Damn - sick and tired of people thinking pesticides are necessary to their livelihood with no accountability on their part.

Hah! Just look at what happened a few years back when they sprayed all that pesticide in New York City and Long Island to prevent mosquitoes (presumably West Niles virus was on the rampage).

Following years, ALL the lobster catch FAILED. Later is was found that the pesticide which works so well on larval forms of arthropods doesn't discriminate: it went into Long Island Sound and decimated the young lobster population. But of course, it took time to realize the disastrous effects of the spraying. Many of the lobster catchers went out of business.

As Scalia and Thomas would no doubt agree, Mehemnet, who could have guessed?

When all the information you get is from some lying sack of dog excrement, you should get all hissy! But Felice Pace is not telling the truth about pesticides on this day, the 25th of November, 2009. He is just explaining. in his way, that the sky is falling and using half truths and falsehoods to scare people into sending his organization money, I guess. He keeps whining about the Klamath River salmon runs, but fails to mention the two and one half million acre feet of water diverted out of the Klamath River watershed to the Sacramento River through tunnels in a mountain range, none of which ever rears or spawns a salmon, and none of which ever gets to sea. Falsehoods about pesticides and their use are not close to seeing that water from Trinity Dam stays in the Klamath River watershed. That said, I will talk about pesticide use.

All pesticides are regulated by EPA. President Obama appoints the head of EPA. Every pesticide comes with a label for its use. The restrictions of when, where, and how the pesticide can be used is clearly stated on the label. All who buy pesticides have to be licensed (except for homeowners who buy their pesticides at the hardware store or a plant nursery, and who are the largest users of pesticides that end up in the streams by way of storm water runoff and storm drains capturing over watering of lawns, the washing of cars and machinery, and just plain dumping of materials in the storm drain because that is an easy way to get rid of the material you don't want anymore). To be licensed to buy and apply pesticides, you have to take classes, and pass a test. There are multiple layers of licensing, and for every type of use and application. Even the stuff you wash your kids hair with to kill head lice is a pesticide, and so it the blue ointment you rub on to kill the crabs. If you deworm your kid, you are applying a pesticide. Kill the mice, ants, roaches, mosquitoes, and you are a pesticide applicator. Spray Round-up Ultra on the sidewalk to kill dandelions, or around shrubs to control weeds, and you are a pesticide applicator who does not need to be licensed. The pharmacy is licensed to sell pesticides, and has to keep a log of products, but the home user is not licensed or trained in pesticide use, disposal, environmental impacts and safety.

Every pesticide has a crop, a use, that is listed for its application. The label states how and when you can use it. The label tells you where you can and can't spray, including near water. The label tells you the amount you can use per sprayed acre, for individual applications, and for crops and crop years. There are food inspections in which the fruits, vegetables, whatever , are burned down and examined for pesticide residues to determine if illegal pesticide use is present. You do know that imported food has less stringent pesticide tolerances that American grown food. American pesticides are stringently regulated in sales, use, and results. There is environmental testing ongoing every day of the year for pesticide residues in the air, and in water. Several of the most widely used are going to be banned due to impacts on aquatic life from runoff. They "system" does work. Pace is trying to kick a dead horse to life. And not telling the truth to that end.

Pesticides cost money to buy, to apply, and to store and keep track of their use. They are not a frivolous product that can be applied willy nilly just because some asswipe with an agenda tells you so. There are pesticides that are labeled for application to water for agricultural purposes. There are herbicides for keeping vegetation in irrigation ditches controlled. There are insecticides to put on water to inhibit mosquito reproduction. There are pesticides to control invasive species in oyster beds. All are labeled by the EPA for specific use. And President Obama is in charge of the appointment of the person who heads EPA. The EPA operates under rule and regulation passed by Congress. And EPA has a robust enforcement arm. And, you might add that most states have a parallel Environmental Protection agency, with a head appointed by the Governor, and entrusted to enforce state pesticide regulations. The implication that all is amok is just wrong!!!. Pesticide use is highly regulated and controlled, and expensive. Add all that together, and Pace's story becomes nothing more than an over active imagination tilting windmills built on a foundation false information.

The time and effort it takes to get a pesticide labeled for a particular crop means than minor crops have few if any pesticides labeled for them, while major crops like corn, wheat or cotton have many competing pesticides from which to chose. Money talks and bulls--t walks. You grow a minor crop with a new exotic pest, and you might not have any recourse but to exist with the pest. And in a country with uncontrolled borders, a huge smuggling destination, you should expect exotic pests to arrive here with regularity. The latest on the West Coast is Dros. suzukii, the two spot vinegar fruit fly. It lays it eggs in ripening fruit, and multiple maggots grow along with bacterial rots that invade the site of ovipositor entry. Not one soft fruit crop is immune, and it just showed up in late in 2008 in California, and by this September, could be found in all the berries, cherries, peaches, plums, grapes, you name it, along the West Coast, and now in Florida. There is no listed pesticide for it, although OP's were used on it this summer in California. Nobody farming wants to use them, and the EPA is restricting them out of existence as I write.

The most egregious use of pesticides, right now, is by the Mexican drug cartel dope grows, and the USFS and BLM cops are finding hand dug cisterns using creek water in which they mix chemicals, both fertilizers and pesticides, to gravity into drip irrigation systems. And then abandon after harvest. They are mixing pesticides right in the stream, and it is killing fish. Irreparable harm is being done to many minor streams across the West. And people like Pace want to blame legitimate agriculture for water contamination from illegal dope grows. It serves his anti people agenda. Long term damage to watersheds by Cartel dope growers is ongoing, pernicious, and only adds to the prior damage from domestic dope growers of the '70s and '80s. Demands for no logging was a ruse to keep people out of public lands so the growing of marijuana could happen with ease. And Pace has been an apologist and protector of that culture.

I guess the left in America wants to eat exclusively from imported foods fertilized with human excrement, industrial waste, and irrigated with polluted water. The reason you don't eat fruit and veggies in Central America is because their water has filled the fruits and veggies with critters and bacteria that will make you sick. Now we import those foods. There is no control over the pesticides used on that food, not unlike the typical Mexican family with a bag of tetracycline they use to treat about anything that bothers them. And never for a full term dose. So the use of drugs in medicine, in third world countries, ends up being an incubator of drug resistant diseases. They do the same to their pests with pesticide use. That is the real problem with pesticide use in the United States today. And anytime farmers use pesticides irresponsibly, and not in combinations of chemistries, we end up with pesticide resistance in weeds and crop destroying insects and fungal vectors now resistant to the limited arsenal of chemicals we can use according to EPA regulations.

Cancer drugs cost a fortune. That is because many cancers are rare, and not much of the product is needed, and there is no economy of scale in production. The same applies to minor crops for agriculture. There is a very limited number of labeled pesticides. And they cost way too much. One lawsuit, and the maker just pulls them, drops the label for that crop, and the farmer is left high and dry. The pesticide is still produced, but all the testing and research for THAT CROP is ended, and there is not enough money to interest another chemical company to put their pesticide that would work on the crop and pest in need of control.

So the widespread dosing of America with pesticides is a falsehood. That is just not the case in the real world today. To say that it is helps raise money to pay NGO salaries and benefits, but the original NGO, Chicken LIttle, evidently is still with us in Mr. Pace. If you don't want farm chemicals used, period, go to Zimbabwe and become a one tenth hectare share cropper and make your fortune, and help feed the world...oh, I forgot. The "breadbasket of Africa" is now a huge importer of food with a starving population, but they are organic as can be. No pesticides. Except, of course, Furidan, which they lace into carrior to kill predators. So much for following pesticide labels for proper use. The mis-use of that particular pesticide creates a cascade of death, as predators are eaten by vultures and other carrion consumers, who in turn die and are eaten by other critters who also die, and the cascade continues for months. That the use and results are known to the world, thanks to 60 minutes, wouldn't you think that some farmer in the US sick and tired of predators eating his livestock would have used Furidan as a bait poison by now if all ranchers are money grubbing ruiners of the wild landscape? Hasn't happened and that is because the US enforces its laws, and American farmers have a much more refined land ethic. It is out of the question to be that cold hearted, that cold of a killer, in a civilized country. And no farmer or rancher I know uses chemicals in an irresponsible manner, and off label. It does happen, and those who transgress get caught and punished. I read about them every quarter in the bulletin sent to me by the pesticide division of our state dept. of agriculture. Mostly it is off label use of a pesticide or the selling of a pesticide by a dealer to a person whose license has elapsed. That and fertilizer blends with too little or too much of one ingredient. Or in the case of California, the top provider of organic fertilizers, the company whose organic fertilizers did the best job, got caught buying train tank car loads of ammonium sulfate which was being used to "spike" the organic fertilizers they sold. The crook was not a farmer, but a provisioner of farmers.

Eat your Thanksgiving dinner and enjoy it. American farmers grow that very inexpensive food because they have access to pesticides that are safe, and ensure bountiful crops which keep prices low. And next summer, grow a garden and don't use pesticides or chemical fertilizers. And then compare your crop with what is available in the super market for whatever cost. In the meantime, I have to figure out how to continue my Integrated Pest Management program in light of a new pest with no known enemy bugs to control it. Can I spray? Should I spray? Will spraying do any good? Or do we just write off a decade of growth and investment to this new pest? Lots of meetings to go to this winter, and little information about action as of yet. Thankfully, there is crop revenue insurance backed by Uncle Sam. For next year. And then the problem has to be once again addressed. It is easy to be the sneering fault finder in Yreka, but a tad more difficult to be a real food producer in the real world. No EAJA to mine for money. No trusts or foundations whose money I can use to buy votes in Congress. All we can do is grow the crop, and hope there is a harvest and a market, and the price is enough to be able to do it one more year.

Pesticides are highly regulated by EPA and state governments because they are toxic materials that poise a health risk as well as having a negative impact on other species. Nevertheless, they have their place as a management tool when used prudently and in a manner that prevents exposure to the public, farm workers and contamination of non target crops.

What is rarely articulated is that biological control strategies are more effective, less expensive and poise no health risks, contamination problems or danger to other species. Biological control is what maintains the balance of organisms in the world around us. Exotic species, organisms from far away, do not bring with them the complex of predatory and parasitic insects that prevent their populations from exploding in their "native land". Unfortunately, there is money to be made by implementing successful biological control programs. The only beneficiary is the farmer who no longer needs to resort to toxic material to reduce the pest population. It is the lack of economic incentive to develop and implement biological control programs that prevents this technology from being the dominant pest control strategy. In contrast to biological control, there is significant funding for research and testing of new pesticides and an entire industry that profits from the sale and use of pesticides. There are many examples of successful biological control programs but my favorite is the Vidalia beetle story. At the turn of the 19th century the California citrus industry was threatened by citrus scale, a devasting pest on citrus. USDA sent a team of entomologists in search of natural enemies of the citrus scale. They sent back from Australia several species, one of which was the Vidalia beetle. Beetles were put on infested limbs covered with netting to keep the beetle in. The beetles quickly devoured the citrus scale. Researchers then moved beetles to another tree and observed the beetles feasting on citrus scale. They soon began large scale releases of Vidalia beetle in different citrus growing areas. The citrus scale disappeared. No pesticides were needed. Citrus scale became a problem again in the 1960's in the Central Valley as a result of pesticide spraying. The vidalia beetles were killed. When agricultural extension workers learned about the Vidalia beetle they began searching for them. Some were found in backyards, allowed to reproduce and re-introduced to infested area. Again the problem went away without farmers having to spend any money spraying or having the risk of handling a toxic material. There are many examples of successful biological control programs. This is a powerful pest control strategy that is sustainable, safe and inexpensive. We don't need more pesticides, pesticide resistant GMO's to grow crops. We do need more public money for biological control research to help find solutions to existing and new problems.

Larry: Well said. Another aspect of pesticide use is demands from processors for no bugs, good or bad, in the fruit when delivered to the packer. Bugs are a "contaminant." Even the remains of bugs that have left behind pupae remains or the exoskeletons of bugs killed by predator bugs are considered a contaminant. I know of a baby food puree' producer whose product was rejected due to chitinous material found in testing. The grower is organic, and the chitinous material was from bugs whose soft tissue was consumed by predator bugs. The baby food producer puts the food sample in an acid solution that consumes everything but the chitinous material, and then weighs it. A discussion of limits on the material were countered with the notion that only by pesticide use will you find no insect remains stuck to the fruit, or things like the larval exoskeleton of a lady beetle stuck to fruit. The organic baby food producer changed their limits on chitinous material, none of which would hurt a child ingesting it. The material is the detritus of good organic farming. My point is that there are demands on farmers at times that are unrealistic in terms of insects being a part of the product. A little protein never hurts, unless of course, it is some insidious poison like China has allowed to be used to adulterate pet food and their own human food.

bearbait's faith in the EPA and federal government is admirable. unfortunately, they tend to be more reactive than proactive. how long did it take the government to figure out that smoking is harmful to human health? that dumping PCBs in the Hudson River was a bad idea? that spraying agricultural fields while workers are in them was also a bad idea? why are many common cleaners and construction materials still full of carcinogenic and mutagenic ingredients? because in our current system we the people have to prove that a substance or practice is harmful instead of the manufacturer proving that it's not harmful. we don't need more chemicals in our environment but let's make sure the ones being used are being applied in an appropriate manner.

So long as our nation is comprised largely of libertarians--or social darwinists--we are in greater danger from opportunists than invasion...