Re: Farming In 59

Posted by Goose on April 15, 2020 at 07:41:39 from (166.182.83.163):

In Reply to: Re: Farming In 59 posted by Bruce from Can. on April 15, 2020 at 03:41:28:

Something I've always wondered about.

When I grew up on a farm in Nebraska in the 1940's and early 1950's, we controlled weeds and insects with cultivation and crop rotation. I joined the Marine Corps in 1953.

By the time I left the Corps ten years later, chemicals had taken over farming. No young farmer was considered up and coming, and therefore worthy of renting farm land to, unless he regularly and routinely drenched his crops with all manner of chemicals. When chemicals first came onto the farm scene, little thought was given to personal protection.

Sometime in the 1960's, Farm Journal magazine ran an article about a farmer who had fabricated a front mount sprayer boom on a tractor. They even ran a picture of the fellow spraying some form of chemical, seated on the tractor wearing only a baseball cap, T shirt, and jeans, while driving through the fog of spray he was generating. It was lauded as a great innovation.

Then, 30 to 40 years later, these same farmers began dying off of all manner of strange cancers. I always wondered if there was a correlation. When I posed that question recently to the moderator of a public health seminar, I was told a correlation does, in fact, exist.

When I farmed in the 1980's, when I sprayed I always wore long sleeved clothes, wore a face mask, and took a shower and put on fresh clothes as soon as I was done. I don't know if it was real or psychological, but I still always felt yucky for a day or so afterward. I finally began simply hiring our local Co-op to do my spraying. From the economies of scale involved it really didn't cost that much more, and it got me off the hook for spraying.

Didn't mean to hijack the thread, but that's been a concern of mine over the years.

Replies:

• Re: Farming In 59 svcummins 22:22:33 04/15/20 (0)

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