You don’t have to be an organic farming advocate to see the value of reducing pesticide use. Modern crops demand expensive inputs of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, and fertilizers to realize their considerable yields. For their own health, farmers must handle pesticides carefully as they spray them on their land. And inevitably, these chemicals have an effect on organisms beyond the confines of the field. They drift over neighboring habitats, run off into streams, or seep into groundwater. Ecosystems can be harmed, and drinking water can be tainted.

Achieving pesticide reductions is challenging, though. Developing crop varieties that can thrive with lesser inputs, either through genetic modification or other methods, is one promising option. But agricultural research has also developed techniques that should keep pests down and lessen the need for spraying. As a result, this would reduce the risk of pests becoming resistant to chemical pesticides.

All you have to do is convince cash-strapped farmers to stop doing something that works (spraying) in favor of a variety of practices that should work.

One country decided to give the farmers a nudge. In 2008, France set a goal of cutting pesticide use in half by 2018. The program hasn’t gone well, so two years ago, the government delayed that goal to 2025. A study led by Martin Lechenet of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research set out to analyze how progress has worked out so far: Can French farmers really cut pesticide use without hurting their bottom line?

Working with data from 946 French farms, the researchers looked at yields and pesticide application rates for the crops they grew, along with a number of factors like soil characteristics and local climate conditions. Using a regression model, they extracted the relationships between yields and all the other factors. The focus was to get the relationship between pesticide application rates and profitability, all else being equal.

They found that higher pesticide use wasn’t linked to larger profits for 77 percent of the farms. This means that those farms should be able to reduce their usage (to some extent) without cost. The other 23 percent of farms were growing potatoes, sugar beets, and seed corn, which are particularly high-maintenance, high-value crops.

To estimate just how far these farms could cut their pesticide use, the researchers grouped farms from the 77 percent group into “neighborhoods” of similar farms in the same area growing the same crops, where possible. In each neighborhood, they operated under the (perhaps optimistic) assumption that each farm could reduce pesticide use to the level of the neighbor that uses the least amount.

By that logic, the researchers calculate that these farms could reduce the amount of pesticides they use by an average of 42 percent.

These conclusions can’t automatically be extended to farms in other places—farms in the US, for example, already have lower pesticide application rates, and crop mixes vary from place to place. But applicable strategies for reducing pesticides exist everywhere—the real obstacle is the added complexity of switching from “just spray it” to a suite of new practices, some of which require careful timing. And as Vasileios Vasileiadis of Italy’s National Research Council puts it in an article accompanying this paper in Nature Plants, “[T]he transition to low-pesticide farming strategies will be challenging for farmers since in most situations, as shown in this study, pesticide reduction would not increase farm profitability but just maintain it.”

Nature Plants, 2016. DOI: 10.1038/nplants.2017.8, 10.1038/nplants.2017.16 (About DOIs).