IS CENTRAL PARK TOXIC?

I’ve always considered NYC itself to be toxic, any pesticide use being sort of irrelevant to the larger situation.

I stay out of any place above the Mason-Dixon line. New Yawk Shitty comes under (not my problem).

These people are total morons. First, the pencil neck reporter repeatedly calls Roundup a pesticide. It is an herbicide. Second, the legitimate issue with Roundup is, should big ag be able to spray it over food crops genetically modified not to succumb to it.

Hey, let me do a little cut-and paste. A short little extract from John Ringo’s novel *The Last Centurion* (2008).

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The best organic farming in the world is hugely inefficient compared to industrial farming. All the kumbaya types that wanted everyone to go to organic farming simply could not do math. Say that everyone was suddenly forced, by some sort of edict, (like, say, The Emergency Powers Act and a fucking Presidential Order) to do organic farming. We won’t even talk about horse-drawn plows, just no genmod seeds, no herbicides, no pesticides, no “nonorganic” (a contradiction in terms, by the way) fertilizers.

Look, the U.S. was and is beginning to be again the world’s bread basket. We produced, and are getting back to producing, 15% of world agricultural production. With about a quarter the workers per ton. But if we had to go to “all organic farming” we’d have had to break three times the amount of land that was farmed. Why three? Because in areas that weren’t rapidly urbanizing, good farmland was all in use. That means working the marginal stuff where production falls off, fast.

Three times as much plowing. Three times as much transportation. About five times (for some complicated reasons) the hands. There was already a notable shortage of skilled farm workers; I have no clue where we’d get the extra guys.

And you have to use some fertilizer. I can project places we could get it, they’re called sewers. Do you transport it raw? I don’t think even the tofu-eaters like the idea of honey-wagons all over the road and they would be all over the road. The transportation network for professionally produced fertilizer was very efficient. Trying to replace it with some massive network of shit carriers was going to be ugly. And then there’s the energy involved in transportation.

Again, plenty of studies. Environmental damage from a total switch to organic farming would have been ten times that of the current conditions of mass industrial farming. Don’t care what the tofu-eaters believed; that was the reality.

For every simple answer people don’t use there are big complicated reasons they don’t. But some people can’t comprehend big complicated reasons so they cling to the simple answers.

Back to the tofu-eaters in Lamoille. The crops didn’t sprout. Those that did did poorly. It was a sucky year to farm, that was part of it. The big part was that the tofu-eaters had no clue what they were doing. And they weren’t willing to work nearly hard enough. If you’re going to organically farm, you’d better be ready to work ten times as hard as an industrial farmer. And I mean “swinging a hoe” hard. And “picking the corn” hard. (The latter is not harvesting.) Why? Weeds. Pests.

Laying down a bed, industrially, works like this in the simplest possible way. (Understand, this is the farming version of C-A-T spells “Cat.” Don’t think this little paragraph can make you a farmer.) Start with winter fallow field. Spray with herbicide. Let sink in. Wait two weeks for Roundup to degrade. Spray with ammonium nitrate to “seal” the soil. Some stuff you have to combine these but that’s getting into sentences and complex words like complex. Wait a short period of time for ammonia to do its magic. Check soil temperature (if you’re good you’ve guessed the day perfectly) and start plowing and planting simultaneously with a John Deere combination planter. At specified intervals spray with insecticide and herbicide chemically targeted to miss your crops. Depending on what you’re growing, you might have to do pollination. (Usually except for the low-grains like rye, wheat and barley.) Pollination is the one thing that is hugely manpower intense. (Oh and picking rocks. I can’t believe I left out picking rocks!) Generally it happens in summer and you hire a whole bunch of the local kids to come out and hand pollinate. And they’d better be willing to work for peanuts or it’s going to break you.

Harvest when it’s ready and get ready to either do a second crop or let the field lie fallow for winter. Repeat.

(By the way, all farmers have some level of debt. Ever signed a mortgage and get the question “Do you want to pay monthly, quarterly, biannually or annually” and look at the banker like they’re nuts? Monthly, of course! Are you nuts? Unless you’re a farmer. In which case, it’s generally yearly. You don’t make diddly until harvest. That’s when all debts get paid, payments on tractors, payments on improvements to the house, payments on your car. And you’d better have budgeted for next year, including the pollinators, or you’re going to go bust. Farmers are planners.)

So, let’s say you’re growing corn and you don’t do all that. You just put it in the ground (at the right time) and let it grow its own way. Okay, maybe you spread the field with “manure” (shit) before you plow. (The tofu-eaters mostly didn’t.) But you’re not going to use evil herbicides or pesticides.

Well, weeds grow much faster than crops. In fact, it seems weeds will grow like, well, weeds. They get up everywhere. Even in fields that have been sprayed over and over again, they spring up. They are transported by wind, by birds. Fucking thistles are the bane of any farmer’s existence. They get carried on bird legs and birds will get into the fields. If you don’t spray in a year or so you’re covered in thistles.

But wait! I can hear the organic types screaming about burning and cutting and all that. Yeah. Tell it to the Amish. Go look at an Amish field right next to an “evil” field. Let’s take wheat since it’s easy to spot. Look at the “evil” field. You’ll see, scattered through it, some brown looking stuff that isn’t wheat. If you don’t know what that is, it’s called “Indian Tobacco.” It’s related, distantly, to tobacco but has no value as a crop. Period. It’s a weed.

Look at the “evil” field. Maybe five percent of the total, usually less, is taken over by Indian Tobacco. Look at the Amish field. Closer to thirty percent.

And they burn. And they cut during fallow at intervals to catch weeds. Some of them, and there was a big debate about it, even used biological controls. (Pests that target specific weeds.)

And it’s still there. Hell, it’s hard enough to get rid of with herbicides. And its root structure strangles out everything around it. Let fucking Indian Tobacco get loose in a wheat field for long enough and you might as well move to Florida and retire.

And don’t even get me started on mustard weed! I really fucking hate mustard weed!

But we were talking about corn. So let’s talk about burcucumber. Sounds cute, right? It’s a combination of two words, the first of which is “bur.” Don’t know if anyone reading this has ever dealt with burs. They’re the things that stick onto your legs when you’re walking through grass in summer. Burcucumber doesn’t have really nasty burs, but it’s a climber. It climbs like any viny plant. Let it get into a corn crop and it will climb right up and kill the plants.

And all weeds, no matter how minor, take away nutrients from your crops. They are a pain in the ass.

So, you can do industrial things to get rid of them. From a paper on weed management and burcucumber:

“Management: Soil applications of Balance Pro or postemergence applications of atrazine, Beacon, Buctril, Classic, Cobra, glyphosate, or Liberty.”

You know, herbicides. Get out there in your spray truck. Call in a crop duster. Corn’s a monocot. Burcucumber is a dichot. (grass vs. broad-leaf plant) Some herbicides (2-4-d: Brush-Be-Gone) only killed dichots. If you didn’t get it with the first application of Roundup you can get it with Brush-Be-Gone. In the case of soy, which had been “genetically modified” to be resistant to glypho (Roundup) you can go ahead and spray ’em anyway. I do so love modern bio-tech.

Or, you can manage it by tilling fallow fields (not a great use of anyone’s time), burning at appropriate times and, most especially, weeding. (All but the last, by the way, causing more damage to the environment.)

Weeding. You know, get out there with a hoe and hack away at the weeds. Better make sure you get all the roots and especially get them before they seed. Or next year is going to be worse. And worse. And worse. Gonna spend a lot of time on your knees. Backbreaking work. Stoop-work, the worst kind. It will kill you fast. Ask any Mexican farm laborer.

But those guys were mostly doing it at harvest. You’d better be doing it all summer. Hell, spring, summer and fall; there are weeds that spring up all three seasons and you need to get them young.

If you’ve got an area that’s large enough to support four people and some to sell, you’re going to be weeding all the time. Or you’re not going to get enough to support the foursome.

And you still will have more weeds than those evil bastards using chemicals. Ask the Amish.

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Y’know. Just to give everybody an accurate idea of what it’s like to farm WITHOUT genmod crops and herbicides, okay?