When I read about calls for a ban on pesticides and herbicides, I sometimes think back to the days when these chemicals were thought of as great breakthroughs and a good friend to farmers and gardeners everywhere.
Of course, these were the days when the majority of people smoked cigarettes, people still chewed tobacco, no one wore seatbelts, if you were alive you were a litterer, and there were no such things as family violence shelters.
On the farm we had cans and drums of chemicals everywhere and while we kids were given the occasional warning about them, they were not any really big deal. I remember standing on the back of the big weed sprayer hooked up to one of our tractors, pouring a powerful herbicide called Atrazine into the sprayer’s huge tank. Though I’d try to be steady, sometimes the stuff came rushing out too fast to handle and it would wash out over my gloveless hands and sleeveless arms.
I saw the same thing happen to my Dad. We’d wipe the stuff off on our pants and carry on.
Atrazine was to our corn-growing efforts what Maalox is to a human’s heartburn. And old TV commercial for the insecticide called Raid used to simply declare: Raid kills bugs dead! Well, Atrazine killed weeds dead and practically everything else it touched, except for the corn, somehow.
One day, Dad had been filling the sprayer, perhaps enduring a bit more than the average spillage. In the process, he must have stepped in some of the Atrazine that had puddled on the ground. Just then, he was hailed to come to the house to take a phone call.
He ran across the lawn to the front porch and in the path he took, for years to come, no grass ever grew, leaving an almost perfect set of bare footprints tracing out his route from farmyard to house. That was the first time, I think, that I began to realize how powerful this stuff was.
I heard this true tale from a former teacher at an agricultural college. A herbicide salesman, in a brave effort to show how harmless to humans was the product he was trying to sell to skeptical farmers, used to demonstrate that opinion by rolling up his sleeve and plunging a bare arm and hand into a pail full of the stuff.
I don’t know whether he expected oohs and aahs of disbelief when he didn’t drop dead on the spot but he did die – too young – of cancer. I don’t know if his death was related to his chemical bravado, but if he demonstrated its safety that way once, maybe he did it numerous times.
How did we live before all of this stuff came along? It wasn’t easy, but farmers had their ways. One method was called summer fallowing: A field would be plowed under during the summer and left that way almost a year before it was cultivated and replanted in a crop. The weeds’ roots, exposed to the elements, died, as did the rest of the plant, now buried.
But it was expensive to leave 20-acre fields unproductive for a year.
And what about homeowners and their lawns? Well, there weren’t many lawns way back when, especially in the country. Look at any
old photo of a farmhouse 100 years ago and you will see just a little strip of green running a 10-foot collar around the home. Crops were often planted right up to the start of that little strip.
Now, many farmsteads in Canada are bigger than the public parks in most towns and villages around. It’s kind of sad to see farmers spending their Sundays jostling up and down on riding lawnmowers, keeping these parks in perfect condition. For whom? The drivers of the one or two vehicles which travel past their farms each day?
At our home in the city, chemicals were dutifully applied to the lawns spring and summer, and the grass had many carpet-like qualities. Then along came our kids and the thought of them crawling around in herbicide-treated grass didn’t appeal.
As a result, 11 years have passed without a particle or a droplet of weedkiller or chemical fertilizer applied. We have not done this out of any virtuous principle beyond a concern for the health of our kids.
And we really don’t know what the best thing for our economy, our health, and our happiness is on the pesticide ban issue.
I once had a summer job spraying fertilizers and weed killers on farmers’ fields. When the wind was right (or wrong), the spray would often swirl back and hit me in the face. But the same would happen on our own farm when I was on a tractor spreading (particularly sloppy) manure on the fields.
I don’t know whether a fertilizer distilled in a factory is any worse than one made in a cow, but either way, I’m still alive.
Then again, I plan to live forever.
So far, so good.
©2007 Jim Hagarty
