Ep 180: Crop Dusting

Crop Dusting

Here in Albany, we’ve just finished the Art and Air Festival, where hot air balloons float overhead like giant, colorful blimps of whimsy. Every year, I forget it’s happening, hear the sound of propane burners outside my window, and assume my house is on fire. Turns out—nope, just balloons. Meanwhile, my dog thinks the Hindenburg is descending on our neighborhood.

But while watching these balloons, I thought about flight—humanity’s obsession with strapping wings to literally anything that moves—and how that leads us, inevitably, to crop dusting. Both the agricultural version and, uh, the “social” one.

From Bamboo Toys to Bombers

The Wright brothers didn’t invent fart jokes, but they did invent airplanes. Inspired by a bamboo toy helicopter, they figured out how to get humans airborne in 1903 with their spruce-and-string contraption, the Wright Flyer. Spoiler: it worked. Not well, but well enough.

Fast forward to World War I. Planes go from “neat gliders” to “how about we strap guns and grenades to these suckers?” Cue Dutch engineer Anthony Fokker (yes, pronounced exactly how you think—it’s been funny for 100 years). He designed the forward-facing machine gun so pilots could shoot without shredding their own propellers. Handy!

By the end of the war, planes weren’t just flying—they were dropping things with levered release mechanisms. Ka-chow.

From Bombs to Bugs

Post-war, farmers looked at these leftover planes and thought: “What if instead of bombs… bug spray?” In 1921, Ohio tested it, dousing orchards with lead arsenate from the sky. (Great for killing caterpillars, less great for public health. Ah, the good old days.)

This worked so well that after World War II, crop-dusting boomed. Suddenly, you could cover 70 acres an hour instead of 100 acres a day. Safer? Not really—most planes were old warbirds retrofitted by farmers with duct tape and hope. Eventually, Texas A&M built the first dedicated agricultural plane, the AG-1, and the industry took off. Today, nearly 30% of American crops are still sprayed from the air.

Enter: The Other Kind of Crop Dusting

Now, here’s where we shift from agriculture to… gastrointestinal culture. Because somewhere between the 1920s and the early 2000s, humans realized:

“Hey, farting while walking past people looks a lot like those planes dusting fields.”

And thus, the slang term crop dusting was born. According to Urban Dictionary, the first recorded use was in 2003 by a user named Charlie (thank you, Charlie, patron saint of flatulence humor).

It fits perfectly:

• The plane = your body.

• The pesticide mist = your fart cloud.

• The innocent crops below = your unsuspecting friends, family, coworkers, or that poor stranger in aisle seven.

It’s poetic, in a deeply stupid way.

History Meets Flatulence

So next time you walk past someone, let a sneaky one rip, and keep striding like a fighter pilot over France in 1918, remember: you are participating in a long history of human innovation. From the Wright brothers, to World War bombers, to farmers trying not to get eaten alive by caterpillars—your fart has wings.