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The pesticides like Round up are expensive. There is little incentive for a small farmer or a large farmer to be spraying in the air on a windy day. It defeats the purpose.
Larger agriculture, not seen here to my knowledge, uses aircraft to spray and that can indeed drift. Not much in the way of Big Ag here. It is a big issue in California where housing developments are adjacent to hundreds or thousands of acres of field crops.
Assume the best and ask questions.
Punaweb moderator
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The guy applying the pesticide is always at ground zero. The neighbor never is. There are orders of magnitude difference in exposure.
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So anyway, all else aside, cause illness or not, I don't think it's a tremendously difficult thing to settle with: Just simply announce to the public before you spray mass amounts of chemicals, whatever type they may be.
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The State Department of Agriculture strongly opposes it, stating..... consistently alerting the public about application would require the hiring of additional staff which would burn through state funds.
Alerting the public could be as simple as having an e-mail list that people could choose to be on. A standard statement. Change the date and time and hit send. What, maybe 2 or 3 seconds. OK I guess I can see how the State would have to hire extra staff and burn through funds for this.
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Water is a chemical. We need advance warning of that as well then.To be safe, apply the same rule to households, issue permits etc.
Or we can only warn about chemicals that have actual evidence of being harmful.
Dear Paul,
Please take a break from here. Go swim @ Pohoiki tomorrow and have fun.
Life too short to get so worked up about Punaweb
peace,
RWR
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If pesticides are drifting from agricultural fields in Hawaii and making people sick then why is there zero documented cases?
If there is no problem why do we need to change the laws to address a non-existent problem?
I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again, this is about demonizing the seed industry in Hawaii that grow GMO crops.
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"Chlorpyrifos kills as many as 10,000 people annually around the world. Its use is already prohibited in Europe and other places."
This one one of the arguments used to get this ban passed in Hawaii !
Nearly every one of those deaths was due to suicide.
Let's ban everything that people can use to commit suicide, guess we will be tribes of hunter-gatherers wandering around naked !
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Rainyjim, I think you are right, your theory explains a lot.
Airpogparking, go play in traffic, have fun!
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quote:
Originally posted by Rob Tucker
The pesticides like Round up are expensive. There is little incentive for a small farmer or a large farmer to be spraying in the air on a windy day. It defeats the purpose.
Larger agriculture, not seen here to my knowledge, uses aircraft to spray and that can indeed drift. Not much in the way of Big Ag here. It is a big issue in California where housing developments are adjacent to hundreds or thousands of acres of field crops.
Rob, I agree with all of this. However, I'm thinking that the problem is actually worse during calm winds. Higher winds will dilute the vapors and carry them away, whereas calm winds will allow the vapors to linger around the area for a much longer time. I don't have a link to support, I only have my own experience with applying solvent based finishes. On a windy day my carport is well ventilated, on a calm day I need to set up fans or the smell gets very thick and it lingers in the surrounding area.
