Flotsam and Jetsam III – Thinking About Agricultural Fumigants (Makes Me Tired)

Still unpacking from my trip last week.

Methyl bromide is to strawberries what fuel is to cars or water is to plants. That being the conventional wisdom, it was not surprising that the alternative to methyl bromide would be methyl iodide.

Well, why not? Once you get accustomed to the idea of protecting crops from soil pests by chemicals which are neurotoxic to humans, carcinogenic in laboratory animals, and migrate through soil to groundwater like. . . water, why not?

I’ve mentioned before in these posts that I started my career with the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), which at the time was responsible for health and safety regulation of pesticide use. Years after I had left, enough of the California legislature was finally convinced that the same agency responsible for promoting agricultural productivity which inevitably meant (and means today) promoting pesticide use, should not also be regulating safe pesticide use and transferred those functions to the newly-created California Environmental Protection Agency.

At the time though, I had many opportunities to see California agriculture and pest control up close. I observed an entire subculture in places such as El Centro, Lemoore, Patterson, Woodland, Yuba City, Watsonville and Castroville involved with the industrial-strength farming, performing workplace monitoring and sampling of pesticide mixing operations, ground spraying, aerial spraying, soil fumigation, chamber fumigation, even fumigating squirrel holes in an almond orchard using methyl bromide. These observations have led m to the conclusion that most people in urban communities have only the foggiest idea of what has to happen for fruits and vegetables to magically appear in the grocery store, and the price some in rural communities have to pay for all of us to eat well.

After the debacle with DBCP, use of which as a soil fumigant contaminated groundwater throughout California, and the hassle of fumigating with methyl bromide, which is sufficiently hazardous and volatile that acres of polyethylene sheeting need to be pulled across the newly-fumigated fields to keep the stuff in the soil, one would have thought that we as a society and our land-grant agricultural colleges would have been working diligently to transform agricultural pest control and reduce reliance on pesticides by instituting Integrated Pest Management (IPM).

However, we can’t just leave these things in the hands of regulators and scientists. Lots of people will need to care and will need to develop more of an appreciation for the risks and benefits from agricultural pesticides, and start making noises about pesticide hazards, before we start to have more sensible pesticide regulations. It’s a nice idea, but we’re having problems getting more people to pay attention to global climate change even with Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize for promoting awareness about it. As long as the strawberries keep showing up in the stores, I wonder who’s concerned about this beyond the activists.