Forces Driving More
year, their sense of vulnerability was still fresh. The best medicine was
producing as much food as possible, or as farmers would say: “Make
hay while the Sun shines.”
Two years later and farther west, grasshoppers were destroying the crops
farmers had planted in Minnesota’s Red River Valley.^ Off and on dur-
ing the nineteenth century, insects ravaged fields from Minnesota to
Texas, the Midwest to California. One farmer described a particular
invasion as being so thick with locusts it resembled “hell from above.”^
Another remarked that the bugs destroyed “everything but the mort-
gage.”^ The largest swarm ever recorded appeared in 87 , reportedly
,800 miles long and 0 miles wide.
While locusts were highly feared, they were not alone in wreak-
ing havoc. Fungi appeared in fruit orchards.^ Boll weevil showed up in
cotton fields (purportedly from across the Rio Grande).^ Chinch bugs
and wheat rust descended across wheat fields. And screwworm (fly lar-
vae that feed on living flesh), foot-and-mouth disease, and hog cholera
invaded animal herds.
These biological invasions were different from the Tambora “win-
ter.” This time, farmers themselves had helped create the unwanted
adversaries. As people spread westward and settled down, they set up
farmsteads in close proximity with each other, grew the same crops, and
raised the same animals. Undercutting the diversity of nature, with its
competitive checks and balances on food, favored those species that
adapted more opportunistically.
Farmers fought back. Non-crop plants became weeds, which were
lumped together with rodents, fungi, insects, etc., and labeled pests.
New pesticides were tried. And protracted eradication campaigns
were carried out, which pushed foot-and-mouth, hog cholera, and
screwworm beyond United States borders.
In the quest to conquer food scarcity through an abundance of crops
and animals, efficiency has become king. Seven of every ten acres planted
are devoted to just three crops—corn, soybeans, and wheat.^ Cattle,
hogs, and poultry provide 9 percent of all meat consumed.^ Some fifty
thousand pesticides have been used on American farms.^ Eighty per-
cent of all antibiotics consumed are in agriculture.^ The majority of food