It began with a slightly uncomfortable question.
If you were growing food for your own family, would you grow it exactly the same way as food you were producing to sell?
Would you tolerate a few more weeds? A blemish on a tomato? A caterpillar hole in a cabbage leaf? Would you accept losing some of the crop rather than spraying it?
And, perhaps more importantly, would a commercial farmer make the same choices if there were no customer, supermarket, processor or export market waiting at the other end?
It is tempting to take that thought somewhere much more provocative.
Perhaps farmers know more about pesticides than the people buying their food. Perhaps they spray the crops they sell but quietly grow something different for themselves.
Do they?
We went looking.
Do Farmers Use Fewer Pesticides on Food Grown for Themselves?
Sometimes, apparently, they do.
One of the clearest comparisons we found comes from the Philippines, where researchers surveyed 302 rice farmers across four regions and specifically compared vegetables grown for household consumption with vegetables grown for market.
At one location, the difference was extraordinary.
In Laguna, vegetables grown for the household received an average of 1.25 pesticide applications, compared with 6.29 applications on vegetables grown for market.
More than five times as many.
At Bukidnon, however, the difference was much smaller: 2.06 applications for home vegetables and 2.48 for market vegetables. At Rizal, pesticide use on household and market vegetables was similar.
Depending on the location, between 9% and 59% of farmers reported using no pesticides at all on their household vegetable crops.
So the provocative version of the story — farmers don’t spray the food they eat themselves — doesn’t survive scrutiny.
But something else does.
Some farmers were treating food differently depending on who was going to eat it.
Why?
Read the 2023 Philippine study
Can One Farm Have Two Different Food Production Systems?
Research from China takes the question considerably further.
Researchers have actually given the phenomenon a name:
“One farm household, two production systems.”
It describes something remarkably close to the question that started our investigation: a farming household producing food one way for the market and another way for itself.
A 2017 study of fruit and vegetable farmers investigated why this happens. Food-safety concerns were part of the explanation.
So were economics.
Earlier research discussed in the paper found households using fewer chemicals or non-synthetic inputs for food they intended to eat themselves while using more chemicals on crops destined for market.
Think about what that means.
Within the same farming household, the intended consumer can potentially influence how the food is produced.
There are legitimate questions about how widespread the Chinese practice is, and nobody should assume that farming in rural China tells us what happens on a New Zealand farm.
But the phenomenon itself is real enough to have been studied.
Which leaves a rather awkward question:
Why would a farmer choose one production system for food being sold to someone else and another for food being taken home?
Why Do Farmers Use Pesticides on Food Their Own Families Will Eat?
If the answer were simply that farmers know pesticides are dangerous and therefore avoid them on their own food, this investigation would be very easy.
It isn’t.
Research among smallholder farmers in Uganda provides an important counterpoint. Pesticides were being used on crops grown largely for household consumption, and farmers were often aware that pesticides could pose health risks.
They used them anyway.
Why?
Because there was another risk sitting right in front of them: losing the food.
Imagine that your family’s food supply depends on what is growing outside. An insect infestation is destroying it and a pesticide offers a reasonable chance of saving it.
The calculation suddenly looks very different.
The immediate and visible risk of losing a crop may outweigh a less certain future risk from the chemical. Using a pesticide therefore doesn’t necessarily tell us that the farmer believes it is harmless.
It may simply tell us which risk matters most at that moment.
And that begins to explain why the same farmer could conceivably make one decision in one paddock and another in the vegetable garden behind the house.
How Does Growing Food for Sale Change Farming Decisions?
Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking why farmers might grow food differently for themselves, perhaps we should ask:
What changes when food becomes a commercial product?
A vegetable grown for dinner only has to satisfy the person eating it.
A commercially grown vegetable has a much more demanding audience.
There has to be enough of it. It has to be ready at the right time. It may need to meet requirements for size, appearance, pest damage, shelf life or processing. Workers have to be paid, machinery has to run and crop losses have financial consequences.
A home gardener can spend ten minutes pulling weeds from a vegetable bed. Scale that across hundreds of hectares and hand weeding isn’t a charming alternative farming system.
Likewise, you might happily cut a caterpillar-damaged piece from a cabbage you’ve grown yourself.
Would you buy that cabbage at the supermarket?
More importantly, would the supermarket buy it from the grower?
That is when our original question changes.
It is no longer simply:
Would farmers spray food they were going to eat themselves?
It becomes:
What does producing food for sale require farmers to do that producing food for themselves doesn’t?
Can Market Requirements Increase Pesticide Use?
We don’t have to travel to China or the Philippines to find evidence that markets can change pesticide decisions.
New Zealand provides its own example.
Historically, commercial apple growers faced extremely strict requirements around insect damage. Research into New Zealand apple production describes export crops where there was effectively zero tolerance for certain pests, alongside the requirement to produce blemish-free fruit.
Those requirements helped determine insecticide programmes.
Consider the same apple in two different places.
Pick it from your own tree with a superficial blemish and you might polish it on your shirt and eat it.
Put that blemish on thousands of apples being packed for an export market and it can become a commercial problem.
The apple hasn’t suddenly become less edible.
It has become less saleable.
Likewise, a pest that a household grower might tolerate can become unacceptable when an export crop has to satisfy another country’s phytosanitary requirements.
The biology hasn’t changed.
The market has.
Can Market Requirements Also Reduce Pesticide Use?
Here’s the complication.
Markets don’t always push farmers towards more pesticide use.
They can push them in exactly the opposite direction.
New Zealand fruit growers have also had to respond to markets demanding lower pesticide residues, different pesticides and more environmentally acceptable production methods. Some overseas supermarket chains impose pesticide-residue requirements stricter than the legal maximum residue limits.
New Zealand’s integrated fruit-production programmes consequently developed ways of controlling pests while reducing reliance on broad-spectrum pesticides and still meeting demanding export standards.
Which puts growers in a fascinating position.
Produce fruit sufficiently free of pests and damage to satisfy the buyer — but do it while leaving as little pesticide residue as possible.
The same market can therefore create pressure both to control pests and to reduce pesticide use.
That isn’t contradictory.
It’s commercial food production.
And it is becoming increasingly clear that the person holding the spray equipment isn’t necessarily the only person influencing whether it gets used.
Do New Zealand Farmers Grow Food Differently for Themselves?
This is the question we’d particularly like answered.
We haven’t found a New Zealand study that has systematically compared how farmers grow food for their own households with how they grow their commercial crops.
But no published research isn’t the same thing as nothing happening.
Anecdotally, we know New Zealand farmers who maintain their own vegetable gardens. Of the farmers known personally to us who do so, all but one say they use no chemicals at all in those gardens.
That’s not a scientific survey and we’re certainly not going to pretend it represents New Zealand farmers generally.
But neither are we going to pretend it isn’t interesting.
Because some of these are people for whom agrichemicals are an entirely normal part of commercial farming.
So why not in the vegetable garden?
Is it because they don’t want pesticides on food they’re going to eat?
Perhaps.
But there are other possibilities.
Maybe there simply isn’t any need. Weeds can be pulled by hand when you’re tending a few rows rather than hectares. A damaged lettuce can still be eaten. Losing a few tomatoes doesn’t threaten the viability of a business, and nobody rejects a misshapen carrot at the garden gate.
Maybe some farmers use exactly the same approach at home as they do commercially.
We don’t know.
And that’s the point.
We have international research demonstrating that farmers can make different pesticide decisions depending on whether food is being grown for their household or for market.
We have anecdotal evidence that some New Zealand farmers grow food for themselves without agrichemicals.
What we don’t have is anyone apparently asking New Zealand farmers, systematically:
Do you grow food for your own household differently from the food you produce commercially — and if you do, why?
Perhaps somebody should.
What Really Drives Farmers’ Pesticide Decisions?
It’s easy to picture a farmer standing in a paddock deciding whether or not to spray.
But perhaps we’ve been giving that single decision too much importance.
Behind it sits an entire economic system.
There is a crop to protect, a yield to achieve, workers to pay, machinery to run, weeds and pests to control, contracts to fulfil and sometimes extraordinarily demanding market standards to meet.
Now take those pressures away.
Imagine that the crop only has to feed the people who grew it.
What changes?
Would we tolerate more weeds in the paddock, accept smaller yields or pay for more labour? Would we buy apples with marks on them and vegetables of different shapes and sizes? Would we tolerate losing more of a crop to insects?
And would we still make exactly the same decisions about pesticides?
The research doesn’t give us one neat answer.
Perhaps it shouldn’t.
Because what it does show is more interesting: farmers’ pesticide decisions can change when the purpose of growing the food changes.
Which leaves us with a much bigger question.
If commercial economics can change how food is grown, what exactly are agrichemicals buying us?
Are they producing more food? Are they making farming easier? Are they reducing labour, machinery and production costs?
And when something such as glyphosate makes food cheaper to produce, does that actually make food cheaper for the person standing at the supermarket checkout?
That’s where our investigation goes next: Does Glyphosate Make Food Cheaper — or Just Cheaper to Produce?
Image Source & Attribution
We’re grateful to the talented photographers and designers whose work enhances our content. The feature image on this page is by solovei23@ukr.net.
