The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  But these were only stopgap measures. Selling damaged produce wasn’t a solid business plan; the majority of our sales were pity purchases accompanied by a sympathetic sweet nothing. “Bad year for bugs, huh?” True, a certain species of diehard locavore approves of holes in produce as evidence of nongovernmental organic certification, but those customers were few and far between in half meat-and-potatoes, half gourmet Sonoma County. Meat-and-potatoes Sonoma County could get hole-free greens at Walmart for less money. Gourmet Sonoma County wanted palate and picture perfection.

  And the sting wasn’t just that damaged produce didn’t sell well. It was also that Emmett and I had spent countless hours coddling these plants. We had improved the soil with loads of organic soil amendments and manure, carefully sowed the seeds by hand, and hunched over the sprouts plucking weed invaders until our backs ached. We were growing these greens to be beautiful, shining examples of sustainable agricultural production. We were not growing them to be prematurely destroyed by ungrateful, sapsucking, motherfucking bastards.

  Environmental ethos be damned. This meant war. So much for live and let live; hello, shock and awe.

  If I had been (just hypothetically speaking here) a conventional farmer, I would have bombed the living daylights out of those bugs. One of the most common beetle killers on the market is named “Adios,” clearly carrying a certain Arnold Schwarzenegger machismo. Its generic name is carbaryl, and it’s a known mutagen and suspected human carcinogen. Although it’s legal in the United States—and is one of the most popular broad-spectrum insecticides in agriculture, turf management, ornamental production, and residential markets—it’s banned in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, and several other countries. Under the Bush administration, the EPA found in a review of carbaryl’s status that “although all uses may not meet the current safety standard and some uses may pose unreasonable risks to human health and the environment, these effects can be mitigated ...”13 In other words, “It’s really dangerous, but eventually we’ll figure out a way to make it less so. And in the meantime, feel free to use it.”

  Carbaryl, a neurotoxin, is also directly responsible for the death of fifteen to twenty thousand14 people in Bhopal, India. To put that estimate in perspective, the upper range is equivalent to twice the number of American deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the World Trade Centers, the war in Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan combined. The notorious Union Carbide plant that accidentally emitted fortytwo tons of toxic gas in the middle of a densely populated city did so in the process of manufacturing this pesticide.

  But if I found carbaryl too creepy, I could always go the nerve gas route. Malathion, another common pesticide, is a member of the organophosphate family that operates by disrupting neurotransmission—leading to convulsions, respiratory paralysis, and death. Its chemical cousins were developed to be dropped on unsuspecting enemy soldiers in World War II. Today we apply it to agricultural pests, and regularly consume food that’s been bombed by nerve gas.

  Frankly, I didn’t want to eat food that had been poisoned, much less apply those poisons myself. The health risks agricultural workers face are considerably greater than those facing consumers. In one study, 96 percent of surveyed farm workers reported direct exposure to pesticides.15 Over half of respondents noted that pesticides touched their skin, over half breathed in pesticide dust, and 17.3 percent had actually been directly dusted or sprayed. Sadly, the exposure doesn’t end at the field. Back home, the families of agricultural workers breathe in house dust that contains seven times the concentration of organophosphates as compared to nonagricultural families.16 Eighty-eight percent of farm workers’ children test positive for organophosphate metabolites in their urine. 17 Those are health risks I’d rather do without.

  But if the conventional pesticide news is dire, the good news is that there are plenty of pesticides certified by the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) and approved by the USDA for use on organic farms. If we chose to go the organic route, our arsenal could have included all kinds of toxic (but present in nature, and therefore supposedly safe) substances. The more I learned about pesticides, even organic ones, the more I realized that the creativity of chemists when it comes to taking life is downright disturbing.

  It takes a certain intellectual chutzpah to transform the mundane into the sinister. Insecticidal soaps are made of fatty acids and salts, in concept not terribly different from the lye-based soaps one uses to wash one’s body. They sound innocuous, but chemists have learned that the fatty acids can penetrate an insect’s cells, causing them to leak and collapse; when combined with salts, this leads to a nasty bout of dehydration and spells certain doom for the little buggers. Or consider Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), a naturally occurring organism that can be found in soils all over the world. It just so happens that when Bt is concentrated, it acts as a poison that dissolves the cell walls of insects’ stomachs until they are basically destroyed by their own digestive juices. Sabadilla, yet another of the organic options, is a sweet-sounding powder derived from the seeds of the Sabadilla lily. It’s also a stomach poison that kills pests, wipes out honeybees, and burns mammalian mucus membranes. Then there’s Neem, made from the seed kernel of the Neem tree fruit (a hormone disruptor); Pyrethrins, made from the cheerful Chrysanthemum flower (a broad spectrum neurotoxin); Rotenone, which occurs naturally on some tropical plants including the crunchy Jicama root (an oxygen deprivator); and Spinosad, a soil microbe first discovered at an abandoned rum distillery (a broad spectrum pesticide, toxic to bees).

  These were our options. Which instrument to choose? Since I was a little leery of spraying pesticides—even organic ones—on fresh greens that would be eaten by our customers only days later,c we compromised and decided to test out an organic spray on the cucumber beetle–ravaged bean seedlings. No one would be eating the bean leaves, after all, and the plants wouldn’t begin flowering and producing beans for several more weeks.

  We opted for Spinosad. It wasn’t a rationalized decision; we stumbled upon it at the local agricultural supply store. There it sat on the shelf, in an innocent enough white bottle. The label told us it was organic and the clerk confirmed that it would kill the bastards.

  “Great, we’ll take it.”

  Hours later, we marched into the field with our jug of concentrated organic poison, a plastic spray bottle, and a vengeance.

  The instructions directed us to dilute one tablespoon of the milky white liquid with one quart of water. Emmett poured a splash into our drug store spray bottle and tilted the liquid left and right as we both peered through the plastic trying to guess at the quantity.

  “Definitely a tablespoon,” I finally said.

  “Without a doubt,” Emmett agreed, and he turned the hose on to dilute our perfect tablespoon with a quart of water. I continued to pore over the label.

  Tucked under the “precautionary statements,” I found the ominous warning that “this product is toxic to bees exposed to treatment for 3 hours following treatment. Do not apply this pesticide to blooming, pollen-shedding, or nectar-producing parts of plants if bees may forage on the plants during this time period.”

  Truth be told, we were in the midst of a bit of a bee crisis; we hadn’t seen one in the field for weeks, and we were starting to wonder who was going to fertilize our squash and cucumber flowers. I was sorely tempted to say to hell with the nonexistent bees. We couldn’t hurt them if they weren’t there, right? That sounded logical enough until Emmett pointed out that—since we were waiting on pins and needles for their imminent arrival—it probably wasn’t best to risk wiping out the first wayfaring pioneers with an experimental application of bug spray. The red pollen carpet wouldn’t be so inviting if it were laced with toxins. So, in spite of our bout of bee absenteeism, we decided that the responsible thing to do would be to wait until the sun was on its way down and the (imaginary) bees were on their way home.

  Reading further on the Spinosad label, we learned that pests inges
t the poison by eating leaves that are coated with it, so it would be important to spray as much of the plant as possible. We returned later in the afternoon to armor our bean plants. Our mission: wet every square inch of leaf matter. This doesn’t sound so hard until you consider three important pieces of information. First, we’d planted hundreds of row feet of beans. Second, the Diabrotica launch their main attack from the underside of the leaf; to be sure they’d eat spray and die, we’d need to coat the top and bottom of every leaf. And finally, we were using a plastic spray bottle purchased for two dollars at Longs Drugs, not the four-gallon high-pressure backpack sprayer that is recommended for this sort of work.

  Off I went, crouching, kneeling, and shuffling along the vacant rows of cloddy dirt, spraying the top and bottom of every leaf. I resisted the urge to drop my spray bottle and slap at the first gaggle of bugs I came to. There was no point; if they ate the bean leaves, they’d be dead soon anyway. I felt a twinge of sadistic pleasure in my power. No wonder some farmers don’t think twice about dousing their fields in poison: after all, this is war.

  I traded off with Emmett until we finally reached the last row. After the final leaf had been sprayed, we turned to other evening chores, like watering seedlings and pulling weeds.

  Emmett filled the watering can to soothe thirsty plants while I crouched down to pluck pesky wild mustard greens. When I came to the youngest bean row, the ground was wet and the leaves were glistening.

  “Emmett, did you just water these bean plants?” I shouted without looking up.

  “Yeah, they haven’t gotten any all day,” he called back from the opposite end of the row.

  After an hour-long, painstaking, back-breaking, mindnumbing spritzathon, my brilliant farming accomplice had washed away 40 percent of our work in 30 short seconds.

  “You do realize that means we have to spray it again?”

  At first he was silent, and then he acted like it really wasn’t such a big deal. Mountains out of molehills. No problem, it just needed a quick second pass. Slightly bitter, I retreated to the scant shade of a grapevine to let him make the second pass.

  Quick second pass my left foot. He moved deliberately, with the demeanor of a pediatrician: superficial cheer but serious assessment. He touched each struggling seedling, examined it with gentle hands, then treated every leaf with Spinosad.

  As I watched the strange choreography—crouch, cock head, peer, spray, flip leaf, spray, repeat—I was reminded of something Emmett once said about music and farming. He’s a songwriter; within weeks of our first date, he’d written one for me. He buried it in a CD of other songs and I was in the car alone when I heard it. If only he could have seen my furious blushing, the grin that spread from ear to ear. And although there’s not much time to make music when you’re a farmer, for him, growing things fulfills the same desire to thrill other human beings with something he’s made.

  What he told me was that farming is about creation, and there isn’t much you can create these days. It’s harder to get people to buy music than vegetables, and music isn’t as useful to them. Music might inspire, but vegetables keep people alive. And growing things satisfies his need for expressed creativity. Emmett even compared being a farmer to being a conductor: not playing the instruments, but coordinating them, crafting the overall piece, nurturing the various sections and making sure they’re playing at just the right moment. Presiding over those harmonies makes a person feel alive.

  So, improbably, farming equals music. That’s why Emmett wanted to be a farmer.

  Which, I suppose, was partly why he was so frustrated now: this movement didn’t begin on time. It was discordant. Cucumber beetles and flea beetles were everywhere. June was making May look like a sissy, pushing easily past 100 degrees Fahrenheit. By late afternoon, even shade was little help. Heat radiated off the bare earth; the air was still and dry. Inside my jeans—the only place humid enough for water to bead—sweat dripped down my thigh. And as so often happened in those days, Emmett’s workaholism—his drive to orchestrate—interfered with my languor.

  “This isn’t quick,” I called out. “I’m exhausted. And hungry. It’s time for dinner. Let’s go home.”

  “Just fifteen more minutes,” he said.

  “You always say that. And then you’re done half an hour later. Maybe. More like an hour.”

  “It’s not my fault there’s too much to do and it all needs to get done now. Do you want the beans to die? They’re barely hanging on. Do you want to be able to sell green beans at the market sometime before winter?”

  Oh lord. Not this conversation again—I was too hot and bothered to deal with it. So I plotted my cheeky disruption: I stood up, trotted toward Emmett ... and tickle-attacked.

  But Emmett, who under normal circumstances would respond in kind, wasn’t charmed by my playfulness. He fended me off.

  “Sometimes I feel like you just treat this whole thing as one big adventure,” he said. “Something you can write about.”

  This perplexed me—What is life if not an adventure? And what is adventure if not something to write about?—but I nodded solemnly, biting my lower lip hard to keep from smiling.

  “I mean it, I’m serious,” he said. “We’re trying to make a living doing this and right now it’s not going well. If the plants die, we won’t make any money.”

  “I understand that. But we work seven days a week. I need a weekend, or at least one day off. It can’t be life or death all the time. And besides, if we’re just going to be miserable, we could make a hell of a lot more money being miserable somewhere else. Doing something else. Then at least we wouldn’t be having this exact same conversation over and over again.”

  The sudden shift in my tone surprised him—I get irritated when he goes all paternalistic on me—but the heart of the matter was, his worry worried me. He was the one who coaxed radishes to fruition on the windowsill of his dorm room. I was the slayer of strawberries. His parents were grape growers, and his grandparents tended orchards. My parents both worked in technology and my forebears ate red meat. If mister thirdgeneration farmer boy couldn’t keep our plants alive, my black thumb wasn’t about to save them.

  But Emmett’s agricultural heritage couldn’t turn him into an instant farmer any more than my ancestry, which allegedly traces back to Sir Francis Drake, could turn me into an instant pirate. There may be something passed through our blood—I’ve eaten meals on bucking boats surrounded by puking passengers and never once felt queasy—but stick me in the middle of the sea with a sextant, and I’d be as lost as the next fool.

  Growing a few things in pots in a pest-free bedroom is considerably different from growing a shit ton of things in pest-infested ground in a small, haphazardly laid out field. Growing up in the country doesn’t provide a person with the ability to cultivate it, just like being born in New York doesn’t automatically grant a person the skills to succeed on Wall Street. Familial advantages? We had borrowed a few shovels, but not much information. Vines are perennials, more like apple orchards than bean rows. They’re not even susceptible to the same pests. In short, single-harvest monocrops are an entirely different industry than that of the small, diversified, directly marketed farm: the discipline specific, not eclectic; the products bulk, not niche; the branding anonymous, not personal. And of the single-harvest monocrops, viticulture is the most different of all. It’s a peculiar mix of precise science and mutable poetry: tangibles like brix and petioles ultimately yielding notes of citrus and melon, undercurrents of licorice and coffee. Certainly, our broccoli would never be subject to such scrutiny.

  All of which is to say: it wasn’t entirely fair to blame Emmett for not knowing what the hell he was doing.

  “Can it really be fifteen minutes?” I asked. “What else needs to be done?”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said, and sighed rather dramatically. I glared. “Yeah, fifteen minutes. And we still need to water the salad bed.”

  As he resumed his shuffle down the row, spraying
leaves in a slightly less deliberate fashion, my mind turned to other things—like, is the naturally derived insecticide he’s applying for the second time truly safe? A single leaf from the oleander bush in my front yard would be lethal to an infant or child, and while that bush is completely natural, there’s no way I’d call it safe. Poison is indiscriminate, taking out predatory insects, pollinators, and pests alike. On top of that, many pesticides require that the bug eat the plant you’ve applied the pesticide to. So in terms of aesthetic, you’re still going to have holes to contend with.

  Hell, I didn’t know. If this stuff could save our bean seedlings from certain destruction, I guessed it was worth the one-time application. But in the future, I’d vote for saving the pesticides for dire emergencies.

  Also, honey, maybe next time we could make a point not to wash the pesticide off immediately after application.

  Weeks into our war against the bugs, they showed little sign of relenting. The Spinosad spray treatment did win us several days of breathing room, giving our beanstalks a chance to shoot upwards and gain strength. But by the end of the week, the Diabrotica were back in full force. And the “catch and crush” method didn’t do anything except slightly depress our primal urge for revenge. Our bug-fighting toolbox was running low. The organic pesticides didn’t stop them; nonorganic ones were off the table on principle; and we’d failed to control the population “mechanically.” The little devils were still eating our plants. The squash seedlings were withering; our chard was crippled and ugly; and the beans, despite their breather, were barely hanging on. We were willing to consider anything now, short of nuclear annihilation.

  In the midst of our mitigation strategy, I soaked bok choy to rid it of flea beetles.