Protect Yourself From Herbicide and Pesticide Exposure

By Terry Shafer
Published on May 1, 1983
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Walnut tree leaves after 2, 4-D exposure.
Walnut tree leaves after 2, 4-D exposure.
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Aerial applicators are a common source of herbicide and pesticide exposure. Sprayed chemicals can drift quite far from the intended application.
Aerial applicators are a common source of herbicide and pesticide exposure. Sprayed chemicals can drift quite far from the intended application.
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To document herbicide damage, take a series of photographs before and after the harm appears. These are healthy young walnut orchard before herbicide exposure.
To document herbicide damage, take a series of photographs before and after the harm appears. These are healthy young walnut orchard before herbicide exposure.

If you live in a rural area, chances are good that sooner or later you’ll come into contact with insecticide, herbicide, or some other toxin a neighbor or government agency has sprayed on nearby forest land, roadsides, or crops. I’d like to give you some ideas on how you might prevent herbicide or pesticide exposure from happening, and on what to do in case you become ill or find yourself with a sick family, dead bees, dying crops, or other property damage because of someone else’s careless use of potentially dangerous chemicals.

Plan Ahead

First of all, there are several important steps you should take now, before an incident occurs. To begin, find out who might be spraying in your area — neighbors, county weed control and road maintenance personnel, local pesticide applicators, power companies, etc. — and let those people know that you do not want any such chemicals drifting onto your land. You may think you shouldn’t have to do this, but keep in mind that many of these folks might believe they’d actually be doing you a favor by killing that “scruffy waste brush” (your woodlot-to-be) or “all those nasty bugs” (your natural pest-control agents or honey producers).

You should also display “DO NOT SPRAY” signs — marked with arrows and giving the distances to your acreage’s appropriate borders — at every roadside corner around your property, to remind the highway-maintenance spray crew to leave your land alone. In addition, call and write your county engineer (or whoever else is responsible for taking care of streets in your area) and ask that person to make certain that all brush-killing sprays are turned off before the maintenance trucks reach your property. At the same time, ask him or her how you can care for your section of the highway right-of-way. Learn which vegetation needs to be controlled where, and why.

Now that you’ve taken all the preventive steps that you can, arm yourself with the information you’ll need if (and it’s still quite possible) a spraying incident does occur. To begin, obtain two phone numbers: [1] that of your regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and [2] that of the state agency — it’s usually associated with the agriculture department — in charge of enforcing the pesticide-use laws.

If you don’t know where the nearest EPA office is, you can find out by calling National Pesticide Information Center. And if you aren’t certain about which state agency to contact (and if the NPIC can’t tell you), ask your regional EPA office. At any rate, put the two phone numbers where you can quickly find them.

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