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Interrelationships Between Agricultural Chemicals and Environmental Quality in Perspective¹

ABSTRACT

A general discussion is provided on the role of agricultural chemicals in assuring a reasonable supply of food and fiber to the American people. These chemicals were inevitable when intensive agriculture was developed under conditions that favored depletion of the soil and an increase in crop and livestock pests. Every pest-averting device such as the use of resistant crops, modification of the environment, promotion of antagonism and parasitism by other forms of life, and rotation of crops must be employed as skillfully as possible. The use of chemicals becomes a form of crop insurance that must be applied when changes in the environment upset these biological control devices. Since such chemicals will have to be used in the foreseeable future it becomes necessary to design more specific, safer materials that present little hazard to the environment and nontarget subjects. Some changes in the objectives of chemical research should be less dependence upon the lipid solubility, that leads to magnification to toxicity in a food chain, more specificity of action to reduce adverse side effects, greater susceptibility to degradation by soil microorganisms and oxidation, and use of nontoxic compounds that readily convert to toxicants in the presence of the pest or host metabolic processes so as to avoid heavy deposits of potentially toxic chemicals.

¹ Paper presented Dec. 28–29, 1970, in Chicago, Ill., at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Section "O" Agriculture Symposium on "Agriculture and the Quality of the Environment in the Seventies."

² Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, Yonkers, New York 10701.