Management, lawn care

Deposited by countless private citizens, moreover, lawn care toxins have also proven far more difficult to measure and far more resistant to traditional techniques of pollution control. The political momentum for water quality regulation lags far behind this changing land-use reality. The shift in the last few years to decentralized decision-making that allowed for the implementation of the Clean Water Act, for example, has not come to terms with this change. In this case, the Clean Water Act mandates the creation of total maximum daily load (TMDL) criteria, standards for cleaning up nonpoint sources such as farms, suburban developments, and other nonindustrial sites. These standards are drawn up by water quality management committees. 

Professional applicators, especially those companies or franchises of any size, rely on their own independent distribution and formulator companies. One such firm, Lesco, distributes lawn care products to apphcators, golf course managers, and other professionals. Their products reach 130,000 such companies and clients worldwide, using innovative distribution networks, including not only traditional service centers but mobile sales and service units. 

But do lawn people really resemble those perfect figures that occupy the frozen advertising images of the formulator industry Do they embrace chemical inputs for lawn care warmly or with ambivalence Are intensive lawns managed for one s self, community, family, or some more instrumental economic reasons Put simply, how do lawn people see themselves ... 

This may overstate, however, the degree to which the management of everyday life and its objects, like the lawn, is passive. The level of civic engagement embodied in the maintenance of the lawn in a face-to-face society like Kingberry Court suggests something else. Despite an insistence that the lawn is collectively trivial and tangential, there is a persistent moral responsibility tied to lawn care that no resident can deny. 

Surveys of professional lawn chemical applicators were conducted during the summer and fall of 2004. Subjects recruited included participants in Ohio State University s OARDC (Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center)-sponsored turf care professional educational seminars (Northeast Ohio Lawn Care Seminars). Approximately 300 professionals attended these events (held at the Wooster campus of Ohio State) to inform practitioners of best management practices, new technology, and health and safety issues. Participants included those who own and work in the lawn care industry in Ohio, spanning companies from small, one-person owner operated firms to large franchised national outfits. Professionals attend these seminars for purposes of certification participation in the survey was optional. 

This profile of a simultaneously zealous and anxious community is not unique to Columbus, Ohio. A survey of U.S. households conducted in 2001 asking people how they manage their lawns and how they feel about the risks and hazards associated with turf care, suggests a nation of similarly ambivalent citizens. The survey revealed that those who apply chemicals to their lawns (controlling for income and education) are statistically more likely than nonchemical users to believe that home lawn-care practices generally have a negative impact on local water quality and that lawn-care services have a negative impact on local water quality. People who use chemicals tend to think they are worse for the environment than those who do not. 

In applying Equation (8.3), the pounds of active ingredient applied per acre is assumed to be a use-specific constant, and the number of acres treated in a year is assumed to be a use-and-user-specific distribution. Use refers to crop (e.g. com, sorghum. North American sugar cane or Hawaiian sugar cane), vegetation management, sod or lawn care, while user refers to either a commercial operator... 

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