While in the midst of a large research effort on the environmental impacts of food production, it occurred to me that there might be a useful way to rank food commodities (grains, fruits, vegetables) on the basis of how much pesticide active ingredient (AI) is needed to produce one unit of each commodity. I just happen to have some recent calculations of pesticide AIs for a selection of crops grown in California, based on activity data from the latest UC Davis cost and return studies.
| Product | Pesticide AI per unit of product (g/Kg) |
| Broccoli - Organic | 0.01 |
| Leaf Lettuce - Organic | 0.03 |
| Green Beans | 0.05 |
| Mandarins - Satsuma | 0.07 |
| Wheat | 0.10 |
| Corn | 0.12 |
| Onions - Red | 0.13 |
| Broccoli | 0.25 |
| Blackberries | 0.27 |
| Plums | 0.39 |
| Tomatoes | 0.45 |
| Blackeye Beans | 0.46 |
| Raspberries | 0.48 |
| Peaches | 0.54 |
| Oranges - Navels & Valencias | 0.80 |
| Apples - Fuji | 0.92 |
| Pears - Green Bartlett | 0.98 |
| Strawberries - Organic | 1.27 |
| Cherries | 1.86 |
| Large Lima Beans | 1.99 |
| Apricots | 2.70 |
| Rice | 3.34 |
| Table Grapes - Flame Seedless | 3.61 |
| Table Grapes - Thompson Seedless | 3.79 |
| Potatoes | 4.09 |
| Almonds | 6.01 |
| Dry Beans | 6.84 |
| Blueberries - Organic | 14.43 |
| Blueberries | 33.75 |
This just ranks the products by the total AI per Kg of product (lowest to highest), and doesn't delve into the ecological and human toxicities of the pesticides. Nor does it capture the likely amounts of pesticide residues in various products. There is also going to be a difference in health impact between items where the the outer skin or shell is discarded vs those that are eaten whole. Finally, people eat more of the staple foods and less of the more exotic items such as berries, which indicates the need for weighting these numbers.
With all those caveats in mind, it does look like several fruits/berries (apples, pears, cherries, blueberries, strawberries, apricots, grapes) as well as some stapes (rice, potatoes) stand out for high pesticide use. Some organics are also on this list mainly because sulfur is included here as a pesticide.
Interestingly, this ranking roughly correlates with another ranking of fruits/vegetables in terms of detectable level of pesticides (based on testing actual samples). Also interesting to note from our internal calculations: The carbon footprint of insecticides, herbicides and fugicides are in the range of 25-35 Kg of CO2e per Kg of active ingredient.
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