As my radio clicked on to wake me up one day earlier this week, I heard Dan Charles on NPR talking about the dilemma corn farmers are facing now. The corn rootworm has returned. This little pest gnaws away unseen at the roots of tall cornstalks. Unsuspecting farmers see no evidence until suddenly, when the damage gets severe enough, acres of damaged corn topple over in a gust of wind.

For about a decade it seemed that biotechnology (GMO corn) would solve the problem. New corn varieties were genetically engineered to make plants poisonous to the corn rootworm, eliminating the heavy applications of pesticides on which farmers had previously relied. But in the ten years since this type of biotech corn first went on sale in 2003, those crafty little rootworms have evolved to be resistant to the poisons it contains, and they’re now happily munching away at corn roots once again. 

(The situation alarmed some top experts so much that last March, twenty-two of them wrote to EPA laying out urgent actions that they say must be made in the way biotech corn is created and sold, to help address the issue.) 

What to do? Some farmers are turning to new versions of biotech corn. Others are slathering on high levels of pesticides, just as they used to. Both solutions are expensive, but the current high price of corn buffers the impact of the extra expense to some extent.

Crop experts like Dan Steiner, who advises farmers in Nebraska, recommend a third solution: a sustainable return to the old ways of farming. NPR says Steiner  tells clients to “starve the rootworms. Just switch that field to another crop. ‘One rotation can do a lot of good,’ he says. ‘Go to beans, wheat, oats. It’s the number one right thing to do.’ ”

The problem, other farming experts agree, is monoculture. By planting the same crops in the same fields year after year, farmers provide a steady supply of a pest’s favorite foods. Deny them food for one crop cycle, however, and goodbye corn rootworms. 

Rotating crops, of course, is what farmers have done for millennia. It was fairly simple in the old days, when the farmer’s only equipment was a horse and plow, and farmhands harvested the crop. Today’s farmers specialize. When all your knowledge and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment are optimized for corn, it’s not so easy to “just grow oats” one year.

Could the oat farmers and the corn farmers trade fields or equipment for a year? Could John Deere come up with convertible equipment that can be used on multiple crops, if the demand were there? With the recognition that we’re not farmers, Oldways and the Whole Grains Council urge that a sustainable and practical solution for farmers – one that marries the old ways of farming with today’s realities – be found to solve problems like this.

Otherwise, as insect expert Lance Meinke of the University of Nebraska told NPR, “if farmers plant just corn, year after year, rootworms are likely to overwhelm any weapon someday.” (Cynthia)