Category:Pests and weeds

If food is planted in fertile soil, it should grow and grow in abundance. Unfortunately, it turns out not to be so simple. Pests - weeds, plant diseases, insects, fungal infections and animals - destroy 20-40% of food grown in the developing world. Controlling pests can be seen as the basic issue in farming.

The most common response to pests is to spray with pesticides. But at Open Source Ecology, we promote closed-loop systems that do not require external inputs. Pesticides can be expensive and difficult to obtain, and are often harmful to health. Biological pest control is our preferred solution - using one species in an ecosystem to control another, until we create an ecosystem that is balanced in such a way that it produces food and wealth in abundance.

This category exists to share knowledge about such methods of pest-control.