Pesticide Spraying on Behalf of Others (3): A Spraying Life That Began at 18
28 Years Old with 10 Years of Contract Spraying Experience: Chen Junyou
In the contract pesticide spraying business, faces of 17- and 18-year-olds are a common sight, but they may also be the agricultural group with the shortest career lifespan. Ten years or more and you count as a veteran, and Chen Junyou, a young man from Yunlin, is an oddity among them.
With a head of short brown hair, 28-year-old Chen Junyou looks no different from the average young person today, yet in the industry he is already at the level of a senior veteran. Ten years ago he first came into contact with contract spraying, just as this industry was taking off. After graduating from vocational high school and finishing his military service, seeing that there were few job opportunities in his hometown, he started a business together with his family, founding "Dafeng Agricultural Spraying Cooperative," and the growers of edamame, carrots and iceberg lettuce exported to Japan are all his clients.
Many of the newer Yunlin operators have to call him teacher. Chen Junyou says many young people come to work part-time spraying pesticides, but spraying is not simple. Just learning to control the force and keep the spray boom balanced takes three months, and you also have to constantly watch the wind direction and dodge drifting pesticide; yet after all the effort of teaching them, many apprentices set up on their own, and even undercut on price, which leaves him very rueful. At its peak Dafeng had 15 spraying crews; now it is down to 8.
But not everyone has smooth sailing after finishing their training. Many see their health deteriorate sharply after 2 or 3 years and quietly bow out. Chen Junyou has been able to stand firm, and he has his own set of methods.
Besides always wearing long sleeves and long pants and a mask while working, the changeover between the first and second rice crops each year is the off-season for contract spraying, and he uses the downtime to go hiking in Alishan and recuperate his body. Compared with many operators who never let go of beer or Paolyta, and even "drink before going back up," he does not touch a drop of alcohol, because in addition to increasing the metabolic burden on the liver, alcohol also accelerates blood vessel dilation, making the skin more likely to absorb pesticides.
Choosing crops carefully is also important. The most dangerous are sugarcane and corn, because the plants are often taller than a person, and just getting inside is difficult; when spraying you easily get drenched all over, and those with poorer technique may inhale an excessive amount on the spot and faint and be sent to hospital.
Because the danger is high, even though the price for spraying corn is more than 100 yuan higher than for rice fields, at 300 per fen, Chen Junyou still is unwilling to take it. "I once sprayed a fen for 600 yuan, but corn is more than 200 cm tall, so after that I quit; it is really too hard to earn."
Normally he reads books and goes online to gather pesticide-related information, and he does not spray unlabeled or unknown-origin pesticides. There was once a farmer whose crop was not growing well who deliberately brought him an unknown pesticide to spray, hoping to falsely accuse him of causing crop damage and seize the chance to extort him, but fortunately he was cautious enough to refuse from the very start.
He reveals that some operators have relatively little pesticide knowledge and spray whatever the farmer brings, including highly toxic "song"-suffix products and banned pesticides; the ones hurt most are themselves.
In 10 years in the trade, Chen Junyou has seen many people poisoned, fall ill, go into shock and be admitted to the intensive care unit. Although he has never once been poisoned, when he took part in Yangming University's pesticide exposure survey a few years ago, the researchers said the pesticides in his blood were much higher than in ordinary people.
Would he and his family not worry? He says he has been trained, so it is fine. How long he will do this work, he has not thought that far; he takes it one step at a time. Recently he heard that someone has introduced an unmanned aerial vehicle automatic pesticide spraying machine, and he seems eager to try it: "Maybe with this, in the future I can reduce contact with pesticides."