My garden gets huger and huger as I read and make amends.

Pesticides kill good bugs as well as bad, make the plants more vulnerable to disease (poisoned soil) thus more bad pest infestation etc, a viscious cycle. Healthy plants really do not attract pests in any great number has been my experience. But big farms need to ensure a profit I guess.

I have thought a lot about vitamin/mineral content of veggies... pesticides may play a part but cheap ammonia/nitrate fertilizers also play a big part. The plants aren't being fed from the ground a lot of the time, but from the nitrates or whatever, and they grow quite big quite quickly and look great on the supermarket shelf, but they're not really the real thing and thus vitamin/mineral content is lacking.

Back in our great grandparent's day, when lots of people had gardens... they composted from the kitchen on a regular basis, buried their kitchen waste in the garden plot, perhaps used horse or cow manure also, and thus fed their plants in a completely different way than most gardeners/farmers today. In contrast, we are a consumer society today, we prefer to run to the store for our food or fertilizer or whatever. Vegetables begin losing vitamin content the minute they are picked. There is a huge difference in taste between fresh produce and week old produce. How long produce sits in the warehouse and store also affects vitamin content. People would rather shop at the store, buy pills and capsules than grow a plant for the real thing. We are a consumer society, big farmers and their big pesticides exist because we have demanded it of them.

In the midwest they spray their fields with airplanes. A good amount of the spray floats around in the wind....

Also, one of the very best places to acquire mad cow disease is N Africa (Morocco, Egypt etc) and the middle east, where eating the brains of sheep, goats or calfs (out of the skull itself even) is common. An arab delicacy. So I am not sure the pesticide argument really holds water.