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I've been actually farming for about 35 years, and the pest management part of farming has
probably changed more than just about anything else.
When I first started farming there was really kind of a limited supply of choices to use
for pest control. In recent years, the number of different materials
that have been developed has just really expanded. And that's really pretty amazing when you
consider what a strict process it is to take a material and get it to the point that it
can actually be used. And what we have seen, what I have seen that
has been the biggest change is that we're using much softer, more directed chemicals
in our pest control programs than what we use to have available to us.
The last ten, fifteen, twenty years particularly, a lot of the chemicals that used to be used
- for sure twenty years ago - are no longer in use.
And the chemical companies that are developing the chemicals are now producing them in ways
that relate to or are cousins of the ones that they produce for the organic.
They're derived from natural sources: chrysanthemum plants, seeds - they really look at the environment
and see what's occurring naturally and then develop the pesticides in that manner.
We're also putting less chemical on the field than we were, say, twenty years ago but yet
getting a better yield out of the crop than we were then.