Organic farming and natural enemy evenness

The basic reality of agricultural activity is that it reduces biological diversity, and these reductions in diversity potentially impact ecosystem services. But do some agricultural practices impact these services less than others? In a recent paper in Nature by David Crowder and colleagues, the question of how organic versus conventional farming affects predator and herbivore pathogen diversity and how this cascades to pest suppression. They show through a meta-analysis, that organic farms tend to support greater natural enemy evenness, and they hypothesize that greater evenness of enemies should better control pest populations, resulting in larger, more productive plants.

Picture from wikipedia

This result in itself is interesting, but they also carried out an elegant enclosure experiment where they manipulate the evenness of insect predators and pathogens and measure potato plant size. They found that even communities had the lowest herbivore densities and saw the greatest increases in plant biomass. Conversely, very uneven communities, typical of conventional farms, had the largest pest populations resulting in lower plant biomass accumulation.

While, multiple farming strategies are needed for adequate agricultural production, there are strong arguments for organic farms to be a important part of agricultural practice. These results show that organic farms have cascading effects on pest predators and pathogens and show that enemy evenness, as opposed to richness, has important ecosystem service consequences. To quote myself, evenness is a critical component of biodiversity, and much research has emphasized species richness, maybe at the detriment of studying evenness.

Crowder, D., Northfield, T., Strand, M., & Snyder, W. (2010). Organic agriculture promotes evenness and natural pest control Nature, 466 (7302), 109-112 DOI: 10.1038/nature09183