Pesticide Resistance, Social Collapse, and Strategies for Community Management Approaches

Mon, February 10, 2025 4:00 PM at 244 Natural Science

Dr. Katherine Dentzman, Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology at Iowa State University, is an alumna of MSU Sociology. Dr. Dentzman will be giving the following talk to the MSU Department of Entomology in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Pesticide Resistance, Social Collapse, and Strategies for Community Management Approaches

 

Dr. Katherine Dentzman; Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology; Iowa State University

 

Pesticide resistance, resulting from a perfect storm of corporate power, technological innovation, and agricultural industrialization, threatens not only yields and agronomic viability across the U.S., but has also resulted in significant social tension. In a 2016 focus group, one Iowa farmer said that instead of talking to a neighbor about pesticide resistance issues, he would think "Just shoot the neighbor. Hoping he'll die. Hoping he'll die soon." While this was said in jest, mere months later a farmer in Arkansas was murdered over a pesticide drift dispute in which a pesticide designed to address herbicide resistance issues accidentally ruined over half a neighbor's crop of soybeans. At the same time, experts in weed science, entomology, and plant pathology are encouraging landscape-level pest management practices to mitigate the spread of resistance—management which would require significant collaboration between neighbors and community members. Drawing on the work of Elinor Ostrom, Dr. Katherine Dentzman presents a possible strategy for facilitating community-based management of pesticide resistance and reports on community formation efforts in Idaho, Washington, and Iowa to suggest potential avenues for future pest management that addresses environmental, economic, and social sustainability dimensions.