Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945

CHEMICAL LANDS

NEW HISTORIES OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AGRICULTURE & MEDICINE

NEXUS is a book series devoted to the publication of high-quality scholarship in the history of the sciences and allied fields. Its broad reach encompasses science, technology, the environment, agriculture, and medicine, but also includes intersections with other types of knowledge, such as music, urban planning, or educational policy. Its essential concern is with the interface of nature and culture, broadly conceived, and it embraces an emerging intellectual constellation of new syntheses, methods, and approaches in the study of people and nature through time.

SERIES EDITORS

Alan I Marcus

Mark D. Hersey

Alexandra E. Hui

ADVISORY BOARD

Amy Sue Bix

Frederick R. Davis

Jim Downs

Richard A. Richards

Suman Seth

Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis

Jessica Wang

CHEMICAL LANDS

Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945

DAVID D. VAIL

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2018 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Cover image: Aerial spraying in Dodge City, Kansas, circa 1940s; courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vail, David D. (David Douglas), 1981– author.

Title: Chemical lands : pesticides, aerial spraying, and health in North America’s grasslands since 1945 / David D. Vail.

Other titles: Nexus (Tuscaloosa, Ala.)

Description: Tuscaloosa, Alabama : The University of Alabama Press, [2018] | Series: Nexus | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017022088| ISBN 9780817319731 (cloth) | ISBN 9780817391652 (e book)

Subjects: LCSH: Pesticides—Application—North America. | Grasses—Pests—Control—North America. | Aerial spraying and dusting in agriculture—North America.

Classification: LCC SB952.8 .V355 2018 | DDC 363.17/92—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022088

To Thomas G. Paterson

Mentor, Teacher, and Friend

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Sinister Touch of the Poison

1

Making Chemical-Agricultural Landscapes

2

Creating New Pests, Experts, and Risks

3

Spraying the Airplane Way

4

Toxic Standards and Fables

5

Regional Politics, National Debates, and the Ag-1 Program

6

Spraying Grasslands Abroad

Conclusion: Agricultural Aviation at the Dawn of a Chemical-Digital Age

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figure I.1. Fifty published versions of the range of the Great Plains

Figure 1.1. The hopperdozzer in action

Figure 2.1. Some factors in selective weed control

Figure 3.1. Basic profiles of the postwar aerial sprayers

Figure 3.2. Early spraying configuration recommendations for Ag pilots

Figure 3.3. An Ag plane nozzle system, 1954

Figure 3.4. The spray planes in Donald Pratt’s P-T Air Service fleet

Figure 4.1. Dodge City spray pilot Roy Mahon in discussion with local weed supervisor Ralph Strum

Figure 5.1. Bootlegging scheme shows that a barrel labeled for DDT exclusively also contained percentages of 2,4-D

Figure 5.2. Bootlegging mislabeling scheme

Acknowledgments

This book finds its origins in my many conversations with environmental historian James E. Sherow. Our discussions about the region’s technological, agricultural, and environmental relationships started me down a scholarly road of great challenges and joys that ultimately resulted in this study. I am also particularly indebted to my exceptional history colleagues as well as to the College of Natural and Social Sciences and the Graduate School at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK). As I completed chapter edits, they offered crucial insights that made the work stronger and more cohesive. I am also grateful for writing support by UNK’s Department of History through the Hamaker Summer Fellowship Research Award.

Numerous archivists, librarians, and staff contributed to the research that went into this book. Particular mention goes to Kansas State University’s Morse Department of Special Collections, the Kansas Historical Society, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma, the National Air and Space Archives at the Smithsonian Institution, and Iowa State University’s Special Collection and Archives. I am especially grateful to the several pilots, formulators, and farmers in Kansas, Nebraska, and elsewhere who shared their time and stories of aerial spraying with me.

I must mention a dear group of friends, many of whom started as mentors but have now become professional colleagues. Joe Anderson, Wayne Anderson, Jenny Barker Devine, Dawn Biehler, Tony Brown, Jason Coleman, Lawrence Culver, Geoff Cunfer, Frederick Rowe Davis, Virgil Dean, Adam Ebert, Sara Egge, Sterling Evans, Sarah Fox, Lori Goetsch, Tim Gresham, Mike Hankins, Dave Hartnett, Derek Hoff, Jennifer Holland, Nancy Langston, Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, David F. McCartney, Heather McCrea, Julie Mulvihill, Ted Nagurny, Aaron Otto, Bob Parson, James A. Petersen, Debra Reid, Pam Riney-Kehrberg, Timothy Rives, Keli Rylance, Jamie Sanders, Paul Sutter, Jeremy Vetter, Albert Way, and Kelly Wenig all taught me much about the profession and have helped me flourish in it. I look forward to their advice, mentorship, and camaraderie in the future.

A note about historians C. Fred Williams and Mark Finlay. One of the most powerful moments in my early career involved joining the Agricultural History Society (AHS) and sitting on a panel with Fred. His kindness, insights, and joy for history really put a young scholar at ease. I am so thankful for that conference and that panel. Over the next few years, I gleaned as much as I could from Fred through our encounters at AHS meetings. Mark’s book Growing American Rubber: Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security and research on the chemurgy movement long informed the direction of my own research. But just as important, Mark seemed to always have the needed words for the right moments. In 2012, when I was facing the stresses of joining a hard job market, he pulled me aside at an AHS meeting in Manhattan, Kansas, and told me that my work was exciting—that he couldn’t wait for it to come out in print. And, that things would work out in the end. These moments mattered. While losing them both still carries much sadness, I am eager to continue down the enriching academic path that both Fred and Mark helped forge.

I extend sincerest thanks to the University of Alabama Press. Director Linda Manning, editor-in-chief Daniel Waterman, environmental history editor Elizabeth Motherwell, and the rest of the staff helped with this book at every stage. I am also grateful for the editorial guidance of Alan Marcus, Mark Hersey, and Alexandra Hui who oversee the NEXUS series, and am indebted to Mark and Alan especially for their insights and friendship. My gratitude also extends to the anonymous reviewers. Their reports struck a perfect balance of encouragement and criticism.

Now to my love, Rosanna. Thank you for listening to my ramblings about pesticides and encouraging me to pull over to watch Ag pilots practicing their craft while driving on busy interstates. Your reading and rereading of chapters made this a better book. Your academic brilliance, unconditional love, and joyful spirit have made me a better scholar and human being.

Introduction

The Sinister Touch of the Poison

If, in the springtime, you find yourself traveling East on Interstate 70 from Colorado through Kansas toward Missouri, or West through Nebraska to Wyoming on Interstate 80, you may witness aerial acrobatics usually reserved for air shows or agricultural fairs. Yellow spray planes take flight over nearby fields. These aircraft are quite impressive to watch. Pilots flying low and slow dip over crops as small as five acres just outside of rural towns. They spray long swaths over hundreds of acres of wheat in western Kansas or treat a similar acreage of corn in Nebraska or Iowa. Although hard to see in the cockpit as they pass by, Ag pilots are working in tandem with aerial conditions and through a digital-chemical process to deliver precisely the right amount of herbicide or insecticide to target fields. Crops under attack from noxious weeds or destructive insects (sometimes both) require pilots’ familiarity with entomology, chemistry, and botany to assist in split-second decision-making as they fly overhead. If the pilots miscalculate spray distance or mix chemicals improperly, the sprays will kill farmers’ crops instead of saving them. A miss also allows weeds or insects to infest another day.

To view these planes and their spraying routes means getting a sense of the long, intertwined history of agricultural science and technology, aviation, and regional environments that defines the Great Plains. Just as significant, though, is what remains unseen. The Ag plane itself is an outward manifestation of hidden, internal relationships between chemicals, physical and digital technologies, and environments that are both aerial and terrestrial. Meanwhile, human pilots offer another set of factors to consider. Their combined scientific, agricultural, and aerial knowledge merges to render spraying sessions successful. If external wind speed suddenly changes or an unexpected thunderstorm appears, pilots have to quickly adapt to these conditions, making the decisions necessary to reschedule the aerial application for another day.

Chemical Lands explores this human, nonhuman, technological-environmental exchange in order to show that what seem to be distinct lines between farming, science, technologies, and environments in the postwar era are actually quite blurred. After World War II, spraying from the skies in the grasslands turned pilots into scientists, airplanes into farming tools, and pesticides into poisoners as well as protectors. Ag planes sprayed chemical winds to treat fields, but these were dangerous clouds, too. All it took was a slight uptick in wind currents, small changes in ground temperature, or an approaching storm to shift sprays beyond target fields. Beyond threatening the health of pilots and crops, unleashing pesticides (which for farmers and aerial sprayers included both insecticides and herbicides) meant remaking the production landscape. As chemicals landed on prairie crops, pests died but soils simplified and nontarget plants and animals suffered.

Farmers and pilots understood that agricultural toxicity also took nonsynthetic forms. Noxious weeds stole nutrients, poisoned livestock, and threatened the overall health of fields. Ag pilots and farmers considered this process just as poisonous as the chemicals they applied. Some plants actually did carry toxic consequences if ingested by livestock. Both synthetic and nonsynthetic versions represented risks that required Ag pilots, farmers, and agriculturalists to study how toxicity worked on the land, followed by inquiries into how they could synthetically match insecticides and herbicides to compete against the noxious pests found in their fields.¹ These notions of risk, reward, protection, and pollution throughout the grasslands were often entangled in ways that applicators failed to calculate or that politicians could not accept. The modern Ag plane, with its bright yellow restricted color and advanced internal technological networks, embodies these longer, intertwined histories of pesticides, health, risk, and agricultural science.

Many readers of this book will be familiar with pesticides’ political history. The controversies that swirled around insecticides and herbicides in the 1960s and 1970s—related to the question of their long-term ecological harm versus benefits to agricultural production—were potent storylines throughout these decades. Most importantly, the environmentalist spark that began with biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring seemed to challenge long-held views about the industrial might of American agriculture.

The power of Silent Spring lay in its scientific critique of pesticides, especially DDT. But Carson’s prose made the critique that much more salient. Her ability to connect complex toxicological data to the real-world consequences of agricultural chemicals in common language ignited public concerns and engendered debates that traveled all the way up to the American presidency. After reading her book shortly after its publication in 1962, President John F. Kennedy organized a commission to study the human and environmental consequences of DDT, an insecticide that, up to that point, enjoyed the benefits of its pedigree as a weapon important to the success of the United States in the Pacific theater during World War II. Many Americans felt that what had protected soldiers must be useful for farmers and housewives back home. Carson disagreed.

Central to Silent Spring was the question of how users applied agricultural chemicals, especially insecticides. Carson never argued for a complete banning of DDT; nor did she suggest that farmers stop using chemicals entirely. She did, however, target indiscriminate application, especially in aerial spraying. Throughout Silent Spring, Carson warned that the haphazard dusting and spraying of insecticides over American cities and farmlands was being done without much thought to long-term dangers and with little regard for precision. The scope of aerial spraying has widened and its volume has increased, she argued, but Americans’ attitude toward toxic sprays seemed to ignore dangers for the promises of poisons. Once chemicals are placed in containers marked with skull and crossbones, Carson explained, the infrequent occasions of their use were marked with utmost care that they should come in contact with the target and with nothing else.² Silent Spring did not look kindly on agricultural aviation. In a chapter titled Indiscriminately from the Skies, Carson described aerial sprayers as poisoners of the worst sort: "Although today’s poisons are more dangerous than any known before, they have amazingly become something to be showered down indiscriminately from the skies. Not only the target insect or plant, but anything—human or nonhuman—within range of the chemical fallout has known the sinister touch of the poison."³

In the wake of Carson’s seminal work and the influential role it played in changing America’s relationship with pesticides, multiple scholars have pursued biographical, political, and scientific paths to understand the political debates and regulatory framework relevant to the agricultural-environmental problems of the mid-twentieth century.⁴ The military and international legacies of pesticides as told by historians Edmund Russell and David Kinkela help clarify how cultural, scientific, and economic legacies of wartime remade American domestic views toward pesticides after World War II and throughout the Cold War.⁵ But little has been written about the decades before Silent Spring. How were insecticides and herbicides viewed, studied, and applied before warnings, political debates, and advanced scientific experimentation in various regions, especially the grasslands? In their recent studies, historians Pete Daniel, Frederick Rowe Davis, Michelle Mart, and Adam Tompkins begin to contextualize Carson’s book by providing a deeper understanding of the time period that preceded its publication. In Daniel’s Toxic Drift, region and risk collide in the American South. Agricultural aviators stood here as prime examples of the kinds of abuses Carson was to write about. Although facing toxic challenges similar to those described in Silent Spring, southern pilots, Daniel writes, held a macho and irreverent image to the world. Some of these pilots realized that their lives depended upon care in handling pesticides and that their business thrived on accuracy of application, while others, like those that flew for the Agricultural Research Service control projects, ignored property lines and displayed little of the finesse shown by private dusters.⁶ For his part, Davis argues for a "rereading of Silent Spring" in the context of the history of pesticides and the science of toxicology. His book Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology argues that in order to understand Carson’s critiques, we must first understand how scientists clarified risks in earlier decades as well as how the American public understood the benefits of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons as well as organophosphates, to which farmers turned after the ban on DDT in 1972.

Tompkins’s Ghostworkers and Greens: The Cooperative Campaigns of Farmworkers and Environmentalists for Pesticide Reform uncovers the collaborative efforts between southwestern farmworkers and environmental organizations to confront the toxic consequences of pesticide use and to develop policies to protect workers and their communities in the post-Silent Spring era. For them, Carson’s ability to communicate complex scientific data about pesticides in an accessible way empowered individuals and groups with knowledge, giving them a degree of expertise that could be used to influence public policy and private practices.⁷ In Michelle Mart’s Pesticides, A Love Story: America’s Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals, Carson’s book is understood as a text that illuminates a larger cultural affinity for pesticides that could not be diminished by risk, policy, or practice. Americans’ love of chemicals seemed to win every time.⁸ As Mart suggests, The first brilliant glow of DDT symbolized modernity, scientific prowess, and the idea that the environment was a resource to be harnessed.⁹

Chemical Lands contributes to this scholarship by shedding light on the Great Plains story. A more diverse agricultural landscape brought different production pressures and chemical dangers than was the case in the farmlands in the South. And, as insecticides and herbicides brought many technological challenges and environmental exposures to the grasslands, agriculturalists, farmers, and pilots devised risk assessments and searched early and often for solutions in the field. That process at the field level, though, was highly specific to the region and complicated by local experiences. The practitioners of pesticides and herbicides did not express a blanket endorsement of agricultural chemicals. More than just a general suspicion characterized how they viewed and used pesticides in the grasslands. Rather, many pilots, farmers, and weed scientists demonstrated a strong reluctance toward the use of agricultural chemicals generally and their aerial applications specifically.

The science of toxicology in this region also took a distinctly agricultural form. Practitioners in the Great Plains certainly reviewed chemical science results reported by laboratories such as the University of Chicago’s Toxicity Laboratory, or federal institutions such as the United States Department of Agriculture. But those professional perspectives only went so far. To secure farm health meant testing laboratory results in fields, airways, and crops in the region. Ag pilots and weed scientists understood in the field what their professional counterparts discovered in the lab—that agricultural chemicals involved much more than the pharmacological principle the right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.¹⁰ In the grasslands, Ag pilots could not fly and spray based solely on laboratory results. Their applications had to be precise chemically; their knowledge expansive and in tune with the region.

Chemical Lands reveals how scientific expertise and common knowledge merged in the air and fields of the Great Plains through agricultural aviation. Similar to historian Brian Frehner’s consideration of vernacular, local, and professional authority in the history of petroleum geology, this book uses a field view approach to examine how landowners, aerial applicators, and weed scientists made efforts toward ensuring crop safety and public health through a risk assessment process that balanced economic goals with the well-being of their fields and communities. Healthy crops for farmers or successful spraying businesses for aviators meant more than killing pests. Pilots developed application procedures, studied chemical toxicity in crops, and built networks that linked local farming knowledge with scientific expertise.¹¹

In a very real sense, agricultural chemicals engineered the Great Plains toward their toxic tendencies. Insecticides and herbicides altered spray equipment and created new pests. Practitioner experts combined laboratory tests with a prairie view of risk, vulnerability, and health to acquire a better sense of the dangers.¹² However, the Great Plains’ transition to chemical lands started much earlier. Beginning with the use of fire and basic synthetics to combat pests in the late nineteenth century, healthy grasses came to be understood as productive fields that relied on a simplified, poison-based cultivation. Insecticides and herbicides offered an alternative to the labor-intensive land management practices of past decades. Even using agricultural chemicals during this era meant that in order for landowners to effectively apply poisons, they needed a chemical understanding. This cultural view of production—that chemical farming meant appreciating how toxics (even in basic ways) worked on crops—continued to guide future grassland views of pesticide use in aerial applications throughout the mid-twentieth-century Great Plains.

As early as the 1940s, a new synthetic cultural-environmental-technological landscape began to emerge, requiring new agriculturalists (weed scientists in particular) to be toxicologists as well as farmers. Ag pilots found themselves studying the fields of entomology, chemistry, and biology, to name a few. Then, there were new pesticide airplanes flying overhead. Wind velocity, air and ground speed, turbulence, micro-climates, drift coefficients, chemical deposit tendencies, drift swaths, and ongoing meteorological events all shaped aviation-based chemical applications. The skies overhead played a significant part in what happened to the chemical-agricultural grasses below.¹³

The agricultural commitment to insecticides and herbicides, however, did not go unchecked in the Great Plains. As Ag pilots sprayed prairies with toxic clouds and weed scientists developed hybrid studies of pests and chemicals, both groups of practitioners designed experiments, engineered agricultural aircraft parts, and planted test crops in order to better understand pesticides. Their efforts to link the science of toxicology with environmental health followed a distinctly regional, agricultural frame. For most people in the region, precision became the answer. Healthy farms meant fields safe from the threat of insects and weeds, but the cultural view also included chemical dangers. Many landowners even extended their suspicions of pesticides’ unruliness to Ag pilots, insisting that aerial applicators harmed as much as the poisons supposedly saved.¹⁴

Certainly pests shaped the region’s agricultural-chemical landscape, but noxious weeds also helped to construct that landscape and played a key role in the evolution of aerial spraying. In addition to poisonous plants causing obvious economic damage, they presented environmental hazards to fields, pastures, and rangelands. As biological vectors, weeds forced farmers, Ag pilots, and agricultural scientists into new relationships with their poisons. Producers needed pesticides to match injurious plants and insects that contaminated their fields. Thus, a natural toxicity and a synthetic, industrial version merged to create new biological-technical relationships among weeds, chemicals, and crops.

The North Central Weed Control Conference (NCWCC) became a central hub for this melding of learning, experimentation, and debate. Panel presentations on the results of studies testing how insecticides and herbicides affected crops, ranchlands, livestock, and agricultural aircraft offered pilots and farmers the kind of local data they needed to achieve successful crop yields. The meetings also