When faced with a drift complaint, Jim Shelton, Landmark Agronomy, Juda, WI, recommends retailers get aggressive. He has a specific team of three or four staff that handle these issues. “We get out there right away and take pictures and follow up,” he explains.
Their approach has paid off. While the large company may get about half a dozen drift complaints each year, most do not ultimately turn out to be drift issues. For instance, the weather over the last two years has been hard on trees in Wisconsin. Sun scald, thanks to 85-degree temperatures and 25 mph winds, was attributed to drift a number of times. Landmark’s homework proved natural causes. And even if a drift case is valid, Shelton says a problem like tree damage can often recover in two weeks.
“Some people just don’t like what we do for a living,” he admits. Some of them have been homeowners up around Madison, a region he says leans toward more liberal politics. “There are a lot of outlying areas with subdivisions where people have their own little 2 acres of happiness out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by corn fields.”
Mike Schiffer, Al’s Aerial Spraying, Ovid, MI has also found that certain places are much worse for complaints than others. He once received a call from an emergency room treating a man who had been working in a garden adjacent to a field Schiffer was spraying. “He was overcome by the fumes and the doctor wanted to know what I was spraying. I explained I was seeding wheat into standing soybean fields for the fall.
“The point is that public perception, shaped by the popular press, led this gentleman to perceive symptoms simply based on the sight of my aircraft. It’s sad that agriculture does not have the opportunity to educate the public more often about standard farming practices. Other people, on hearing I am a crop duster, will grab my arm and tell me of a time they saw someone spraying and how excited they were — and of their awe at the graceful art of a crop duster flying.”
