When you know and accept this, you can learn how to control insects without the use of toxic sprays.
A worldwide revolution in agriculture occurred in 1975 when Dr Phil Callahan published his book “Tuning into Nature” subtitled “Infrared radiation and the Insect Communication System”.
After many years of research together with 16 other researchers and 7 entomologists, he finally wrote the book recording their breakthrough studies. Their research showed that sick plants emit a particular infrared frequency signal which is picked up by the insects which then come to destroy the plant. Insects are thus doing their job as intended by nature and removing unhealthy plants. Insects rarely attack a healthy plant. Universities and major agricultural institutes still do not pay any significance to these studies; journalists seldom report his findings and chemical companies certainly do not reveal what Callahan discovered and reported in his book.
The current practice in conventional farming is to kill the attacking insects thus allowing the unhealthy plants to grow. However there are disadvantages of spraying a commercial chemical. These are:
1. They are toxic to human operator
2. They are toxic to the livestock
3. They can set back the pasture or crop to some degree.
4. They can and do set back the important fungi in the soil as insecticides are known to double up as a fungicide. This allows soils to become bacteria dominated. These soils with reduced fungi grow lower succession or lower order plants which are the common weeds.
So by trying to kill the insects the farmer in fact can be setting back the capacity of the soil to deliver the nutrients to the plant, favouring conditions for weeds rather than crops and also providing the conditions for weaker plant growth.
There is a better option to chemicals and that is to lift the energy and vitality of the plant by using a plant nutrient. This can be fish fertiliser, seaweed fertiliser, liquefied worm castings, compost teas, even plain molasses or sugar has done the job.
The benefits for using plant nutrients include:
1. The operator uses a safer product
2. Grazing stock benefit and there is no withholding time.
3. Crops do better and cease to give off stress signals to insects, therefore insects disappear.
4. The soil is helped rather than hindered ensuring future healthy growth and reducing inputs.
In biological farming there are countless stories of farms which experience no insect attack while the neighbouring crops are decimated by insects such as red legged earth mites and locusts. These insects cause considerable production loss in both pasture and cereal crops. But when a farmer understands why insects attack, he can take remedial action and help strengthen the plant health. Plants, in many cases, can grow through the stress stages with the insects disappearing in a later growth stage. If considerable production loss is evident, for example where pasture quantity is crucial for milk production, intervention may be necessary.
