PhD student University of Wisconsin Madison, Wisconsin
Conservation biological control (CBC) is an approach to farm and landscape management that seeks to conserve beneficial insects and minimize pests. CBC is limited not only by ecological knowledge, but also social, economic, and political forces. In particular, likely mismatch between the values of ecologists and farmers along with poor characterization of the structural conditions that produce particular pest management regimes hinder progress in CBC adoption. Overcoming these limitations requires integrating the study of people’s relationships with their environment and non-human beings into research on biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. Here I seek to address these knowledge gaps through semi-structured interviews with Wisconsin farmers across a gradient of landscape and management contexts.
In 2021 and 2022 I interviewed grain, dairy, and beef farmers who varied in their cropping system diversity (2 to 7+ crops grown), use of agrochemicals (conventional and organic farms), and amount of unfarmed habitat in the surrounding area (10 to 80%). I asked them about the insects on their farm, how they manage them, and whether they practice landscape thinking when making management decision. I found most of farmers tended to focus on a narrow range of pest species, with some also highlighting charismatic beneficial species such as the monarch butterfly. Almost all emphasize the primacy of economic factors (both individual profitability and structural policy/market conditions) in driving the decisions they make about what and how to farm. Finally, very few considered the landscape (i.e. unfarmed habitat or neighboring farms) relevant for management decisions.
