How do overhead sprayers get under the leaves?
I have no dog in this fight. I just like to argue and question things.
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The force of the water is pretty significant, those tanks are big most younger plants get sorta tossed around all over. It’s a pretty fine mist too, and if sulfur was that groovy I have to imagine covering 95% of the plant would be a sufficient deterrent to prevent most problems. I assume they have a good reason to do what they do as well, just wondering why if it’s a panacea it isn’t often used. And hell, forget crops like corn and beans, what about smaller acreage operations like greenhouses and orchards? Fruit orchards are like magnets for pests and since we demand blemish free fruit as consumers they’re aaaaalways spraying something.
Fertilizer is great. The stuff it does to the environment long term? Not so much. Which is why people kept using it. It got them short term results that they needed in exchange for long term debilitating problems that initially weren’t even known and then, when they were, were covered up for the sake of profit. People being short sighted is exactly the problem we keep running into, be it fertilizers or chemicals we put on our food and our weed. This is a constant and repeated failure that we’re seeing the compounding effects of now, which is why your anecdotes of “I smoked it and didn’t die” don’t matter and the long term studies that finds out what happens after repeated uses and to entire populations IS important. It’s all a matter of scale. You think small and immediate, so of course you don’t consider long term effects. Once you start actually making all the necessary considerations for things like sustainability and peoples health then your methods reflect that. If your solution to everything is “spray a chemical on it and fuck it” well, that’s what got us in so many terrible places in the first place. You HAVE to make these considerations to adequately prepare. We can see the consequences when you don’t. I can’t believe people are still arguing about this shit.
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To be fair. Beacher IIRC used a fogger with microban to clean his whole basement.
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It is a real deal business, but your argument that they wouldn’t push it if there were better options out there is flawed. Big Ag is a business that only pushes what it the best option for the corporations that run it.
I’m not trying to make any claims about sulfur or fungicides here, just saying the decisions that get made in big Ag have nothing to do with safety or what’s best for the people. The reasons big Ag is the way it is is to keep the corporations that are in control in total control. This is what the subsidies and much of the regulation that happens is about. Especially in the US, which seems to be your main country and system of reference, as it is mine.
They don’t have any kind of altruistic motive. They are fucking scum, and I think saying that well that’s not the way big Ag does it so it must not be the best is a poor argument.
Don’t have a horse in this race, just an axe to grind with the powers that be…and love for productive discourse
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Might be reading a bit too much into it there, Joey. I’m sure beacher will show up, you tagged him a couple times.
Look if you got an axe to grind with big ag there’s a million gripes but that’s not my point. My point is they feed basically everyone on the planet and almost everything they do is to try to squeeze more, better product out of less dirt. Their shit is down to a science…every aspect of everything they do. How to grow the most with the least and survive harvest to be sold.
@FailingForwards if you wanna save the world from fertilizer be my guest…in the real world we have billions of people to feed, more on the way, and soil alone can’t produce the yields necessary. Where I’m from, it has the best soil for cereal crops in the world. Really no better except parts of Ukraine, maybe. They drained millions of acres of swampy prairie just to grow in it. And they still use fertilizer lol.
BTW schmarmpit has got this under wraps, like bam, done. Never mistake confidence for arrogance.
For applying a fine powder all over, could prob do a blend of sulfur and diatomaceous earth for a multipurpose application
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I disagree with this point wholeheartedly.
They do not feed the whole planet. Not even close. And if that was their goal Monsanto wouldn’t have burned so many fields that had been cross pollinated with their genetics from neighboring fields. They could easily make their genetics sterile, but the don’t they run a scorched earth campaign of domination…quite literally.
Modern agriculture destroys top soil. They are creating a world where everyone will be more dependent on their products because what top soil there is left will be so poor. We could start getting into the pack of bio diversity and how mono cropping is the exact opposite of true food security…
Better product? The crops produced by modern agriculture are becoming less nutrient dense as the soil becomes more and more depleted of life. The only thing they seem as better is more money/control/power. They don’t give a fuck if any part of it is better/safer/healthier for the farmer or the consumer.
They do have it down to a science, but that science is incomplete. If you look at it from an ecological perspective (and ANYTHING needs an ecosystem to live), most of what they do is totally fucked up. And ecology is most certainly a science as well. And science evolves over time with our understating of the world and universe around us. And we know enough to know how bad the damage is that Big Ag is doing. Some of the tools are really valuable, but more than anything a lot of it has been extraordinarily destructive
I’ve got to offer this quote right back at you, because you drink the big Ag corporate kool aid hard.
You drop a lot of knowledge here, and I respect that, but people will never our engineer the rest of the universe. Not ever.
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This is so, utterly, completely true though.
If your goal is to harvest the most for the least at a large scale, and do t care about literally anything other than that, the modern BigAg standard is probably the way to go
It is important to understand what the repercussions of that actually are, which the older I get the more I realize how few people do
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@schmarmpit think this will work for the detection?
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I am not an ADM or Cargill shareholder lol. I don’t love or agree everything they do and I am not sure how you came to that conclusion. If you wanna grandstand against big ag and modern ag in general don’t let me stop you, it’s just not the point.
I’m saying the sprawling machine might know a thing or two about growing plants. The scale and man hours and effort that goes into ag and ag science, currently the biggest industry on the planet that ever existed, with every human besides hunter-gatherers participating, is breathtaking. They are the best at what they do, IDK what to tell you.
As far as “people will never engineer the universe”…well…we’ll start with Earth. In a couple hundred years humans or our next iteration won’t even have flesh bodies and a need for food it’s a moot point but that’s just my thinking.
We dump bleach on billions of tons of food because if we didn’t food wouldn’t be profitable. We make way more than we need because the bottom line demands it. It’s absolutely the dumbest possible thinking and you’re over here like “Yeah, we have to do that.” Not to mention that fertilizer farming is from ages ago when we didn’t know all the harm it would cause. And we actually DO have better, more sustainable methods now, but we literally have fertilizer lobbies to make sure that shit doesn’t go anywhere. And regardless, it’s not sustainable. So if we didn’t have an alternative, we better be working on one. It’s. Not. Sustainable. Basically nothing about the way we operate the world is. If we don’t solve those problems we will face the consequences.
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I never claimed you love everything they do, I simply reiterated what you said about their way being the best way, which I think is drinking their kool aid because that says to me you are taking their word and not thinking critically about their methods.
I agree that they know a thing or two, and they are best at what they do(although I think how we define what they do differs greatly).
There is much knowledge and many tools of they have created and discovered that have value. There is also a large amount they try to keep from proliferating, like the importance of regenerative practices, and how if you try to build soil rather than deplete it you become less dependent on their products.
I was just making a point that using the argument that because big Ag does it, it’s the best way to do it is very flawed.
Using that argument to back up your points about some of these tools, it actually detracts from the credibility of your argument. As I stated previously, BigAg’s only interest is power and money, and they are much more short sighted than they would lead you to believe. Look at the rampant overuse of antibiotics for years just to increase yields if you need further proof of this. That was absolutely terrible for humanity, but it sure did increase yields of meat harvests
Call me a pessimist, but my guess is the human race destroys itself before then.
The speed at which large swaths this planet becomes uninhabitable for humans I think will far outpace the technology necessary to thrive on another planet. If any exit strategy is feasible, the will likely be a massive devolution due to the fact that part of human nature is that those who have access to said escape will not be based on what sets the whole up for success.
I just find the view point that the human race is all powerful to be arrogant (same same for the concept of any kind of anthropocentric god) and don’t think it gives enough credence to the whole. Ironically, I think a greater acknowledgment of the full impact of our actions and the whole of the system are the path towards any type of positive future.
Who knows, maybe if technology advances enough we will see one of those play out a bit…fun to speculate though!
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I agree, this is not the point, the point should be to think about these things critically.
I feel that you often start here, which is how I always get roped in because you drop some good knowledge, but then you follow it with “it’s the best of it wasn’t big Ag wouldn’t use it”, which I find to be counterproductive to critical thought.
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Yep that’s it. Meant for PP, also works for PM.
I just wanted to share another application method I tried today, dunking them in the sulfur mix. The pictures should explain it pretty well. For small plants only. Overall I’d say this method is less effective than spraying. The surface tension seems to have the water slide right off. The fine spray instead leaves many small droplets of the good stuff all over. The red brush is just for mixing in between, and the strainer is for getting soil out between plants.
If I try anything else as my final go, it will be that cheap dry duster that SeaMonkey posted.
I also wanted to correct a false claim I made at first about the initial spread. I thought I carried it out of my quarantine tent on my clothes or something. But after searching through my pics and developing a timeline I realized I brought in the PM on a silver platter to my other tents. 2 weeks quarantine was not enough to detect it on the infected plant with my then untrained eye. By week 4 it finally showed up, spreading it for 2 weeks to all the others.
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that’s not what I want to hear
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Your story brought a tear of joy to my eye. Seriously!
I would love to share an insight from genius max planck:
New ideas don’t win over their opponents, instead their opponents die.
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Besides the dusters, I’m imagining more like a cooking technique, liike flower coating a piece of chicken. Dip in liquid, then roll in sulfur to coat.
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