The contamination of milk and of farm produce in the cours e of the gyps y moth s praying came
as an unpleas ant s urpris e to many people. What happe ned on the 200-acre Waller farm in
northe rn Wes tches ter County, New York, was revealing. Mrs. Waller had specifically requested
Agriculture officials not to s pray her prope rty, becaus e it would be impossible to avoid the
pas tures in s praying the woodlands. She offered to have the land checked for gyps y moths and
to have any infes tation des troye d by s pot s praying. Although s he was ass ured that no farms
would be s prayed, her prope rty received two direct sprayings and, in addition, was twice
s ubjected to drifting s pray. Milk samples taken from the Wallers ’ purebred G uerns ey cows 48
hours later contained DDT in the amount of 14 parts per million. Forage samples from fields
where the cows had grazed were of cours e contaminated als o. Although the county Health
Department was notified, no ins tructions were given that the milk s hould not be marketed. This
situation is unfortunately typical of the lack of consumer protection that is all too common.
Although the Food and Drug Adminis trati on pe rmits no res idues of pesticides in milk, its
res trictions are not only inadequately policed but they apply s olely to inters tate s hipments.
State and county officials are under no compulsion to follow the federal pesticides tolerances
unles s local laws happen to conform—and they s eldom do.
Truck gardeners als o s uffered. Some leaf crops were s o burne d and s potted as to be
un marketa ble. Others carried heavy residues; a sample of peas analyzed at Cornell University’s
Agricultural Experiment Station contained 14 to 20 parts per million of DDT. The legal maximum
is 7 parts per million. Growers therefore had to sustain heavy losses or find the ms elves in the
pos ition of s elling produce carrying illegal res idues. Some of them s ought and collected
damages. As the aerial spraying of DDT increased, so did the numbe r of s uits filed in the courts.
Among the m we re s uits brought by beekeepers in several areas of New York State. Even bef ore
the 1957 s praying, the beekeepe rs had s uffered heavily from us e of DDT in orchards. ‘Up to
1953 I had regarded as gos pel everything that emanate d from the U.S. Departme nt of
Agriculture and the agricultural colleges,’ one of them remarked bitterly. But in May of that
year this man lost 800 colonies after the state had sprayed a large area. So widespread and
heavy was the loss that 14 other beekeepers joined him in s uing the s tate for a quarter of a
million dollars in damages. Another beekeeper, whose 400 colonies were incidental targets of
the 1957 s pray, reporte d that 100 pe r cent of the field force of bees (the worke rs out gathe ring
nectar and pollen for the hives ) had been killed in fores ted areas and up to 50 per cent in
farming areas sprayed less intensively.
‘It is a very distressful thing,’ he wrote, ‘to walk into a yard in May and not hear a bee buzz.’
The gyps y moth programs were marked by many acts of irresponsibility. Because the spray
planes were paid by the gallon rather than by the acre there was no effort to be cons ervative,
and many prope rties were s prayed not once but several times. Contracts for aerial spraying
were in at least one case awarded to an out-of-state firm with no local address, which had not
complied with the legal requireme nt of regis tering with s tate officials for the purpos e of
establishing legal responsibility. In this exceedingly slippery situation, citizens who s uffered
direct financial loss from damage to apple orcha rds or bees dis covered that the re was no one to
s ue. After the disastrous 1957 spraying the prog ram was abruptly and drastically curtailed, with
vague s tatements about ‘evaluating’ previous work and testing alternative insecticides. Instead
of the 3½ million acres sprayed in 1957, the treated areas fell to ½ million in 1958 and to about
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