The Rural Voice, 1978-06, Page 7This Piper aircraft is one of five that Kincardine Airways uses.
There are three regular pilots each of whom must do 10,000 acres
a year to break even.
not seem large but on the 10,000 acres a crop sprayer is likely to
do a year, that's a lot of savings. about 500 acres of yield.
Despite his justification of some damage caused by aircraft
spraying, Mr. Szekely claims that a good deal of the damage crop
dusters get blamed for is actually from other causes such as salt
damage along roads and drift from ground sprayers.
Government inspectors called to investigate damage will often
put the blame on aircraft spraying even though they have no
proof that was the real cause.
In some cases, he says, aircraft can more safely apply
chemicals than ground sprayers. He talks about orchards where
fungicides must be applied after a rainfall. The aircraft can fly
right over the tree tops to drop its chemicals but the ground
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sprayer has to spray the chemical up in the air sometimes 20-30
feet to let it drop down.
It isn't that he's just a complainer about government
restrictions with no alteynatives in mind. One recent summer, he
says. he asked for the government to split the salary with him for
a student to monitor his spraying operation. There just isn't
enough testing and research into crop spraying he says. There
aren't enough experts on crop spraying to know just what it's
about. The government refused to go along, he says.
He and Mr. Fischer commiserate over the government's
expectation of how much knowledge sprayers should have of the
chemicals they use. They use over 500 chemicals, they say and
the government expects them to know the chemical makeup of
each and such things as the symptoms of someone who has had
an ingestion of each.
Mr. Szekely put the blame on government for many of the
problems with chemicals saying the government is supposed to
test the chemicals before they are released for public use but
they don't do a good enough job and then when something goes
wrong, the government blames the sprayer or the manufacturer
of the chemical but shucks the blame itself.
All these problems with herbicides and pesticides has
Kincardine Airways looking for other business. They're trying to
get into liquid Nitrogen application for instance, but with the
poor weather for wheat planting last fall, there was little nitrogen
to be applied this spring. They're expecting more business this
year applying fungicides to beans because of the infections
which have struck the bean crop and the fact that if the bean
plants are disturbed by ground sprayers. the disease can be
spread.
Crop sprayers. like the farmers they serve, have been caught
in a cost -price squeeze in recent years. Price cutting by
competing sprayers means that the spraying charge is only $3.50
per acre plus chemicals in 1978, compared to $2.50 plus
chemicals in 1972 but the price of gasoline for the aircraft, for
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`____._..._...._J
THE RURAL VOICE/JUNE 1978. PG. 7.