On Wednesday, May 22nd we went to Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) in Ames. Most of our discussion centered around pesticide drift, specifically, Dicamba. Dicamba is a volitile pesticide and once it is sprayed, it quite literally is gone with the wind. It can move for miles and with no way to determine who sprayed it, effected farmers find it hard to get recompensed for damages. Even if they can prove who the pesticide drifted from, vegetable and other specialty crops are not eligible for crop insurance like Mitch Meyer and Renae Zoske sell, and most will not receive damages.

PFI also mentioned that good applicators of pesticides will use DriftWatch. DriftWatch is essentially an app that makes specialty farmers visible to conventional farmers. Applicators can notify specialty farmers if they plan to spray near them but there is no regulations to do so.

Later today after stopping for lunch at Noodles we headed for Monsanto (now Bayer). Once again the hot topic was Dicamba and pesticide drift. Bayer’s stance is that they did not originally know that Dicamba would drift so far and the way to control Dicamba is through applicator training. I find it amusing that applicator training required for Glyphosate (Round-up) is less rigorous than Dicamba, when there are health effects to exposure. In fact, it seemed that Bayer was trying to push their idea that exposure to organophosphates, pesticides and Round-Up was entirely safe. They even handed out a fact sheet on the safety of Glyphosate. I’m not convinced, and I’m sure the OSHA fact sheet would tell a different story.

Regardless, the scientist in me is completely in awe of the way DNA can be extracted. We even got to play with the small version of the chipper machine. It takes a small sample of the corn seed enabling the scientists to extract genes. If done correctly, the corn seed retains its ability to grow. We each got to place a corn seed in the machine and received a chipped seed to keep. My next venture will be trying to grow my corn kernel in my backyard.