QuestionThank you for your prompt reply! It is informative and educational. For your information, here are the list of active ingredients for my fertilizer and my herbicide:
The fertilome fertilizer label lists these chemicals: Ammonical Nitrogen (0.82%), Urea Nitrogen (11%), Urea Formaldehyde (4%), Muriate of Potash (8%), Sodium Borate, Copper Sulfate, Iron Sulfate, Manganese Sulfate, Zinc Sulfate (ALL less than 0.05% by weight).
The WeedFree Zone label lists these active ingredients: 2,4-D, 2-ethylexyl ester (10.4%), Mecoprop-p (2.7%), Dicamba (.6%), Carfentrazone-ethyl (.5%)
I am not yet sold on the "If God made it, it's good" argument to fertilizing/gardening. Another author in this forum recommends baking soda and sugar for a healthy lawn. Now I'm not certain if she's right or not, obviously it worked well for her. But God did NOT make her sugar OR baking soda. Neither of those two chemicals occurs, in that specific form, naturally. BUT, I have held in my hand, 100% copper sulfate and sodium borate crystals from the floor of the Atacama Desert...both COMPLETELY made by God. And, oh by the way, Copper sulfate is a highly toxic/poisonous material...complete with the skull and crossbones.
So, I guess my follow up question is this. Why are you so sold on this "natural" thing when "God made" seems to be truly in the eye of the beholder?
Now, in ALL sincerity, this is NOT a DIG! REALLY! I deeply respect your point of view. I am genuinely, and passionately interested in how you arrive(d) at your position.
My original question was NOT directed at whether organic or synthetic was good/bad. Rather it was a plea from a novice to understand whether these PARTICULAR chemicals posed a threat to my children.
From further research, I'm sold on the hazards of my herbicide. So, please don't spend your time on that. But I am interested in your position on the fertilome and how you arrived there.
Thank you so much for your time, detail and effort. It is a fascinating world you opened up for me.
Regards
John
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Followup To
Question -
I use Fertilome Classic Lawn Food 16 - 0 - 8. I do not use pesticides, and spot treat weeds with "WeedFree Zone". The salts and chemicals on the labels look "frightening". If applied as directed, will this fertilizer be harmful to my 4 and 2 year old children? How about the herbicide? My children play in the yard daily during the summer. I think I'm doing the right thing for their safety by using simple fertilizers. But I am not certain of it. I like a good, healthy lawn. But I also do not want to expose my children to unsafe chemicals. Any help/advice you can provide would be very much appreciated.
Thanks
Answer -
John, I am so glad you wrote to me. It is so important to keep up to date on these products and on top of what kinds of damage they are capable of.
We will look up your products in detail. But I want to give you the links you need to search for anything, anytime on the internet to find out, quite easily, the BEST CASE SCENARIO for these products.
I say Best Case Scenario because the damage that we KNOW or that is made PUBLIC is not the whole story behind these. It's just the tip of the iceberg. So if you read that 2,4-D is KNOWN by the EPA to be DANGEROUS (fyi: 2,4-D is generally held by the industry to be one of the safest chemicals on the market!), then you KNOW that 2,4-D REALLY IS SO DANGEROUS THEY HAVE TO TELL YOU. The EPA is functioning, funded, staffed and largely managed by an Administration that is hostile to the environment (have you see their figures on the state of Texas? I mean, if you aren't going to take care of your own back yard, what are you going to take care of?). In this climate, if the EPA says something is DANGEROUS, it has to be hands down let-them-eat-cake-and-go-to-hell wicked.
That said, your fertilizer is probably benign, as far as the children. I'll check on it after I send your answer back. But instead of putting down that stuff, why not put something down that will be really good for your grass, and not just nontoxic? Good old fashioned manures, composts, pelletized lime, humus, greensand, bonemeal - these are the things that build roots and grass from the ground up.
Now, for your EPA searches: Go to www.pesticideinfo.org/Search_Products.jsp.
Search for a product (in this case, WeedFree). Up come 2 products named WeedFree.
Click under More Info. And you find:
The Active Ingredient in WeedFree 63 and WeedFree 75, which are made by Harrell's Inc., is Oxyfluorfen.
Click on the little book next to the name Oxyfluorfen and you find a wealth of details including crops in California that use it and links to studies of toxicity. The EPA lists this chemical as a "possible carcinogen".
Under the Aquatic Ecotoxicity, you find Oxyfluorfen kills crustaceans, fish, phytoplankton and zooplankton and alters development in echinoderms. Among other things. All which adds up to "Acute Aquatic Toxicity". The Skull and Bones logo says it all.
Well, I'm glad you didn't buy it from Scotts. Scotts and Ortho are way too powerful to care if you use their products or not. Most Americans still use all these chemicals and have no idea that the "Dangerous" warning is a very serious message. Skulls and Bones? If it was REALLY so bad, it would not be so easy to buy.
Your WeedFree 75 has the addition of the chemical Trifluralin. It boasts all of the above, plus it is a "Suspected" Endocrine Disrupter.
So, what happens if you mess up a person's Endocrine System? Almost anything, including disturbances of hormones affecting activity of the ovaries or testes, and that has all kinds of repercussions we don't even want to think about. Our user-friendly but budget-neglected EPA has a nice little web page that answers this question very nicely: www.epa.gov/scipoly/oscpendo/edspoverview/primer.htm. How can you not like the EPA?
Since this chemical alters "almost anything" it is very hard to pin down. Sort of like a guy who might rob a bank one day, a car another day, an ATM, steal someone's wallet next, kidnap someone else's dog - how are you ever going to catch this bad guy if he doesn't have a pattern? That's why these are "suspected" for so long before they're caught.
KNOWN Endocrine Disruptors taint the fruits and vegetables we buy in the grocery store for our children. Check out www.drgreene.com/21_1941.html and you'll never feed your small children non-organic peaches ever again. If you're thinking of washing - heavily - these fruits and vegetables to remove "most" of the Endocrine Disruptors, you're out of luck: these foods ARE WASHED PRIOR TO TESTING. These are VERY clean fruits and vegetables that test positive for Endocrine Disruptors.
As Drgreen.com points out, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are "toxic by design". These are not simple fertilizers. I want you to know that.
Finally, to add even more bad news, which I apologize for - but you asked! - one of the worst things about these chemicals is that they rely on UV exposure to break down. When your children run around on the lawn, when you mow, when you chase the dog, when you BBQ, when you water the grass, it gets on your shoes, you bring it into the house and it STAYS THERE FOR YEARS, adhering to the floor and the rugs and your textiles and even your children, soaking into your skin, getting into your lungs, in trace amounts for a long, long time. Like they say, you can run, but you can't hide.
My basic rule is: If God made it, it's good for you. If God did not make the stuff on the label, it's not. Maybe too simple a rule for some people. But it works for me.
As I said, I am so glad you wrote. I hope you feel the same way. Peace and love,
AnswerVery good points you make, John. I appreciate the time you took and the thought that went into your message.
I have to make this a short answer and once you see how much it is you will be grateful you did not get a long answer... yet. It's only Friday.
Let's start with the God rule.
My dad is a devout Catholic. Catholics on Long Island (I am the Long Island Gardener), Christians around the rest of the country, lean toward the Conservative - or even righter. After years of questioning my own moral codes, I started to believe that the most basic rules of Christianity - the Golden Rule, the 10 Commandments, Love Thy Neighbor, etc. - really do matter very much to me. They are the most important things I can teach my daughter. Who by the way is named Holly. When Rightrightright Christians such as my father, with the best of intentions, invoke God in their politics, and then break things like the Golden Rule, or in this case poison God's Greeb Earth, I think someone has to call it for what it is, in a language we both understand. It is Un-Christian. My father disagrees severely with left-wing politics. This is a man who won't wear a seat belt on principal that the Government should not regulate that. I reach him best in my explanations when I talk in terms he originally taught to me: that because God did not put Diphenylamine (DPA), Thiabendazole, and Azinphos methyl in apples, they simply don't belong there.
Of course, I have considered your copper response, copper is poisonous, it is organic, God made it. This is not intended to be a scientific explanation. It's a simple answer to clarify matters for the part of the world that respects the teachings of Christianity and yet somehow manages to miss the point when dealing with everyday life.
Food should not be tainted. Yet almost all of it is. That's just not the Christian thing to do. And the way things are set up now, it's dishonest. As a parent, I know you don't like that either. Poor people, uneducated people, clueless people - they are the ones who end up eating it all and suffering from the results. In a free country, we have responsibilities. But something is wrong here. And so it boils down to basics: God did not put the gazillion ingredients in that can of Pork and Beans and I will not feed it to my daughter. God made sugar, He didn't refine it - ok, Holly's other parent argues that white sugar is deadly. Somehow, I don't mind it. The workers in the sugar factories are not dying of cancer.
I have a feeling you are highly educated - HIGHLY - and can think critically enough to understand just how terrible those chemicals are. Most people cannot think in those terms. By the way, I think all children in this country deserve a great education. Few will ever be that lucky. That's disgraceful in Thomas Jefferson's USA.
As I said earlier, I'm afraid this is just so long I may not finish tonite so I will continue this over the weekend but for now, regarding the non-organic fertilizer, I can give you a quick explanation. (Thank God!)
There is the argument that "it makes no difference to the beet root if the atoms of potassium it absorbs are from an organic fertilizer such as wood ash or an inorganic one such as muriate of potash" (Steve the Gardenguy, http://www.bostongardens.com/bostongardens/detail.cfm?id=1186%26catid=14%26webid). Gardenguy points out, correctly, that organic fertilizer must be broken down into simpler, inorganic molecules before nutrients are in a form that can be used by your lawn, while chemical fertilizers are ready immediately, since they are already inorganic. Nitrogen molecules are Nitrogen molecules. Very efficient, yes. And fertilizer manufacturers are profiting from this - but they have produced a market that now believes this is good for the grass (as I suspect you do). It is NOT.
No?
Building up soil, making nutrients steadily available, builds the healthiest grass you can grow. There is an artificial market that has been created for applications of chemicals that are high in Nitrogen to force-feed the lawn. The grass greens up in a flash, but it is less healthy and weakens because it is respond to a burst of Nitrogen and overproduction of chlorophyll for a short amount of time.
The Agrowinn website (www.fertilizeronline.com/about.php), one of many organic fertilizer retailers, explains this much better than I can:
"Fertilization with high concentrations of Nitrogen, Potassium, and/or Phosphorus ... stimulates rapid initial plant uptake of trace minerals ... without providing for their replacement... Excessive nitrogen reduces the valuable calcium available to the plant. Calcium is a "cation", together with Magnesium, Potassium, and Sodium. A reduction in the available Calcium always leads to an imbalance in the "cation exchange". If cations are out of balance, anions will also not work properly, nor will several important trace elements."
Cation Exchange is one of the qualities that is measured in a soil analysis to determine soil health. You have no idea how many people overdo not just the application (and burn their entire lawn with their enthusiasm), but the feeding of their lawns. This is eventually followed by fungus attacking the weakened plants, followed by profitable fungus killers which is more chemicals, followed by more fungus, then grub killer, Weed and Feed, etc. You may very well not make those mistakes - I doubt you will. But MOST people do. Instead of building up their soil, they may as well just paint their grass green. It would be healthier.
At the very least, once the Nitrogen is down, it is used, and the grass is still growing in the same soil. Same microbes (assuming you don't kill them with other chemicals), same flaws, the birds are not happier. Supporting the myth of the green lawn when you could build up your soil in an earth-friendly, grass-friendly, soil-friendly, John B-friendly way is only good for the stockholders of the fertilizer companies.
Being an American stockholder myself, and being a believer in capitalism and the American system, I have no problem with corporate profits. But I do have a problem with unethical business practices. I don't think taking advantage of people's ignorance is right - and neither do you. It's legal, of course. And for chemical companies (and I won't go into the labor practices of these companies, domestic or foreign), it's highly profitable.
The bigger picture: Study after study documents the damage caused by Nitrogen fertilizer runoff to the environment. For starters there's "Nitrogen runoff from lawn fertilizers: A comparison between organic and inorganic fertilizers" by Stephanie Stern at Wellesley College(courses.mbl.edu/SES/data/project/2002/stern.pdf#search='organic%20nitrogen%20chemical%20fertilizers'), which begins, "Nitrogen pollution from home lawn fertilizer can compose a substantial percent [of] the nitrogen loading to local waterways causing eutrophication and resulting in anoxia, loss of biodiversity and fish kills." There are lots of these, by more credentialed authors, but they all point to that same Silent Spring. Your children will be inheriting this Earth. So will mine.
I will look into the chemical properties and side effects of your fertilizer as soon as I can get some sleep and take care of parental and work responsibilities this w/e. By then, however, I am sure you will be tired of this discourse, I cannot blame you, I will try to make my future answers more succinct. Somewhere, there is a Biblical reference to this virtue but I am not the one who knows what that is. Hasta luego, Sir,
