After Drone Pesticide Spraying: Jiangnan Silkworm Farmers’ “Silent Spring”

In March this year, a news story about pollinating bees in a rapeseed field being “accidentally harmed” by drones attracted attention. Beyond the spotlight, however, another insect that has lived alongside human civilisation for thousands of years — the domesticated silkworm — is facing a more hidden and severe survival crisis.

Once the drones fly, “the silkworms have been raised for nothing” — silkworms are extremely vulnerable to pesticides and environmental factors; many “low-toxicity” pesticides, even biopesticides, are harmless to people but highly toxic to silkworms. Drone “pesticide drift damage” further compounds the impact — poisoned silkworms will fail to spin silk, form thin-skinned cocoons, or be dumped into the woods by silkworm farmers.

When “efficiency” becomes the benchmark for agriculture, technology is also quietly changing the ancient practice of sericulture — in the past, a brick-and-tile factory in a Jiangnan water town would stop work during the silkworm-rearing month, but now, before spraying, no one notifies you any longer.

In this episode, starting with the hot topic of “bees being poisoned to death”, we go into a Jiangnan water town to listen to a silkworm farmer, who has been back in the countryside for 14 years, tell us: how drone pesticide spraying has led to the mass poisoning of mulberry silkworms, how the traditional mulberry-silkworm system is being squeezed, and another kind of future that industrialised sericulture is bringing.

This episode’s guest, Yu Jiangang (Yugang), was born into a family in the South Taihu Plain that had reared silkworms for generations. As a child, he helped his family cut mulberry leaves and feed silkworm larvae; even the village cats were all named after the seasons of silkworm growth. Later, he left home for university, worked in Beijing, and devoted himself to rural development; in 2011, he chose to return to the land and tried to rebuild a silkworm–rice–human pastoral order. More than a decade on, he is still trying to answer: can traditional agriculture still survive in the cracks today?

Between efficiency, ecology and culture, what exactly are we losing? And are these changes truly irreversible? If you care about this small but important topic too, please click to listen to this episode.

00:21 Why is an incident in which drone pesticide spraying killed bees worth attention?

02:26 Starting with the South Taihu basin, what was the former mulberry-based fish pond ecosystem?

04:43 Why, when every household once reared silkworms, are only a few still holding on?

08:28 From sporadic to the norm, why is this “pesticide drift damage” increasingly hard to avoid?

12:47 Insurance covers only one third, and silkworm farmers start abandoning sericulture from the second year

14:28 “East-to-west relocation of sericulture”: can smallholder farmers make money?

19:16 Industrialised sericulture: silkworms eat soybean feed and spin silk all year round — is that necessary?

25:06 From harmonious coexistence to “mutual harm”, are we losing a traditional way of life?

29:56 “First Silkworm Cat”, “Second Silkworm Cat”: how has sericulture permeated the sense of time in Jiangnan water towns?

31:58 One silk quilt: how much can a silkworm farmer earn?

34:35 To prevent silkworms from being poisoned again, Yugang took on 15 mu (Chinese acres) of rice paddy

39:42 Creating a protected area the way a zoo keeps tree frogs

48:00 How can you support? Buy rice, build together, and share