[Vwdiesel] Lowering Gasoline Prices

[James Hansen]

On Sunday, April 14, 2002 12:08 PM, Harmon Seaver
[SMTP:hseaver at cybershamanix.com] wrote:


Are you a farmer Harmon, or just another "well informed" urbanite that knows so
much better than us dumb farmers?

>    Well, he's right about the spraying helicopters for sure -- they should be
> banned, they're poisoning the whole community. Aerial sprays drift for miles
> and
> miles, and it's pretty nasty stuff.

It actually drifts surprisingly less than you think.  I used to wrench on spray
planes, a lot is done to decrease drift, and they are checked annually to see
that nothing has changed that would increase drift.  Your exposure to toxic
chemicals would be greater in a city that has a smog problem than miles and
miles from spraying happening in fields.  In spray season around here, the only
place that stinks of spray is the city where everyone is using all kinds of
shit on their lawn and golf courses that I wear a chem suit and respirator to
handle and apply.  The said folks then proceed to run their kids, dogs and
themselves through their toxic lawns, and then bitch about a farmer spraying a
field miles away that they saw last time they left the environmentally
responsible concrete jungle in their 8 mpg SUV.

>Insecticides are essentially nerve
> poisons,


They are not essentially nerve poisons, they are.  You get sprayed with them,
you die just like the bug. Herbicides are pretty benign however, and when used
correctly, stay out of the food chain. Vastly more herbicides are used than
insecticides.  Every farmer that is spraying isn't using fog of death...


> but the whole concept is totally flawed. Nature has plenty of predators to
> kill
> the bugs that eat the crops, but the sprays kill the good bugs right along
> with
> the bad,

That's right, unfortunately too many are willing to spray bugs prematurely, but
I'd wager you've never seen crop going down like there was a mower moving from
one fenceline to the other across the whole field where you could watch the
field go down like some kind of cartoon.  Insecticide does have it's place,
sometimes you have to use the silver bullet.  Using predators to control pest
species is useful, but only in a greenhouse or organic garden plot. In a couple
thousand acres like I seed, it is prohibitively expensive and logistically
impossible.  Better is using aerially applied bioactive organisms like bacillus
thurigensis for larval stages of moths for example.  Much more research needs
to go into this safe targeted avenue of pest control.

 just insuring that they'll need to spray again and again. Chemically
> dependant farmers are just that -- junkies, and the pusher is the ag-agents
> and
> the chemical companies. We have crop eating bugs in our greenhouse too, but
> we
> just bring in some predators and let them eat the whitefiles, mealybugs,
> aphids
> and other pests.
>    The best way to deal with spraying helicopters is to sue them and the
>    farmer,
> it's pretty trivial to prove that the spray comes on to adjoining land, and
> they
> don't have a legal right to spray anything, even water, if it comes on to the
> neighbor's land, there's been plenty of court cases already affirming that.

Yes, sue sue sue. the lawyers will save us all.....  Court cases you refer to
are generally for damages caused to another crop by chemical applied that
accidentally drifted from an adjacent field onto a susceptible crop and applied
by an operator that was negligently spraying when conditions were not ideal.
 This is not the norm, and all that was being affirmed is that damages were
caused, and the responsible party's insurance was milked for all it was worth.
Ag chemical is quite expensive, and everyone concerned generally busts their
ass trying to get it to go where it's supposed to go so it does what it's
supposed to do.  Consumers still want white bug free flour, shiny apples, and
green lettuce without holes.  You want to change the world? Change the CONSU
MER, they drive the entire marketplace. Fixing those dirty rotten farmers by
sueing them to achieve your environmental goals accomplishes and proves
nothing. (other than pushing some of my buttons that is... :-))
-James