COLLEGE STATION — The key to cutting down pesticide pollution of the environment is through economic incentives to farmers, according to Thomas Hoogheem, environmental operations director for the Monsanto Company.
Hoogheem was one of eight speakers highlighting 1995 Texas A&M University System Agricultural Program Conference, held recently on the university campus.
Hoogheem said that most pesticide contaminations do not happen because the product is an inherent danger to the environment. Instead, most accidents happen because farmers and other consumers don’t follow label directions or otherwise misuse the products.
There are good and bad herbicides, Hoogheem said. But good or bad, abuse by users has been the main cause of pollution problems and bad press for the chemical industry during the last three decades.
Chemical companies such as the Monsanto Agricultural Group do not intentionally produce environmentally hazardous chemicals, but simply produce products that meet public demand. Chemical companies have no way to prevent misuse of such products, but they do get much of the blame, Hoogheem said.
As examples of misuse, Hoogheem cited the illegal and unsupervised dispersal of PCBs at Love Canal; the runoff of the herbicide atrazine in groundwater due to overspraying; and the entry of other herbicides into groundwater through cracked well casings or the mouths of uncapped, abandoned wells.
The easiest and surest way of promoting more environmentally conscious use of pesticides is through federal and state farm programs that offer farmers economic incentives for following better management practices, Hoogheem said.
He added that agricultural chemical companies have not been entirely innocent, but that Monsanto and the industry as a whole are becoming more environmentally conscious.
“We’ve made some mistakes. We’re going to try not to make them again,” he said.
Titled “Preparing for Change: Creating the Future,” the 1995 conference’s intent was to address the “tremendous change facing agriculture in the 21st century,” said Dr. Charles Long, professor with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station and member of the conference program committee.
“Our objective was to assemble a program that would provide a diversity of views and stimulate university faculty to think about the future,” said Long, who is also resident director for research at the Texas A&M Agricultural Research and Extension Center at Overton.
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