Pesticides are safer Nov 15

For California AG today, I'm Mike Stephens. We continue with Jeff Rasmussen, California pest control adviser. He explains how the use of pesticides are safe and the surrounding environments are always taken into consideration

When we do apply pesticides. We're always consciously looking around our environment. You know, I've worked in many areas where my grower is next to a creek bed or in rangeland where we have migratory pests. And so we're always out looking, not just in our field. We have to look around our surroundings to understand where these pests are coming from and what other beneficial insects or habitat is there. And we're conscientious because it's our community and that we just don't decide that it's just best for a crop that things are migratory and we have to understand where and when these pests are coming into our field and that we observe our surroundings and the ecosystem around us and we live here and we're not going to poison our own water well. And so we're always conscious about these systems. And again, the degree of the safeness of these materials have increased significantly over the years, and we're learning more again to manage. And I think before we had kind of this concept that we were controlling pest, and I think we were constantly understanding and managing that.