. But there's another a hundred and twenty five species that are living within those dung pads that are doing an awful lot, really a remarkable community to work with. So given that we've got this kind of diversity within our cow turds we wanted to know whether or not diversity could be related to function. This is one of my other master's.

17:47 Students, she's the one who did the corn study that showed that the profitability of proactive pest management was much superior to reactive pest management. And you see a very similar situation to our big corn study that we did. These are each corn fields. Right, as species diversity goes up, you see this reduction in pests.

18:07 We saw that in the last talk. I just kind of wanted to drive that point home. We wanted to know whether or not the same pattern was happening within cow poop. And to get there, this is a very complicated graph, so ignore most of this graph right now. All right, pretend it doesn't exist. So what we're looking for is that downward trend. This is species diversity. This is the number of maggots. Okay, and this is ivermectin treated and no ivermectin.

18:39 What we see in May is that in both of these cases the community has not responded well to the maggot populations. However, by June we're starting to see that in the ivermectin-free plot the community is driving those maggot populations down, whereas in the ivermectin-treated plots they're still uncorrelated. So the function of this, and then by the end of the season, you see that both of these—the ivermectin-treated community has caught up but they're both functioning according to plan.

19:18 That means that decisions made within your ranching operation that encourage diversity within your cow poop is how you're going to get rid of those maggots. Okay, this pattern is not just a maggot thing. It's not just in corn systems. It's the more that I've looked throughout our substantial list of databases that we've accumulated over the years, the more it becomes this same pattern that starts to pop its head up again and again and again.

20:15 So predation is another one of these functions of diversity. More diverse, or as diversity goes up, so too does the predation. We find this not just in cornfields, which is what I've talked at length about, but also in organic vegetable systems. We're seeing the same pattern. We're seeing this in granary weevil, which is seed predation in soybeans. When we look at the diversity of the granary community, it is positively correlated with how many seeds they're eating in those soybean fields.

20:52 To our other discussion point, grant abhors random wars, our seed feeders. Grande wars are weed control agents. Granta bores are nature's herbicides. We want them. A lot of people don't realize just how many seeds that insects consume, and we haven't done a good job of valuing that yet, but we're getting enough data that I think we can get there soon. Why are we seeds consumed? Well, seeds are abundant and seeds are nutritious. That's why we eat them, right? That's why we like seeds. We estimate that even in unproductive systems, like, or compared to natural systems, we see hundreds of thousands of weed seeds per meter squared or seeds per meter squared. That is a tremendously abundant resource. And then when we look at the nutritional content of these seeds, I went through in this book I wrote and I found as must way way too much literature on the food value of insect prey and of seeds. And what we did is I just kind of compared it. This is calories, proteins, lipids, fats, and carbs. And almost every case the seeds had higher nutritional value than insect prey, except for proteins where it was kind of, they were kind of tit-for-tat.

22:29 Their seeds are really nutritious. That's why insects would want to eat them. But seeds are also, and that, and that the fact that seeds are nutritious and abundant means that there are quite a few different species that like to eat them. And we've actually identified a lot of them. So what we did is we took seeds and then we put a protein on them. In this case it was rabbit immunoglobulin, there was a protein from rabbit blood. And then we put these seeds out into the environment, and then we collected a bunch of different insects and different species from there. And then we looked inside their stomach for that protein to see which of these insects had eaten seeds. And what we found was pretty amazing. Millipedes were one of our most frequent seed consumers up in our northern temperate habitats. Crickets, you want crickets out in your fields. Isopods, Roly Polys, yeah, you want these things all in balance, of course. Other crickets, and then ground beetles. These little ground beetles down here that I was showing you earlier that we're eating the caterpillar, they're actually seed feeders as well. So a lot of these insects are really opportunistic feeders. They take whatever they can get as it comes about, and seeds are certainly one of those things. However, seeds are not just a sitting.

27:12 Cows require bacteria in order to digest a lot of the food that they're eating, so we decided to try to test whether or not the bacteria of these beetle stomachs was influencing how much they're consuming as far as seeds. Okay, so this is the number of food items that were consumed when we fed these beetles eggs and seeds. This is when we fed them antibiotics, we cleared them of their bacteria. And this is when we allow those bacteria they'll stay put. When we cured them of their bacteria, they ate eggs at a similar rate regardless of whether or not. So in this case, the eggs were a good indicator that our control system was in place. But when we cleared them of their bacteria with antibiotics, we find that there is a 50% reduction in how many seeds are actually being eaten.

28:08 Further multivariate analyses revealed that Enterococcus faecalis, when it is present in the stomach of these beetles, the beetle is a grain of. Or when it's absent, it's a predator speciation. Speciation is being driven in part by the symbiosis that these organisms have with their bacteria. Right, so you can look at a particular beetle species and be like oh good or bad or whatever, right. But depending on what bacteria are present within that beetle, it could be a much different organism. Pretty cool, huh? The complexity of the natural world is profound.

29:00 So what effects these, what effects symbionese insects stomachs? Remember that, remember Ryan's study where he looked at the prairies and the pastures and the cornfields and he looked at how many species were living in there, and there was only 25% of the species in quarter of 25% of the original species occurred within cornfields. Well, he also looked inside the stomachs of the crickets that were living within those different habitats, and he found that the symbiont that were living within the stomachs of these things were also significantly reduced by living in cornfields. This is actually published now. Why is that important? Because the bacteria are dictating the services that those organisms can provide. So right, reducing diversity, you're not only reducing the number of species that are living within your crop field, but also the jobs that they can do.

30:11 Because biodiversity isn't just about what we can see, it's also all of the little crap that's influencing everybody else within that system. Diversity and insect function, right? We're seeing these consistent patterns, and there are a lot of diversity, but we're we have a very low perception of just how much diversity is even is in.

30:43 Even our best studied system, but we started a look at that. So here we've got this is Mike Bredesen, he's being held by a small Asian girl, he looked in sunflowers, found 467 species. He's my PhD student right now. Cornfields we've got 382 species, wheat 103, 127, 150, and dong 150. Right now it looks like we've got more bugs in our cow poop than we have in our soybeans. That's a problem, innit?

31:16 All that complexity, how do you understand? How do you conceptualize what's going on? And we need to understand that these are networks, right? And we can turn to the social sciences in order to try to understand these things. Have you ever heard of 7 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon? Everybody in this room knows Kevin Bacon through 7 acquaintances or of acquaintances, kind of a thing. That's network theory. It's how we understand how information goes through the World Wide Web. It's how social structure is understood so that we can understand how to get information to infiltrate a community, so on and so forth.

32:01 We decided to try to use this approach to understanding how species networks work within our cropland and our understanding of these mostly comes from very simplified systems, right? We put up, we have a black plastic pot and then we stick a 1 species in there like an herbivore or on a plant and then we put in a couple of predators and who's eating who and all of that stuff. But these very simplified systems really ignore that complexity that's occurring within the natural world. It doesn't mean that they're without value, but it does mean that we need to be taking this out into the field where we can understand it more completely.

32:48 This is an interaction network within an actual cornfield that is a hairball, right? Look at that. What that is is each of these dots is a different species. So what if we pull out this one? What if this is our pest? What do we kill that thing? We find that it's connected to things that are connected to things that are connected to things, right? But that one decision that are focusing on just one species has implications for the entire community. How many of these species can we tug out of here before the whole web collapses on itself? Does the complexity of this bowl of spaghetti noodles influence the function of that community? Another great question. I already talked about this. Know now, shoot, yeah, this really sucks. All right, yeah, so it turns out, turns out that the

33:56 When you look at what ends up happening is when I tug out all of the major components out of this thing we see that the communities that have very low pest abundance have very high connectivity. There's a big old big tight ball of string right, but this is a community with very high pest abundance and you see that there's almost no connections there. It's broken. The community is broken and that's what leads to your pest population.

34:43 Community structure and pests. It's not just having the diversity in there, it's also the complexity of the interactions of the species that are there that drives whether or not you're going to have pest population. So what do you do about that? You get as much diversity into your system and you get out of the way.

35:07 The bee problem we've seen scientists and honeybee farmers and stakeholders and policymakers and each of them has their smoking gun right. It's the insecticides that are killing the bees. No, it's the varroa mite. The varroa mites killing the bees, the past that's sucking the blood right out of these things. Now it's a super virus, it's a super virus that's coming through and it's killing all of the bees. No, there's not enough flowers, that's the problem. All of these are related to one thing: a lack of diversity in our food production system. Until we solve that, you solve this. You get diversity back in there that provides nutrition and it diminishes the effect that makes the bees healthier to resist insecticides because you're not going to need as many insecticides. You also reduce the ability of these bees to resist things like pests and diseases. Healthier bees.

36:25 So we decided to look at this landscape. This is Brookings County. In the center of each of these dots we put a beehive cluster and then we looked at the landscape complexity around each of these beehives. That's what these pie graphs are. We went out about three kilometres and then we characterized what kinds of plant species based on the spatial imagery from satellite imagery and we were able to characterize the landscape matrix in which each of these hives was located. Then we took the bees out. This is work done by my postdoc Chrissy Mograine and colleague Tatiana Rand who still works for the USDA out in Montana.

37:18 Did a colorimetric assay where we ground up the bees and we looked at their nutritional status thinking that that nutritional status just like with us how healthy we are will dictate how resistant we are to pests. This is the percentage of crop tool and this is the amount of glycogen lipids and proteins carbs fats proteins in those bees bodies. What we find is as we cropland the nutritional status of the bees decline as you increase perennial habitat within that landscape matrix the status the nutritional status of the bees increases.

38:03 Folks this is not a bee problem. You still heal the soil the bees are going to be just fine. It's got to start with the soil. It's got to start there and that requires that we need to change our perception when you see a pest outbreak within your fields that is your field screaming out to you that there's an issue. Don't just silence that message right. Fix the problem.

38:35 This is my son standing way too close to a raging Columbian river but it illustrates the diversity right. Diversity in the natural world is incredible and whenever we try to replace it with these agrochemicals we're always put back into our place.

39:01 Research and regenerative agriculture. We've got what you saw here today. I don't know that people realize it but what you saw here today probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to get right. That's what research costs. And when I say that to people they're kind of like but we already knew the diversity was important why did we have to have data in order to support that what we already know right. And the reason is is because because I said so only gets you into the white house right. It may be good enough for that but in a rational world we really need to be having data-driven compelling discussions and right now if you want to support the current paradigm and plant monocultures for the rest of your life you know what there is a ton of data that says that screen. What you're doing is right good job just keep going that route. We're going to fix all of these little issues that you keep on running into. But if you want to change how we're thinking about things that's where the innovation and the science has to come into play. That's what we're trying to give you guys all right.

40:25 Thank you so much for listening. Thanks to all of our supporters. Thanks to my team and go to our websites if you want to learn more about us. That's all I got.