What would DiMare do if methyl bromide were banned today?
“We’d have to quit farming,” he says. “Before we started using methyl bromide, we only got about 25 to 30 percent of the tonnage we now get. There’s just no way we could stay in business, because right now there is no commercially available alternative to methyl bromide. And, I don’t know of anything that will be available anytime soon. So, realistically, we’d have no choice. We’d go under.” He says a good example of just how effective methyl bromide is comes across loud and clear when the fumigation equipment gets blocked and sometimes skips 100 to 200 feet of soil in a field being treated with methyl bromide. “Of course, we have no way of knowing this at the time, but when that crop matures, it is readily apparent: sickly looking plants that bear little or no fruit.” According to DiMare, he has always been careful about methyl bromide escaping from the soil. “We always had a machine about 20 feet behind the fumigation equipment that was putting down mulch to keep methyl bromide from
