A low-flying airplane was the cause of several calls Wednesday to the Collin County 911 Center.
The culprit? A crop duster doing work on farmers’ fields from Frisco to Melissa.
“I’d be concerned as well as they would if I didn’t know what was going on,” said Ken Lauderdale, owner of Lauderdale Aerial Spraying and the airplane that caused all of Wednesday’s commotion. “I can easily put myself in their shoes.”
Lauderdale told NBC 5 he was not surprised to learn about the 911 calls.
“We get calls. A lot of calls,” Lauderdale said, standing in front of his plane on the tarmac of the Sherman Municipal Airport.
Crop dusting planes fly low – as low as 10 feet off of the ground – which can drop jaws of the uninformed.
But there is a very specific reason for the aerobatics.
“We try to get as low as we can because we want the product to get on target,” Lauderdale explained. “Our job is to try to make sure this product gets where it’s intended to be and not off target.”
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Increasingly, Lauderdale’s business comes too close to concerned citizens, as development pushes farther and farther into what had been rural portions of North Texas.
“The more people that move into the country, the harder that becomes,” Lauderdale said, about spraying fields located near housing developments.
It’s a problem lifelong farmer Jack Norman has seen firsthand.
“Every year the Metroplex moves a few miles closer to us. And as that happens we have housing developments that we work around,” said Norman, who has farmland in Collin and Grayson counties. “And very often it does provide a very difficult situation for us.”
Despite the population boom north of Dallas-Fort Worth, agriculture is still a booming business.
As recently as 2010, agriculture production in the 27-county region in northeast Texas – east of Interstate 35E and north of Interstate 20 – accounted for 11 percent of the entire production in Texas, according to figures released by the Texas AgriLife Extension Service. In addition, the agriculture industry accounted for the employment of more than 57,000 people and nearly $1.4 billion in total economic impact to the region.
Lauderdale told NBC 5 his business is needed by farmers during a particular window of time – right now.
In addition, this year his services are in higher demand than usual.
“This has been a very unusual year because we’ve had so much beneficial rain to fill the lakes. But it’s been a challenge for the farmers,” said Norman, who has hired Lauderdale’s company this year to spread a special wheat seed treated with a fungicide, meant to ward off harmful fungus which could damage his crops.
