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Agricultural Aviation (1955)

1955 · Ephemeral film · 13 min

Watch now On the Internet Archive

Synopsis

About using general aviation in agriculture. cropduster over cotton fields boll weevil on cotton boll Cartoon of boll weevil on airplane rudder GS US Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC hand pouring contents of graduated cylinder into beaker agricultural research activities – greenhouses, fields, chemicals, etc. biplanes dusting and spraying crops (good) Some of this footage is quite scary Experimental cropduster Black child looking at cotton, smelling bolls boll weevils on cotton bolls workers picking cotton in fields, lugging bags, dumping bags of picked cotton onto trailer sprayer applying cotton defoliants to field (idea is to thin out vegetation by killing leaves) helicopters spraying defoliants in San Joaquin Valley, California bolls on defoliated plants Mechanical picker going thru field of rank and matted cotton Apple orchards in the Northwest: windfall damage and pre-harvest drop Worker inspecting apple from tree Helicopter landing and receiving filling of growth regulator chemicals 2,4,5 TP – growth regulator for apples Helicopter spraying growth regulator as it flies over Northwest river apple stems connecting apple to tree Northwest applies in boxes Biplane spraying DDT tobacco field and tobacco leaves tobacco leaves attacked by tobacco hornworm insect-infested corn field (killed by grasshoppers) Leaves and stalks with holes from insects tobacco leaves chewed by insects green pest on leaf Narrator: “Insecticides are poisonous…” insect writhing after…

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Details

Running time
13 minutes
Collection
Prelinger Archives
Internet Archive item
0316AgriculturalAviation

Subjects on the Internet Archive

Reviews on the Internet Archive

★★★★★ · Interesting look at the history of the field · sapair · 2023-04-26

It was interesting to see how far we've come in the field of Ag Aviation since the '50s. I thought it gave fairly unbiased information for when it was filmed. The filmed gave a bit of the history of the field, its importance, and some of the things that need to be watched for.

★★★ · Mmmm! Chemicals! · Spuzz · 2022-07-06

This shocking 1955 film, features plane apon plane spraying gallons of dangerous chemicals such as DDT and 245tp. Nice close-ups of dying insects are shown. Not shown, side effects after exposure to humans. It's amazing to see how naive people were in 1955. In film after film, they're just whooping it up, with not a care in the world, and we have now these films to prove how grossly wrong their ideologies were.

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