Welcome to the Food Chain, Y’all : Medfly: Since the pest may be with us for a while, a Farm Belt native wonders if urban and rural interests might not get together and find a sensible way to deal with the problem.

Y’all having trouble with them pesky flies again. Four hundred flies is all, I hear, trapped around Los Angeles County over the last 10 years. Hell, I’ve known farmers who trapped more flies than that in their pickup cab on a cold night. Probably ain’t none of my business, but since the state’s mixing the malathion with corn syrup, sliming your cars and scumming your swimming pools with syrup made from good Midwestern corn, I didn’t think you’d mind my putting my two cents in.

See, farmers got to deal with this kind of trade-off all the time. They take it seriously, same as you do, worry about breathing the stuff, worry about their kids. But there’s humor in it, too, if you look hard. World would be a terrible place without a sense of humor. Like Lakewood City Councilman Robert G. Wagner saying about the chopper spraying, “I think it’s overblown.” Well, if it was, he wouldn’t have a problem, would he? Or this Republican political consultant, Sal Russo, saying that fighting the Medfly “needs to be like Panama or Grenada. You’ve got to get in fast and win it or else it’s like Vietnam.” Was it using choppers that brought out that old boy’s killer instincts or what? Did we win something in Grenada and Panama that I didn’t hear about?

Or that Los Angeles Times Poll that showed Republicans were more sympathetic to spraying than Democrats. Was that because Republicans own the orange groves, or because old George Deukmejian is a Republican and they’re standing behind their man, or don’t they know straight up from apple butter? Then there’s the sad tale of the Vietnamese people at the nightclub in Garden Grove running out scared when the Medfly choppers came roaring over. We watch the 6 o’clock news out this way, after supper, and when California comes up sometimes we suspicion we might have turned on another weird Hollywood picture show.

It does get to be a mite exasperating for a farmer to hear one more time around that city people, however well-meaning, don’t mind enjoying the fruits but don’t want to help shoulder the burden. There’s people who go around parading for animal rights with meat in their bellies and leather shoes on their feet, letting someone else do their killing for them. There’s people bent out of shape about food prices who don’t want farmers to use chemicals to grow that food cheap. And there’s people who sneeze when a little malathion-laced corn syrup tangerine-flakes their cars, sneering about farmers driving tractors with enclosed cabs and air-filtering systems.

You’ve got 250 types of fruits and vegetables in California susceptible to Medfly infestation. If that fly gets out into the valleys and the fruit groves, farmers are going to have to use a lot more malathion than the state is spraying over the Los Angeles area these days. Spray a little in the city or a lot on the farm: Welcome to the food chain.

I asked my friend Tom Bauer once about pesticides. Tom’s a real farmer out in Missouri who harvests a thousand acres of corn and soybeans and wheat and raises cattle and hogs. He said he didn’t have much truck with pesticides ever since he read on the can label about 10 years ago that he was supposed to burn his work clothes after he sprayed his fields. He still uses herbicides--which are pesticides for plants--to keep down weeds. But he’s gone to rotating crops to fight pests--corn one year, soybeans the next--because the same bugs don’t eat on them.

It wouldn’t be so easy to rotate crops out there in California, since your crops are trees. You might think of rotating your fruit trees with Florida’s every other year. That would make a fine parade, all those trees crossing the continent back and forth on flatbed trucks.

Spray the city or spray the farm. That looked like it in a nutshell until this entomologist fellow Jim Carey came along. Farmers are slow to take to experts. They’ve been burned. A lot of what farming’s about ain’t taught in graduate school. But Carey’s worked up a map and it’s hard to argue with. It shows Medflies being trapped since 1988 in all six of the areas where they turned up in 1980 through 1982, sometimes just a few blocks away.

A couple of the other scientists on the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s science advisory panel thought that looked more like a continuing population than new introductions. One of them, Richard Rice, even allowed the reporter who interviewed him to use his name. The panel recommended saturation trapping over the next two years to see if Carey’s right or wrong. Out here we’re betting he’s right. Flies get around.

If Carey’s right, then the Medfly’s already your neighbor. You know what that means. You Angelenos wasn’t standing behind the door when the brains was passed out. It means you and the farmers over in the next valley have a common problem. You ought to sit down together, listen to your experts (but don’t take their word for it) and work out something permanent. Something better than toad-strangler nights spraying malathion bait. Something fair to both sides, city people and farmers trying to grow you a decent crop.

Y’all have howdied, but you ain’t shook.