Sometimes, when your garden gets killed, you might think it's your neighbor's fault, but you'd learn something different.
When our farm garden's tomatoes and peppers went from vital to crappy almost overnight about a month ago, we initially thought the culprit was herbicide drift from a neighbor. We called the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship first, because you never want to confront a neighbor with just a suspicion. IDALS sent a guy out to our place, and his assessment was that it was much more likely that our county's ditch spraying program was the problem. The guy had a pretty good handle on our county's weed control practices and history -- suffice it to say that there's notoriety -- and this, combined with what we knew about both 1) a recently-imposed county requirement for local rural landowners who want to keep such chemicals away from their property to complete a set of two APPLICATIONS to be left off of the otherwise ubiquitous spray protocol (https://www.hardincountyia.gov/540/Roadside-Spraying) and 2) a 2021-imposed set of 'hoops' for citizens to jump through in order to, again, APPLY to publicly address the county Board of Supervisors at one of their meetings, all of which need to be cleared by 5 business days prior to that meeting -- made it pretty evident that our garden trouble was fomented by the county, rather than a neighbor. I'd like to think that our county is the outlier when it comes to the adoption of a "weed-free," Iowa Farm Bureau, fencerow-to-fencerow-and-more mentality, but I really don't know the degree to which other rural county governments embrace this. Sad, though, to think that any rural dweller in our state has to concern themselves with practices like this in order to just grow some food.
Ah yes, another good point. It might not just be the neighbors who are spraying, but also your county government! As you point out, it is a lot for people to think about when all they want to do is grow food.
Sometimes, when your garden gets killed, you might think it's your neighbor's fault, but you'd learn something different.
When our farm garden's tomatoes and peppers went from vital to crappy almost overnight about a month ago, we initially thought the culprit was herbicide drift from a neighbor. We called the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship first, because you never want to confront a neighbor with just a suspicion. IDALS sent a guy out to our place, and his assessment was that it was much more likely that our county's ditch spraying program was the problem. The guy had a pretty good handle on our county's weed control practices and history -- suffice it to say that there's notoriety -- and this, combined with what we knew about both 1) a recently-imposed county requirement for local rural landowners who want to keep such chemicals away from their property to complete a set of two APPLICATIONS to be left off of the otherwise ubiquitous spray protocol (https://www.hardincountyia.gov/540/Roadside-Spraying) and 2) a 2021-imposed set of 'hoops' for citizens to jump through in order to, again, APPLY to publicly address the county Board of Supervisors at one of their meetings, all of which need to be cleared by 5 business days prior to that meeting -- made it pretty evident that our garden trouble was fomented by the county, rather than a neighbor. I'd like to think that our county is the outlier when it comes to the adoption of a "weed-free," Iowa Farm Bureau, fencerow-to-fencerow-and-more mentality, but I really don't know the degree to which other rural county governments embrace this. Sad, though, to think that any rural dweller in our state has to concern themselves with practices like this in order to just grow some food.
Ah yes, another good point. It might not just be the neighbors who are spraying, but also your county government! As you point out, it is a lot for people to think about when all they want to do is grow food.
Thanks for taking the time to comment!!
Thanks, Beth. I will print this out and give it to him.