The use of biodiversity to control pests is feasible

Wang Yanjing is a farmer at Siyuan Family Farm in Shanting District, Zaozhuang City, Shandong Province, and has carried out a large number of meaningful ecological agriculture practices in recent years. He applied the author's concept of "restoration by the force of nature" to the restoration of degraded farmland ecosystems, and achieved success. Natural restoration has proved to be the most effective practice in the restoration of grasslands, forests, deserts, wetlands and marine degraded ecosystems, and has been widely promoted throughout the country, but is this approach feasible for agro-ecosystems with serious artificial disturbances? The author is also bottomless. Mr. Wang's experiment was successful, verifying that this theory can also be used for agro-ecosystem management. Wang always conducts experiments on his family's seventy or eighty acres of land, involving fruit trees, staple foods, vegetables, Chinese herbal medicines, etc., and the method used is the "six no's" that the author's team has long insisted on, that is, no pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, mulch film, hormones, and genetically modified seeds. After six, what kind of technology is used? That is, environmentally friendly ecological technologies, and there are many such technologies, the most critical of which is to restore the ecological balance. What is introduced here is the scientific biological control technology summarized by Mr. Wang, who put forward that "most of the current biological control emphasizes the release of a natural enemy to control a pest, and once it is released, it is a continuation of the pesticide plant protection thinking" The view is very novel and deserves serious consideration by academic experts; they use agricultural biodiversity to control successful insect outbreaks, and under the premise of not confronting species, to achieve pest-free and weed-free.

The use of biodiversity to control pests is feasible

Wang Yanjing

Siyuan Family Farm, Shanting District, Zaozhuang City, Shandong Province

Biological control has flourished in the world, and a lot of research has been done in China, and many natural enemies of insects and fungal agents have been developed, and they have begun to be applied in many fields such as agriculture, forestry, and grassland. However, in practice, we have found that there are some problems in traditional biological control, which limit the promotion of this technology. Specifically, it is manifested in: (1) biological control still continues the Western pesticide plant protection thinking, and the purpose of releasing natural enemy insects is to kill them; (2) the environmental needs of natural enemy insects in the agricultural ecosystem for self-breeding and self-breeding are not considered, and it is impossible to continuously control insect pests, which increases the cost; (3) the use of single natural enemy insects to control a pest, such as the use of ladybirds to control aphids, often can not achieve good results; (4) biological control can not come up with real and complete biological control success cases, lack of credibility, and it is difficult to promote.

In order to overcome the above shortcomings, we carried out an improved experiment in the Zaozhuang Shanting Area, the theoretical basis of which is that plants and insects have a symbiotic and co-existing relationship, which is the result of hundreds of millions of years of co-evolution, and they are mutually restrictive, coexist and coexist, and indispensable. The so-called "pests" and the so-called "beneficial insects" are divided according to people's preferences, and the so-called "pests" are beneficial insects within the controllable range. For example, the chinese academy of sciences Institute of Botany Jiang Gaoming teacher team did an experiment, simulating pest nibbling, intentionally removing part of the corn leaves, the impact on yield is not the highest, plants have the ability to compensate for growth; they do not use pesticides, with physical + biological methods instead of chemical methods, for 15 consecutive years there has been no yield reduction caused by pests, but the yield is higher than the results of farmers with chemical confrontation, pests This species is still there, but its population is controlled by beneficial insects and birds, and it can no longer become a disaster. It can be seen from this that control aimed at the eradication of a species is not advisable, and it is common to consider the so-called pests at the level of the biome or ecosystem, to carry out appropriate artificial interventions, to use the relationship between species, and to suppress the scale of the target species.

Biological control is a systems project. Most of the current biological control emphasizes the release of a natural enemy to control a pest, and once released, it is a continuation of the pesticide plant protection thinking. Biological control involves the protection of wintering grounds of various natural enemy insects, habitat generation, and embedding of breeding conditions. We have tapped the potential of free natural enemy insects in the production system, implemented insect wintering land protection, orchards adopt non-winter farming practices, artificially release natural enemy insects to increase the base number of natural enemy insects, have a habitat environment, breeding conditions are good, natural enemies continue to breed, forming an ecological balance, there is no need to release natural enemies every year.

Biodiversity plays an important role in biological control. There are no so-called "pests", where the so-called "beneficial insects" come from. Planting biodiversity can be achieved by planting diverse economic plants and deliberately retaining weeds in the field, and the use of biodiversity and the diversity of natural enemies and insects can achieve ecological balance without pesticides. The use of a single predator insect can achieve ecological balance, and it is very difficult to achieve the purpose of not using pesticides. The use of ladybirds to control aphids and praying mantises to control pests. According to our observations for many years, ladybugs will lay their eggs on the leaves that are a certain distance from the leaves of aphids, and the ladybugs will intentionally leave some aphids for it to reproduce, and when the aphids spread to the petals of the ladybird eggs, it is the time for the small ladybugs to hatch, so it takes a long time to control the aphids only by using the ladybirds, and even a large number of ladybirds and aphids coexist, which is within the scope of failure.

Biological control requires a variety of aphid natural enemies such as aphid cocoon bees, aphid-eating flies, grasshoppers, etc. Ladybirds are also very intelligent, how many eggs they lay within the ladybird population is "considered", they need to ensure the food needed for the next generation of breeding; aphid cocoon bees parasitize will also deliberately distinguish between repeated parasitism, and different natural enemies are competitive; aphid cocoon bees do not affect parasitism because of the presence of ladybird eggs, grasshopper larvae can not give up feeding because of ladybird eggs and zombie aphids parasitic by aphid cocoons, only these natural enemies of insect survival to form a competitive relationship, it is possible to put the so-called "pests" Control to the extent that the insects are harmless. We once photographed aphids that are 100% parasitic by aphid cocoon bees, which should be aphids that parasitize relatively large individuals, and other predator insects have eaten other aphids. Our orchards or farmland, because of the diversity of natural enemies, formed a competitive relationship for survival, so the biological control of peach trees is very successful, and a few years have passed, and pests have been controlled without pesticides.

In short, biological control is a systematic project, and it is unrealistic to rely on only one natural enemy insect to form an ecological balance. The kind of biological control system that only releases natural enemy insects, without considering the living environment and biodiversity of natural enemies, is an unscientific biological control system.