organic farmer successfully sues pesticide sprayer for trespassing on his crops

listen.  I know you have an attention span of about ninety seconds, but if you don’t have time to watch this video, leave the site and come back when you can.  this is one of the most interesting, and most important videos I have ever presented on ihoc.

larry Jacobs is the first organic farmer to successfully sue a neighboring pesticide sprayer for damaging his crop.  this is now a legal precedent, which will hopefully change the game completely.  for those of you in agriculture, the importance and weight of this story will be self evident.  for those of you not involved in ag, you might need to step back to grasp the bigger picture. 

the scale, the toxicity, and the short sighted approach to conventional agriculture is flabbergasting.  tons and tons, literal tons per acre in some cases, of pesticides and herbicides and fungicides are applied to our foods and our soils in order to maintain the yields which these chemicals can produce.  these chemicals rape the soils of their life.  the soil becames an empty vessel for which chemicals and petroleum are cleverly reorganized into food like products. 

in california, every inch of available land along the coast—the only place certain crops like strawberries or artichokes can be grown—either goes to housing developments or huge conventional monocultures.  everyone—not just produce—wants to live near the ocean.  the issue with all of these overlapping interests is that small family farmers, who have been all but elbowed out, will undoubtedly find themselves surrounded by huge fields of a single crop regularly sprayed with seriously toxic chemicals.  these chemicals dissipate from the soil, evaporate into the environment, leach out in water runoff, or simply drift through the air and into neighbor’s lungs during application. 

this video is the story—as told by the man himself—of the first successful lawsuit against a pesticide sprayer for contaminating his crop.  the bottom line?  they were trespassing. 

really big deal.  really cool stuff.