A good many farm friends of mine have passed away with cancer. Including my former father in law.
Atrozine and all that stuff is nasty. But, here is the ticker. They have to go to school and get training on the usage of that stuff and then have the farm licenses to use it, yet you or I can go down to Home Cheapo and buy that stuff right off the shelf.
We never used it on the small farm I grew up on. You can get corn to grown pretty well if you get it up above the weeds by cultivation. These chemicals are used to help save on the costs of cultivating. It would be near impossible to cultivate corn, and other row crops, on a large corporate farm. Costs would be unreal.
Would you really like Phoenix better with WEED POLLEN everywhere? I’m much further south with a few acres of land. Without the help of generic Roundup and a backpack sprayer, my land would be covered in nasty weeds - sometimes growing waist high.
No gravel landscaping here, but tomorrow morning Mr Generic & I are going to start killing a whole lot of little weeds before they become big weeds.
A farmer who sprays thousands of acres may have issues. I doubt my twice a year treatment, spraying weeds by hand, will cause me cancer. But then, I’ve been vaccinated for anthrax, other weird military stuff and COVID. No telling what I’ll die from.