but I'm sure an army of lawyers can argue that they are not responsible for the applicators' behavior. And they might have a point. From the Atrazine label: Groundwater protection: Atrazine can travel (seep or leach) through soil and can enter groundwaer which may be used as drinking water. Atrazine has been found in groundwater. Users are advised not to apply atrazine to sand and loamy sand soils where the water table (groundwater) is close to the surface and where these soils are very permeable, i.e., well-drained. Your local agricultural agencies can provide further information on the type of soil in your area and the location of groundwater. I mean geez, if you know that your product can cause a problem, you tell people what the potential problem is, you tell them how to use it safely and what they can do to avoid using it unsafely, and tell them where to get even more information on how to use it safely, but they choose to use it in an unsafe manor, what else can you do? Anything is dangerous if used incorrectly. And where the heck is the outrage over this little gem: As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported in a series of articles last fall, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency failed to notify the public that atrazine had been found at levels above the federal safety limit in drinking water in at least four states. Holy cow! The people who buy the product misuse that product, (causing the precise problem that the company warns against) the government knows about it and sweeps it under the rug, and then it's the manufacturer who lands in the hot water? Wow.

The following commentary was posted on a banned listserv. The subject is crop genetic engineering with human dna and the attendant ethical and moral questions. ------------------------------------------------- Swans Commentary » swans.com May 9, 2005 Mommy, Is Aunt Sally In The Rice Puffs? by Don Fitz (Swans - May 9, 2005) Would it be worse to find a finger in your chili or guzzle human DNA when you down a beer? In the recent furor over the potential for "pharmed" rice to destroy Missouri's rice growing industry, something is being downplayed: corporations are proposing to put human DNA into plants whose neighboring cousins could end up being eaten (or drunk) by people. Ever since Ventria Bioscience announced its intentions to plant genetically engineered rice, it faced strong opposition from environmentalists and local rice farmers. "Pharming" is an experimental method of inserting human or animal genes into plants so they will become biofactories for producing pharmaceuticals. Ventria claims that its pharmed rice would produce the proteins lactoferrin and lysozyme, which would go into medicines for dehydration and diarrhea. But Friends of the Earth spokesperson Bill Freese says that Ventria is just as likely to use its rice to make granola bars, yogurt or poultry feed. In 2004, Ventria's application to pharm 120 acres of rice in California was turned down. Seeking a state with even less environmental concern than that governed by Arnold, the company looked to John Ashcroft's Missouri. Its politicians readily promised support and $30 million in subsidies. The Missouri project would allow up to 204.5 acres of such rice to be grown. It would not only be the largest pharmed crop in the world - it would dwarf the typical pharmaceutical crop of less than an acre. Rice farmers are not at all happy with the idea of such a large field being planted next to theirs. If the pharmed rice spreads, it could contaminate their fields. Pharmaceutical rice could be spread by cross-pollination, floods, rice-eating birds, rice grains in farm equipment, or human error in distribution. Risks from pharmed rice include allergic reactions, aggravation of bacterial infections, and autoimmune disorders. Farmers might be less nervous if Ventria had liability insurance. But instead of purchasing enough insurance, Ventria has its public relations artists spin the yarn that dangers are too little to worry about. "It can't happen here" is the essence of its message. But it has happened. The StarLink corn incident of 2000 led to a $1 billion recall. In 2002, a half million bushels of soybeans in Nebraska had to be destroyed. Iowa burned 155 acres of pharmaceutically contaminated corn. As Ventria was touting the pharming of its rice as risk-free, on the other side of the globe Greenpeace campaigner Sze Pang Cheung announced the illegal release of genetically contaminated rice in China. That Bt rice that could cause allergic reactions in people. The gnawing question remains. Doesn't Ventria's arguing that accidents never happen instead of showing that it has insurance to cover accidents suggest that the company doesn't believe its own press releases? The Missouri chapter seemed like it might be over when Anheuser-Busch announced on April 12 that it would not buy Missouri rice if genetically engineered rice were grown in the state. Like Monsanto, Busch is headquartered in St. Louis. Busch is both the largest brewer and the biggest purchaser of rice in the country. As soon as the beer threat hit the news, Missouri politicians repeated their act of falling over each other while rushing to serve the genetic engineering industry. Just three days later, Governor Matt Blunt announced that a deal had been brokered between Busch and Ventria. The beer giant would drop its threat to boycott Missouri rice and Ventria would promise that its pharmed rice would be grown at least 120 miles from other Missouri rice fields. As the politicians patted themselves on the back, Missouri rice growers maintained their doubts. The rumor went out that Ventria plans to get a field near Mark Twain's home town of Hannibal in the northern part of the state. But it might not be as easy to pharm rice in northern Missouri as it is in the boot heel, the state's southernmost region. Farmers have a strong suspicion that once Ventria gets its foot in Missouri's door and the controversy is out of the news, the corporation will slither down the Mississippi to the state's prime rice-growing fields. There is a deeper side to this story that is being sidestepped: Why would sales plummet if pharmed rice genes got into regular rice? Part of it is the risk to public health. But reporters are not asking people who eat rice (virtually all of us), "Do you want to have human genes in what you eat and drink?" Perhaps beer drinkers are not the only ones who don't want to taste a little bit of Uncle Fred. Maybe mommies don't want to give their darlings wee morsels of Aunt Sally in their rice puffs before waving them off to school. This brings to mind a problem which plagued the meat packing industry a century ago. Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle that sometimes packinghouse workers "fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting -- sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!" Most people would see gobbling up a finger in a bowl of chili as cannibalism. But what about the tip of a finger? If you eat food cooked with lard which includes fragments of a slaughterhouse worker, is that cannibalism? Is it cannibalism to eat food with one human gene? What about 50 human genes or an entire human chromosome? To use the language of the genetic engineering industry, we could say that human DNA in rice is "substantively equivalent" to human flesh in hamburger meat or human remains in Durham's Lard. Of course, there are differences. Genes are incredibly small in comparison to boiled human flesh. But those human genes would be present in every cell of every contaminated plant you put into your mouth. This is not something that suddenly arose with Ventria rice in Missouri's boot heel. Genetic engineering researchers have been putting human genes into animals for years for medical purposes, such as trying to make pig hearts human-compatible. Gen Pharm bioengineered Herman, the first transgenic dairy bull, for siring cows that produce milk with a human protein. Scientists with the US Department of Agriculture put human growth hormone genes into pig embryos to produce faster growing hogs. The project did not stop because its originators woke up at night pondering the morality of what they were doing. Rather, it was abandoned because the resulting pigs were so deformed that some could not support their own weight. But other laboratories could well overcome these failures and successfully implant even more human material into plants and animals. If one gene worked pretty well, could 20, 100 or 1000 genes work even better? In 1997, Japanese researchers reported inserting a complete human chromosome into mice to produce human antibodies. How much human material spliced into a living organism makes its products "essentially human?" This ethical dilemma is deafening by the silent treatment it is given. Imagine that you doze off one night while watching Buffy slay the bad guy. You wake up thinking you heard an ad for "Angel Beer" that is fortified by inserting genes from human blood into rice that's sold to the brewery. It might be hard to tell if it was a nightmare or the latest biotech venture into Missouri's boot heel. Eating food with human genetic components would certainly run counter to the moral or religious beliefs of many people. Even those who do not share their views are likely to defend their right to practice their beliefs. Clearly, all genetically contaminated food should be labeled so that those who choose not to consume it can do so. But the last thing you are likely to see on any bottle of beer, box of rice puffs, pharmaceutical, or lard is a statement that "This contains human by-products or genetic material." What this means in the realpolitik of pharming is that if the biotech industry gets its way, there may soon be human DNA in every rice product on the shelf. Once human genes get into a plant, they become a permanent part of that species. When Grandpa is spliced into a pollinating plant, he just keeps blowin' in the wind forever. His DNA becomes part of the diet of all who eat the plant. Unlike exploding gas tanks, Grandpa's genes can't be recalled.

I haul water for cooking and drinking routinely - old uncle was a beef farmer and his barnyard was too close to the well feeding the house. About five years ago, after his wife died and I stayed with him for a couple of months till his cattle went on pasture, I drank the water with him. He'd had three hip replacements and had quite a lot of pain in back, hip and leg so we didn't want to hear of him becoming stranded in a snowbank while doing chores (lacking kids, why he needed to keep cattle in his mid-80s is beyond me: we used to kid him, saying that we figured that he was trying to figure a way to take his assets with him). But when he died about 3 years ago, his relatives suggested that it would be adviseable not to drink the water (it smells, especialy when hot) and in the tests prior to sale of the farm the house well failed the e-coli test badly, also the coliform test. The well serving the barn passed e-coli, but failed coliform. I drank that water sometimes last summer when watering the garden, without dire result, and my landlord said that he did, same result. The trouble with hooking most water wells' pumps to a generator is that few of them have a feed line that can be separated easily, e.g. a push-and-twist plug in the line. As most furnaces lack - which makes it quite difficult to hook them up, as well, as I indicated earlier. The landlord came early this morning to plough out the lane ... but I wasn't planning to go anywhere. Arranging for a partner driver, and usually needing to drive "naked" to his/her place, even if the roads are mainly rather quiet rural ones, tends to make one avoid it for routine stuff. I hope that you had an interesting weekend. Maybe I'll turn my chair 180 degrees to the desk and get some stuff cleared off of it, in the coming days. ole joyful

Grainlady makes a good point in that you may get a bigger bang for your buck by looking at other areas where your savings might be more significant. For me, as well as many others who contribute faithfully to this forum, frugality is a way of life. I have certain "friends" who laugh at my efforts, and my grown children accept them as part of my personality but they seem to be grateful that it is not part of theirs, for some reason. So be it. I'm the one who has no debts, and where my kids are concerned, the one they always turn to (sometimes successfully, but most of the time not) when they have gotten themselves in a financial mess. They don't want my advice and I keep waiting for them to get a clue. So far I wait in vain, although I'm seeing a glimmer of hope in my one daughter, finally. There are so, so many ways to cut down on costs. Start by making a list of everything you spend your money on and examine each one for potential savings. Usually, when you are frugal about the things you buy and the way you live your life, you will find you are also decreasing what they are now calling "your footprint". One nice thing about DD is that she buys a lot of the same things that I do. It is not uncommon for one of us to say to the other, "I'm making out an order to _____. Anything you need?" Then we share shipping. When I first started visiting this forum, I went all the way back to the first post and read each one. It took several days, but it allowed me to get to know people and to see what they were all doing. I'd recommend that as a first step for anyone new to this forum. It is very educational. My parents started out as farmers in Kansas. Because they did not have the financial expertise to run the farm at a profit, my dad started working as a driller on an oil rig. This set the wheels in motion, as my mother could not run the farm alone and he struggled to come home from a gruelling day's work on the rig and then work on the farm. Eventually the rig owner moved his operations to Oklahoma and we followed, selling the farm, moving into a small house with a good-sized yard in a small town. We were not poor but we were not well off, either. My mother was frugal in some ways, but in other ways not. For instance, every summer she would buy printed cotton fabric that was sold 4 yards for $1. (this was between the years of 1954 and 1965) From this, all her daughters would make their school clothes, and she would make dresses for herself and shirts for Dad. When double-knit was first marketed, my mother was in hog heaven. She bought so much double-knit that she wore it until she got too old to sew. And she recycled any plastic bag, whether it was a bread wrapper or a zip-lock bag that one of her "wasteful" daughters brought something in. BUT, my mother was not frugal when it came to buying a car. Because her father had been a horse-trader and she witnessed him haggling for the best possible price, feeling embarrassed about it, she would never, and would never allow Dad to, haggle over the price of the car. Car dealers loved to see Mom and Dad walking onto their lot. They always bought brand new and paid the price on the sticker. They usually kept the car for ten years so there was some recovery in that, at least. Mom loved to play the piano, and after she tried out her sister's electric organ, she had to have one. She went to the most expensive music store, and as usual, bought without haggling. Clearly, my mother had issues with money. And it seems a lot of people do, as if their worth as a human being is measured in dollars. I have a lot more respect for someone who lives comfortably on very little than I do for someone who brings down a huge salary but lives from payday to payday. When the job is lost, who's homeless?