Following the broadcast of Farming Today on Wednesday 8th July The Good Gardeners and Sustainable Agriculture London would like to present our case for Farming for Insects.

The scale of mechanised farming

over the past 100 years has led to less people and less animals being employed on the land. This has resulted in bigger and bigger fields with bigger and bigger machinery which has resulted in less wildlife and less insects.

Cause of decline of bees and other insects

With the introduction of bigger and bigger fields for a bigger economy and to make food cheaper more and more hedgerows have been removed from fields to make way for the bigger and supposedly more efficient machinery. But is this more efficient? This has all led to the depletion of the soil and the natural micro biodiversity that is found within it. With the lack of these organisms that are found in healthy soil plants are more susceptible to pests and disease and therefor over theyears the use of chemicals has increased A. for fertilising the decreased productiveness of the soil and B. to combat the ever increasing onslaught of pests and diseases that occur due to soil depletion. These combined factors have resulted in up to a fifty percent reduction in our insect populations.

You cannot farm without insects

Without insects crops and trees cannot be pollinated, it not only bees that do this work there are so many other insects that do this job too. With the increase in the field sizes and the decline of hedgerows we have automatically reduced the border spaces around fields that the EU have been saying are so important for wild life and plant and insect species. This combined with the increased use of pesticides to battle the depleted soils has resulted in decimating the insect populations down to as much as half what they were.

Entimology cannot help

If the above paragraph is true then how can the science of entimology possibly be effective. Pesticides are not selective on the species they kill therefore introducing one species to predate another harmfull species is becoming less and less effective.

The Science of maximum soil remediation

Maximum soil remediation is achieved through the generation of the right fungi and bacteria in the soil. This then generates the entire eco system and soil food web that is essential to healthy soil. The Good Gardeners Technolgy can remediate even the poorest of soils through its ability to recycle the many forms of lost carbon in todays modern living and agricultural systems. It’s not just about carbon it is about Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium that is created and maintained and released in the soil for healthy crop production.

Mechanised farming

The very nature of mechanised farming means that through heavy cultivation that is practised in all forms of modern agriculture the soil bio diversity is reduced by the excessive disturbance of the soil structure and the use of chemicals. This in turn kills the organisms in the soil but also the natural fungi and bacteria that is found in living soil.

The Science of maximum soil remediation

With the cessation of heavy tillage and the elimination of the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides the soil will regenerate itself. But there is more to it than that. The right fertilising agents have to replace the chemical fertilising agents which will then automatically feed all the soil micro and macro organisms in the soil which will in turn replenish the food scource of all the insects and the birds too. The RSPB have announced that chemical farming has decimated our bird populations by half as well as the insect populations that we are now hearing about on BBC Farming Today.

Emergency farming techniques

Besides the organic farming methods that are practised in the UK, which allow such organic chemicals as sulphate of ammonia to kill slugs there is a more direct approach that does not require the six organic chemicals that are employed in organic farming and that is the technology that the Good Gardeners have developed to produce pest and disease free crops without the use of any chemicals “organic” or otherwise. This we have been doing for 60 years in the backwaters of England and Wales. This is all possible with the Science of our HH technology that generates the right fungi and bacteria and reintroduces them back into agriculture.