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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] herbicides for use in a cut flower garden

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  • From: road's end farm <organic101 AT linkny.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] herbicides for use in a cut flower garden
  • Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 09:24:04 -0400


On Aug 27, 2007, at 8:27 AM, Wiediger, Alison wrote:

<x-tad-smaller>I’d like to weigh in on this also.  We trialed it this year.  From what we understand, it is a corn based product, fully biodegradable – not like the photo-degradable petroleum product we used only ONCE many years ago.  In our production system, it starts to degrade in about 45 days and is basically gone in 90.  To succession plant a new crop, all we need to do is pull the drip tape and turn the rest, including crop residues, under.  In our small, very diverse, labor poor (just the two of us) system, plastic that needs to be removed is a real problem.  By the time the crop is finished, it has degraded enough to be hard to get up.  Even with hand – rather than mechanical – digging and pulling, we can always find pieces of plastic remaining.  With this new biodegradable product, that is not happening.  So, succession planting gets done on time, crops get removed in time for cover crops to be planted, and our fields aren’t full of pieces of plastic of all colors and sizes.  It is pricey – about 3 times the price of regular black plastic.  So far, we have only found it in black (we’d like a white on black product for mid-summer plantings). It does degrade quickly in UV if there is no canopy to protect it and you must protect it in storage.  It is a little more fragile and has to be handled more carefully when laying it.  For instance, we had to reduce the tension on our mulch layer because the clods in our early spring soil were tearing holes in the plastic.  Once we did that, it worked much better. Since we are not certified organic, we haven’t had to worry about it being OMRI labeled. </x-tad-smaller>
<x-tad-smaller> </x-tad-smaller>

If it's not acceptable for certified use, you might want to find out why. Then, as you're not certified, you can make up your own minds as to whether the reason it's not certified is a problem for you, However, if it is actually entirely biodegradable, leaving no residue of heavy metals or other unacceptable materials, it ought to be accepted by certification agencies; so there might be something about it you do want to know.

It's possible the manufacturer just wouldn't disclose something; and, if so, it's possible that the something they won't disclose isn't a problem, even if the material's in repeated use over many years. And it's possible that it's not acceptable because of something that doesn't bother you. And it's possible that it is acceptable, but just hadn't been through the approval process (which isn't necessarily OMRI, a certifying agency can allow materials that aren't OMRI listed if they can confirm that all ingredients are on the generic materials list). But a number of years ago I did some further investigation on a product that was at the time being listed by reputable suppliers as entirely biodegradable; when I contacted the actual manufacturer and asked for test results, the results they sent me were entirely unacceptable: for one thing, they showed that the manufacturer had been unable to get any very high percentage of the product to actually degrade (as opposed to breaking into minuscule bits) even under greenhouse conditions with very high soil biological activity and warm soil; and for another, the tests had been done on what they said was a similar material, and not on the material they were actually selling, for which they provided no test results whatsoever (and my further requests got no reply at all).

This is years later, presumably a different product, and quite possibly a different manufacturer (the name of the one described above is buried somewhere in my old paper records). But it is a reminder that advertising and reality don't always match; and that even reputable resellers don't always do the research.

Even if you're not certified, if you ask a certifying agency whether the stuff is acceptable, and if not why not, you can probably get an answer; and then you have more information with which to make up your own minds.


-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale



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