PLPA 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Downy Mildew, Fungicide, Rodenticide
4 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
The major issue for this week is human use of pesticides. A pesticide is a chemical that kills a pest. It can be a rodenticide that kills mice in a warehouse, an herbicide that kills dandelions in your lawn, or a fungicide that kills fungi in an apple orchard. A more technical de nition is that a pesticide is a chemical or mixture of chemicals used to prevent, eliminate or control unwanted animals, plants or microorganisms. It"s important to remember that all material things in the world are made of chemicals, and that no chemical is inherently good or bad. every chemical can be toxic to living organisms if the dose is high enough. And chemicals produced in nature are not necessarily safer than those synthesized by people. Chemical pesticides have been used by people for thousands of years. Chinese and the romans, used chemicals to manage animal pests and experimented with them to manage plant diseases.
