Share Life Farms

The news this week brought a strong reminder of why I believe organic farming is the best way to farm. The town of Drexel, MO was unable to use the public water supply because the town lake had been contaminated with the farm chemical atrazine. Atrazine is a weed killer used in corn for grass weeds and some broadleaves. It was one of the first soil applied chemicals and has been around for a long time. When I first started farming atrazine was often used alone but today it is usually used as part of a tank mix with other chemicals or is part of a formula of a chemical of some other name. My question would be since atrazine today is seldom used alone what about the other possible chemicals that were probably present with the atrazine. The patrons of the water district were told not to use the water even to wash dishes and were told it was not safe even if they boiled it. And another disturbing part of this story not covered in the news bite is we talked to a grower from that area that get their water from there and they knew nothing about the order until they heard it on the news. Until then they were using the contaminated water. It makes me wonder since atrazine is an herbicide what if people were watering their gardens with this water. Were the levels high enough to cause possible crop damage? The grower we talked to grows 4000 tomato plants which I am not sure if atrazine would kill them or not since I haven’t dealt with chemicals for years.

Then came the announcement that never ceases to amaze me. When they announced that the water was once again safe they did not say that the atrazine had been removed from the lake but that the levels were below the levels deemed safe to consume. How much comfort do you think it would provide if the public announcement were to read something like this? We would like to inform the public that while there is still atrazine in your drinking water there is no need to worry because we have determined that a certain level of poison will not harm you even if consumed over a long period of time.

This kind of logic really bothers me because while it may be true for a vast majority of the population my wife is one of the ones for whom it is not and it has caused me much money and time over the years. She has to drink a special brand of bottled water and we haul water from 20 miles away to cook with. Just because they say the water is safe it does not mean it is pure.

As a young man on the farm most farmers used few if any chemicals and most weed control was done mechanically. As soon as the crop germinated you tried to get over it with a rotary hoe. I used to like to use this implement because for it to work you needed to go as fast as you could. I can remember hoeing corn one whole day with the old 51 John Deere A that had been my dad’s and then was my uncle’s whom I helped after Dad left the farm. That tractor had no power steering and was notoriously hard to drive. Because you wanted to go as fast as you could you hoed in “road gear” which was the same gear you used running on the paved or gravel road. It was probably about 10 miles a hour for that tractor. After hoeing the field I drove home and thought as I was nearing home that that tractor didn’t seem so hard to drive after all. It was not until I had turned off the tractor and started to the house that I realized that I could hardly open my hands because I had been griping the steering wheel so hard all day. Then as soon as you could you were on the field with the cultivator. I hated this job because while you hoed in the fastest gear you had you cultivated in the lowest gear you had. You would work all day long to just get over a few acres. While with the hoe you just had to keep the tractor pretty much on the rows with the cultivator you had to be meticulous. If you got off the row the least little bid or went a little too fast you would tear up the corn. As much as I hated that job it was still rewarding to pull into a weedy field of corn and start down the rows of corn and look back and see those rows of corn with those clean middles after going through them with the cultivator. Then farmers started using chemicals and they no longer had to rotary hoe because while the early chemical did not last all season they held the weeds back until you could cultivate. You could usually cultivate when the corn was a little bigger so you could go faster and it was harder to cover up the corn. Today the chemicals are designed to last all season and kill everything but the desired crop. Now the only farmers that consider the rotary hoe and cultivator two of their most valuable implements are organic farmers.

Sometimes I think chemical farmers think organic farmers really don’t mind weeds but that is not true. I wish the chemical industry’s assumption was true that chemicals are really not that dangerous or harmful to health and environment. That any time we had a problem we had a chemical that would solve it. It would be nice to be able to simply treat the crops and still have all the benefits I believe organics bring. No I think if anything organic farmers hate weeds more than our chemical counterparts for many times we are battling weeds in hand to hand combat and not from the cab of and air-conditioned cab with 100 foot booms!

My friend Melinda Hemmelgarn stopped at our market booth and was telling me how much she appreciated us trying to continue being certified organic. I needed that because at that time I was feeling like organic farmers were the only farmers dumb enough to pay a third party thousands of dollars just to be a pain in our rear. My agency was questioning some things that I believed they had already approved and I was frustrated to say the least. Also in a year like this year that hand to hand combat is rough.

Your friend in farming bringing you food with integrity.