Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Catch my drift?
With a gust of wind, an Iowa crop duster can squash an organic farm
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-07-16-an-iowa-cropduster-can-squash-an-org
anic-farm/
Kurt Michael Friese
Posted 12:40 PM on 16 Jul 2009
by Kurt Michael Friese


Grinnell Heritage Farm is 152 years old. Andrew Dunham is the fifth
generation of his family to work this land about 50 miles east of Des
Moines. He is a direct descendant of Josiah Grinnell, founder of the town
and the man Horace Greeley once famously quoted as having said, “Go west,
young man, go west.” Andrew and his wife Melissa are a few months shy of
receiving their formal certification as an organic farm.

Across the road, due north of their land, is a field of corn that is
managed by the nearby Monsanto seed corn plant. In Iowa and anywhere
commodity corn is grown, it is common practice around this time of year to
use chemicals to control fungus. Often this is accomplished via the use of
aerial application, commonly referred to as cropdusting. On July 6th, a
rustic-looking old biplane swooped in to spray Monsanto’s field. To put
it mildly, the pilot’s bombardiering skills were not what one would hope.

Dunham’s crew was in the field picking broccoli and spinruts
(“turnip” backwards—a Japanese form of the root vegetable). They
witnessed the plane as it failed to shut off its spray mechanism in time,
and the fungicide drifted into their tree planting and hay field. “The
hay ground is in the third year of transition and would have become
organically certified on September 1st,” Andrew said. Now, probably not.

You’d think that this would be a clear-cut cause of action, as the legal
folks would put it. But the clever folks at Monsanto hire the crop dusters
as contractors, and they in turn use a corporate shell with no assets, so
when something like this happens and a victim sues, they simply file
bankruptcy and then form a new corporation.

Iowa is the single most radically altered landscape in the country. No
state has changed more since the arrival of European settlers, and today
the land is heavily “mono-cropped.” Nature abhors a lack of diversity,
but pathogens love it so farmers respond with more and stronger chemicals
to fight off the bugs and weeds and fungi. No one owns the airspace, so
planes can fly over any land they choose. Even if the pilots are incredibly
accurate, Iowa is a windy place (thus the massive increase in wind energy
production here in recent years). Drift is practically inevitable.

Last month in Mississippi, the Clarksdale Press-Register ran a story about
the problem of chemical drift. They spoke to a pilot:

    Bob Howard, owner of Howard Flying Service, says crop dust pilots like
himself are often unfairly singled out as the culprits of drift damage.
Howard points out many farmers apply herbicides and pesticides from ground
rigs, which if done in high winds, is also susceptible to cause drift
injury.

    The risk of dusting an off-target field with Roundup is something
Howard says is always in the back of his mind when working.

    “If everything was Roundup Ready it would be the greatest thing in
the world,” Howard said. “If they would all go to Roundup Ready or all
go back to conventional farming it would sure be a lot easier on us.”

I’m not sure I would even know where to start with this guy, but let’s
try the part where he says that the risk is something that’s “always in
the back of his mind.” The back? It’s stunning that someone so
obviously shortsighted was able to obtain a pilot’s license. His apathy
toward his community and flagrant self-centered simple-mindedness are
indicative of the unconscious conspiracy to which so many are a party. They
have all been bamboozled into believing in “Better living through
chemistry.” So much so, in fact, that the methods most farmers have used
for a mere few decades are called “conventional,” and the few who
practice farming as it was done for millennia are the outliers.
Monsanto’s website even claims that they are “Growing yield
sustainably.”