Here is my land at the moment as you can see a real mix..
Here is my fence line with my pulled back property line that I mow to help keep off over spray next to Farm R’s working fields..
Here is his fields…I know that when I asked years ago, he said Round-up but mn.. what a desert..night and day.. sigh.. at least he works with me and makes sure his boys don’t spray my safe zone, that happened one year with new hire and I showed him the drift and its never happened since. So do you live next to someone that uses things on their land, that you would personally choose not to? and if so, have you created your own version of a buffer zone?
Just another Day on the Farm 
You know, it wasn’t that long when ago you saw a “roundup ready” field (with that terrible, dead, reddish-brown “scorched-earth” appearance) and it was an oddity… Now I’m hard pressed to see a working field that’s not and it just breaks my heart.
Do these “farmers” (and btw, to me being a farmer has no higher calling; for who else is entrusted with the health of so many?) do they truly not see the results of what they’re doing? How can they not?
And, in answer to your question, there have been times when nasty smelling things drift in, but what can you do? Nothing controls the wind; it has no regard for man made borders. The only solution is for man to work with Nature – using the pest control solutions which, in a healthy biosphere, have been in place for millenia.
Don’t have the answers at all Deb, but all weekend as I worked on our land filled with toads, frogs, butterflys and buzz of bee’s, flipping green covers and digging out wild carrot over and over again as we put in our garden again, I would stand and stretch and over and over again, my eye would go from my “alive” but working land to the barren fields around me and it would just feel wrong to me..
I’m going to play devil’s advocate and chime in a little. Everyone uses roundup around here because of the price of fuel. The way it was explained to me is that a sprayed field takes many fewer passes with the equipment, and when you’re talking in hundreds of acres it adds up. I know so many people who are just barely getting by, trying to hold onto the land their families have worked for generations, I can’t help but sympathize. I don’t like it, but I sympathize because I know them and they are good, honest and hard working people. It’s a hard way to make a living, especially when you are small and family-run. I only bring this up because I wanted to point out the other side of the coin, at least from my own experience. I think I would be hard pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t prefer to do things the old way, for the most part no one I know likes it either, but it’s the world we live in. Maybe one day farmers will be paid what they are actually worth and we won’t need to worry about these things anymore.
I hear you Daisy, and as I said, I do feel that I have a good working relationship with the gentleman that owns the land next door, he could choose to overspray and does not, he could not warn me but always does, he could not be kind enough to tell me when his corn will be fertile, so that I can plant around it, knowing that it won’t effect my garden crop, he could complain about the fact that I let certain area’s of my farm be “wild” as there is a bush-hog rule in place, but he instead he has only asked that I make sure two different things are kept well-eaten down by the sheep for control, and he lefts me wild-craft on all his bush lines, take anything I want plant wise for transplanting and plows my laneway during big storms for nothing more then a thank-you and fresh baking.. I consider myself very lucky to be honest.. but I still don’t like seeing that big black sea of round-up land..
Hi Daisy, You know, they always said that roundup becomes inert as soon as it comes in contact with the soil (see it? right there on the label) but now (finally) studies are showing that this is far from the truth. Think of it as poisoning everything in the soil, right down to all of the micro flora and fauna… Now please tell me why no one does real tillage, disking, growth and fallow cycles anymore.
When I was a kid, self sustaining family farms were everywhere and they were prosperous; now they’re in decline and the land is being leased to big cash croppers. Can you tell me what’s truly changed since then and how much do the “efficiencies” really cost?
That is really sad. What a shame that we have to worry about things like this. Maybe there will be a time when we won’t have to.
I would love to think so, but given how very far behind we are in regards to controlling the use of these products and in regards to the fact that N.A. is darn near the only place that does not have to tell the consumers that there is or is not GMO in the foods we consume, gives me little hope at the moment but as you say.. perhaps in the future..
For now, we have left a 6 ft. barrier. We are working on turning it into a permaculture hedgerow. Hopefully that will be enough.
You are lucky to be allowed to do that, I looked into it, and we have farming rules about what can and can’t be planted in that five foot stripe down the farm property line, I am not allowed to plant tree’s that close to working feilds, I have tree lines on the front of the property that faces the road, as that is legal, I tend to push the line on the one front yard side but keep it to fruiting bushes, nothing getting bigger then currents or gooseberries etc but even so I have been given a warning when I first planted them out as I had them maybe 3 feet from the line and I had to pull them back to six feet to make it ok, Don’t want to make it sound like the farmer does not work with me, the one time I had fruit crops clearly visable and almost ready and he dropped by and said.. pick them now if you can, I can hold off up to two days before doing my last spray of the year and I know you want to keep it clean, so he really does try and work with me, but I do the same back, if I have something that he really worries about “weed” wise, and its not something I eat, I will put the sheep on it and graze it down so it won’t send seeds his way etc.
Dang… Must say it’s hard to ‘like’ that one…. I found that our DOT sprays the road with growth inhibitors a while back… ARGH. I’m growing a child in this house, and we have a well. I spoke w/ the man from DOT who does the spraying and he said he would not spray our section any longer so long as we keep the weeds/etc. under control. DONE. I’ve also put up a “no spray zone, thank you” sign as a reminder. Curse you Monsatan….
*anna