Saturday, January 19, 2013

We Can Do Better, Farmers!

I read our local paper tonight and right there is a stick in the eye to the agriculture industry:

.Syngenta Settles Lawsuit With City of Wilmington

Come on farmers and industry, we can do better than that!   The suit points out they had to prove it has been going on over 10 years.  Now I am wondering how they are applying atrazine between here and Wilmington to go over the EPA regulated amounts so much so long?  It's not that much and I do not believe it is that harmful, but I know we can do better than that.

We lost our best corn herbicide, Blades or cyanazine doing these things, why in the world didn't we learn our lesson?  I cost myself bushels last year because I did not use enough atrazine and returned a bunch to Philip Huffman.  I am too conservative.  Obviously others are not.

Before your bash all pesticide use, remember the book from the Hudson Institute proving all the benefits of pesticides because they are natural in nature.  I can't think of the name of it but my copy has a dark soft cover and I can't find it on my bookshelves.  I probably shared with someone who was bashing pesticides.

Some pesticides are more harmful in nature than others and atrazine easily moves in water.  The label of precautions is huge although it is a mild herbicide compared to others.  Ir just moves freely in water.  We were told that the salt of glyphosate is very safe if you swallow it without the oils but it stays in the soil a long time and chelates minerals the plant needs and can't get because it is so firmly attached to the soil.  We were told that glyphosate was safer to man than a dose of aspirin or a cup of coffedd.  More so, Robert Kremer of USDA proved it is a biocide, killing off the good guys in the soil so the bad guys like pythium run wild, killing plants.

The city of Wilmington, Ohio couldn't be happier and I couldn't be more concerned.  We don't need black eyes like that in Clinton County or any county agriculture, 3088 of them.  We must do a better job.  This is inexcusable.  I will talk to my industry friends and find out more how this happened.  I knew EPA kept finding very low levels of atrazine in Wilmington drinking water but I never dreamed Syngenta would have to pay a fine like this because of simple misuse.

Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastics

If you click on this review, I do not entirely agree with the reviewer although he points out the weak points in the argument.

I am of the opinion after a life of study that DDT and Alar and so many pesticides should have never been banned.  PCB's yes, I have never seen a good way to deal with PCB's which are currently hard to avoid because of the way we transform electricity.  People can use so called science to disprove real science.  Perhaps the glyphosate GMO issue fits here.  We are far from proving that but the evidence so far does not look good to me.

Farmers and agricultural industry, I know we can do better than this, especially right here in Clinton County.

Ed Winkle

1 comment:

  1. Well DDT hasn't been banned on a whim; If it was banned even in the U.S. after so much pressure from the manufacturers, there must have been some extremely compelling reasons.

    I know I spent a few weeks over the mid-late 80s in the mountains standing still, not trekking, directly as a result of DDT: The whole peregrine falcon population in France was down to about 2 dozens of reproducing couples, they survived only in mountainous areas where they weren't in contact with agriculture. We maintained a constant watch around the nests in our area to prevent hunters or egg collectors or falconers from destroying the last remaining birds we had in the whole country.

    If DDT was still allowed, the national animal of the U.S. would have been Disney's chipmunk, as the bald eagle was experiencing a similar decline, DDT blocking calcium assimilation so badly that the egg shells were too thin to be viable, same as with our falcon.

    On another note, does the dog shelter has facilities so you can video skype with Sable while on your vacations? ;)

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