The Story Behind the Story: Super Friends

By Trevor Bacque

You can’t go for a walk in the Prairies for more than 30 seconds without encountering a handful of pests, some innocuous, some nefarious. The same is true for Canadian farmers, who deal with a variety of pests within their field crops.

And while this fact of life continues on, multiple people within the industry, both researchers and farmers alike, are keen to change the narrative about the pests which infiltrate fields. As many farmers contend with shifting policy regulations surrounding pesticides and their real or perceived health effects in their country—including Canada, where the audience for this podcast is based—understanding how other farmers deal with pests is critical. The intention of the story was to provide farmers with many free clues as to how they can make a better mouse trap, or, in this case, better fly trap.

Within Canada, methods to combat pests are both well-known and well documented, so it was decided to not focus too heavily on that. However, the Prairie researchers we spoke with were excitedly working on compiling an index of essentially all insects a farmer may come across, good, bad and neutral. Further to that, a gigantic research roadmap was being created so researchers can focus their efforts more and not duplicate work that may have already been done. The attempt to bring together a fractured network of academic agri-research was important to highlight.

While the print version of the story interview farmers from multiple countries (Brazil, U.S., U.K. and Australia), the podcast itself focused on Andrew Watson, an Australian farmer who is, arguably, one of the world’s foremost fighters of pests and simultaneously being a beneficial bug protector. The methods he has utilized signal to farmers, quite literally all over the world, simple and effective ways to gain the upper hand on pesky pests.

With so many interviews to sift through, there were difficult choices to make about who to highlight and what to leave on the cutting room floor. In the end, it was felt that the finished product was a podcast that landed very well with farmers both in Canada and abroad.