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Garlic Farmer Wards Off High-Speed Internet

Posted by samzenpus on from the attack-of-the-killer-garlic dept.

DocVM writes "A Nova Scotia farmer is opposing the construction of a microwave tower for fear it will eventually mutate his organic garlic crop. Lenny Levine, who has been planting and harvesting garlic by hand on his Annapolis Valley land since the 1970s, is afraid his organic crop could be irradiated if EastLink builds a microwave tower for wireless high-speed internet access a few hundred meters from his farm."

3 of 475 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Where's the proof? by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's not possible. Only ionizing radiation can alter DNA.

    Microwaves are not ionizing radiation. Not even remotely close, they're on the complete opposite side of the visible portion of the spectrum in fact.

    From visible, you go to IR and then to RF (including microwaves)
    To get to the wavelengths capable of altering DNA, you need to go the other way, through violet to UV (DNA damage), X-rays (more DNA damage!) and gamma (lots of DNA damage).

    There's only one way I can describe this guy - fucking ignorant dumbass. The most likely thing to do DNA damage to his crops is the very sunlight his crops depend on to grow.

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  2. Re:He should be so lucky by Moraelin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Reminds me of http://german-bash.org/101161.

    Short and translated version: the Telekom had built a cell phone mast in a village, and a lot of villagers started to complain about sleep problems and whatnot because of it. The comment of the Telekom was, "how bad must it get, when we actually turn it on" :p

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
  3. Re:Side note by Entropius · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This isn't an American problem exclusively. Related to this is the scare about "zomg genetically modified organisms!", which is much worse in Europe.

    I helped gather data for a study, incidentally, comparing GM and ordinary cotton. The GM cotton had a gene expressing the BT toxin in it, a protein that fucks up caterpillars who eat it rather royally but is harmless to pretty much everything else. The farmers were told to not do anything special with their fields, to use pesticides as normal, etc. (This meant more use of pesticide on the non-GM cotton, obviously.)

    Then I wander through the fields and sample the insect population by species. The conventional cotton was something of a wasteland -- here's a lonely little spider, looking for dinner; there are a few ants; here are a shitload of aphids, which are resistant to insecticide.

    The GM cotton had a whole pile of bugs, all running around happily eating each other.

    GM crops can be *better* for the environment. After all, the BT gene is just a way of putting a pesticide only harmful to a narrow range of insects *into* the crop, so only pests that actually eat it will die. This is a whole lot more targeted than crop-dusting the field with something that'll kill anything that moves with more than four legs. Monsanto's abuse of the patent system is another matter altogether, of course.