Session 5 – Risks and benefits of pest management methods including pesticides, genetic engineering and classical biocontrols

COVID-19 Protocols – As the main conference organizer, the Mitchell Center is required to have conference attendees follow University of Maine System COVID-19 protocols. Please go to the COVID-19 page for more information.

Morning Session: 8:30AM-10:30AM

Arnold Room (First Floor, North Wing)

Session Chairs:
Gary Fish, Maine Dept. of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, Augusta, ME
Fred Dillon, City of South Portland, South Portland, ME

This session will cover the risks and benefits of pest management methods including diverse technologies such as genetic engineering, pesticides, and classical biocontrols. These technologies are often misconstrued in the popular media and grouped together as providing serious environmental risks without peer-reviewed scientific data to back up the claims. Decisions are sometimes made based on product toxicity without regard to the potential for exposure. The future of sustainable farming, landscaping and forestry, including urban forestry, may hinge on these new technologies. This session will explore whether the potential benefits outweigh the real human and environmental risks as we strive to meet society’s sustainability and water quality needs.

Session Format
The format for this session will be for featured speaker Kevin Folta to give the main presentation followed by a shorter presentation by state horticulturist Gary Fish. A question and answer session will round out the session.

A recording of this session is available.

Fighting Agricultural Disinformation with Trust Building

Kevin M. Folta
Horticultural Sciences Dept., University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

The challenges to agriculture arise at an ever quickening pace. Increasing weather extremes, insufficient labor, competition, low prices, loss of arable land, new pests and pathogens, and a suite of other issues challenge domestic food production. However, new technology has been created at a parallel pace to meet these challenges. A problem emerges when we don’t possess the social license to apply the technologies devised, and while we may have a solution, it remains unused. Over the last three decades genetic technologies have demonstrated that precise engineering of crop traits can have economic benefit, with increased environmental sustainability. It is not all positive, as specific challenges have emerged with application of new genetic technologies. The application of these technologies has spawned an industry created to ensure its failure, whether by deceiving disinformation in social media or by direct poisoning of public sentiment through traditional media. Our job as academic, industry and government scientists should be to inform the public, but do so through a specific means of trust building through popular communication channels. This talk will discuss the new technologies, its applications, risks and benefits, and strategies to communicate it more effectively with public audiences.

Is Keeping All the Tools in the Toolbox Essential to Our Future?

A slide presentation from this talk is available.

Gary Fish
State Horticulturist, Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, Augusta, ME

Given the enormous pressures on agriculture, forestry and public health, such as high population growth, climatic events and shrinking natural resources, one huge global sustainability challenge is meeting increasing food, fiber and forest product demand (over 9 billion people by 2050), while ensuring a high rate of productivity, reducing natural area conversion and minimizing environmental impacts. The use of new breeding techniques, pesticides and biological controls can play a key role in allowing plant breeders, foresters and growers to meet the needs of a very diverse and changing world. As with any forest or crop management method, there are risks and benefits. The perceived risks of genetically altered plants, pesticides and biological controls are regularly published, but the actual known risks and potential benefits are rarely given much light. Are these technologies friend or foe? Will banning them prevent future scientific discoveries that could make life on earth more sustainable and reduce the potential for degraded water quality?

This presentation will explore some of the following:

• Precise and rapid alteration of crops to boost yields and enhance nutritional quality
• Improved crop & vegetable resource efficiency and reduced input needs
• Plants with drought tolerance or flood resistance
• Changes in composition of nutrients in plants (i.e. vitamins or fatty acids)
• Food crops with reduced allergenicity (for example wheat without gluten)
• Plants with pest resistance (insects, mites, pathogens, weeds, etc.)
• Return of functionally extinct species (American chestnut)
• Biological controls to preserve highly threatened species (Ash trees)
• The continued role of properly used pesticides

A Q&A will follow the talks.