A New Weapon in the War on Weeds: Flamethrowers

Records show that in the 1940s and '50s, more than 80,000 farmers nationwide primarily controlled weeds with flaming, often with diesel fuel. But a post-war boom in chemical research produced a tremendous number of new herbicides and pesticides for the farm and garden, and the once-intense interest in flame weeding dropped as farms became industrialized and reliant on those chemical inputs. But land managers are now wondering whether cooking weeds to death is better than pesticides

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