A helicopter crop-duster applies a mix of insecticide and fungicide on lettuce fields in California’s Salinas Valley, which produces half the lettuce in the United States. Synthetic pesticides became an essential element of the Green Revolution of the 1960s that nearly tripled global grain production over the next twenty years. Today, more than 1 billion pounds of pesticide are applied in the United States each year, and some 5.6 billion pounds worldwide. While these have contributed to a substantial increase in the yields and variety of fruits and vegetables in the diet, they’ve also caused an estimated 385 million people—44 percent of the world’s agricultural workers—to suffer pesticide poisoning each year.
