The radio show Living on Earth is a font of useful and interesting environmental knowledge.
In a recent show, host Steve Curwood spoke with “agronomist Frank Forcella about how he modified the common sand blaster to simultaneously fertilize and weed food crops.”
Curwood introduces the topic thus, “If you’ve ever weeded a garden, you know it’s a backbreaking job, and if you have row upon row of crops, it’s, well, it’s easier to use herbicides. But then the crop is not organic. Enter a team of soil scientists for the U.S. Department of Agriculture who harnessed a common tool of the building trades to blast away those unwanted weeds without chemicals. Joining me to explain this breakthrough is Frank Forcella. He’s an agronomist with the USDA’s North Central Soil Conservation Research Laboratory.”
Forcella then tells Curwood how he got the idea. “One of my hobbies here in Minnesota is growing apricots, and 2007 happened to be a wonderful year for apricot production in Minnesota.
“We ended up with about a five gallon bucket worth of apricot pits, and I was wondering what can we do with apricot pits. One of the things you can do with them is to grind them up and use then as a grit in sandblasters, and I was talking about that with one of the fellows who works with me, Dean Peterson, on our way out to our field plots. Both of us work on weeds, and we had more or less simultaneously had the idea, ‘I wonder if you could use sandblasters to kill weeds.’ Initially we thought that had to be the dumbest idea in the world, but it was one of those ideas we just couldn’t get out of our heads.”
Read how a dumb idea led to a great invention here.
Photo: Frank Forcella
The four-row grit applicator in action, driven by Charles Hennen. 
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