An Interview With Author Michael Milligan

Michael Milligan

Q: So, how did you get into farming in the first place?
Milligan: Although I was raised mostly in suburban San Diego, I spent my first seven years on a farm in Ohio and come from a long line of dirt farmers. I launched my own ag career in the Arkansas Ozarks as a back-to-the-land organic gardener, then moved into production horticulture—first as a market gardener and then as a tree farmer.

Q: Did you stick with organic techniques?
Milligan: I tried to, but as I became more and more commercial, pest control options ran out. It was a tough decision, but farming was my income. Either I used chemicals or I quit.

Q: What gave you the idea for The Pine Field Killing?
Milligan: The Alar scare. If you remember, Alar was a chemical used to keep apples from dropping and spoiling before they could ripen. Activists created a huge stir by claiming that Alar residues were carcinogenic to young children and demanded that it

Soil ready for replanting with Monterey pine seedlings. The bare ground is 12 of the 72 acres Mike Milligan managed for Windmill Christmas Tree Farm. (Any resemblance to fictional farms is purely co-incidental.)

be immediately banned. They had people so worked up that parents were calling 911 to ask whether it was safe to pour apple juice down the drain or if it should be hauled to a toxic waste dump.

Q: What was your reaction to all that?
Milligan: Mixed. While I was upset over what I took as an assault on the tools of my trade, I was worried too. What if these people were right about the danger of pesticides? There I was in 100 degree weather, hunched over the steering wheel of my tractor, sweltering in a respirator and plasticized suit, spraying my trees with a chemical more toxic than Alar and absorbing thousands of times the dose any consumer ever would. I had to find out if such anti-pesticide claims were based on solid scientific evidence.

Q: And what did you come up with?
Milligan: I found that despite the activists' political victory in getting Alar pulled from the market, their science was flimsy at best.

A BRIEF BIO   Michael Milligan has been an "on-again, off-again" writer for decades. He was an investigative reporter for the San Diego Street Journal, a contributing writer for Ramparts and Organic Gardening magazines and a recent editor of The 3rd Degree, a newsletter for Mystery Writers of America.   Born on an Ohio farm, Milligan spent his early childhood happily tromping around barnyards until—much to his dismay—the family quit farming and moved to suburban San Diego. Years later, Milligan—an Army veteran—studied horticulture and forestry at the University of Arkansas. For almost three decades, he earned his keep as a market gardener and tree farmer. In addition to his training in horticulture and forestry, Milligan studied fiction writing and screenwriting at UCLA. Currently residing in Southern California, Milligan is working on his second novel.

                              I learned from Dr. Bruce Ames, head of U.C. Berkeley's biochemistry department, that we consume ten thousand times more "carcinogens" from the chemicals occurring naturally in fruits and vegetables than we do from any exposure to pesticides, Alar included.
     I read the likes of longtime anti-smoking campaigner and former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop saying that modern pesticides were not only harmless to humans but crucial to sustaining our health. Without them we would not be able to supply the abundant fruits and vegetables that are our best defense against cancer and other diseases.
                    The message from Nobel Prize winner Dr. Norman Borlaug was equally clear. Borlaug, who averted a famine by introducing modern agricultural techniques to the Third World, said that without pesticides, wide-spread starvation in underdeveloped nations would be inevitable.

Q: Didn't this kind of evidence sway the activists?
Milligan: Hardly. Within a year, there was a ballot initiative in California that would have effectively banned many pesticides critical to agriculture—including the only insecticide I had to control spider mites. A few months without mite control would have destroyed the tree crop into which I had already invested four years. Once that initiative got the required number of signatures, I was sweating bullets.

Q: Did the initiative pass?
Milligan: Despite early poll numbers that made the proposition look like a shoo-in, it ultimately failed. Since then I've seen similar scenarios over and over: ill-informed people taking pot shots at corporate agribusiness and never hitting anyone but small growers like me.

Q: Was writing The Pine Field Killing a way of

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dealing with that angst?
Milligan: You bet. Once all the political dust settled, I found a certain therapeutic aspect to puzzling out murder plots while driving my tractor.

Q: To whom do you compare yourself in mystery fiction?
Milligan: A hard question. I love the stories and outdoorsy feel of Tony Hillerman's work and admire Michael Crichton's ability to weave social critique into his work—usually without clobbering the reader over the head. A small part of me goes for the techno in Tom Clancy, but I enjoy many others such as Michael Connelly, Martin Cruz Smith and Thomas H. Cook. Certainly, each has influenced me.

Q: What's your wish for The Pine Field Killing?
Milligan: I love the escape of a good mystery. I think folks will find mine a great read. If, in the process, I can give them a glimpse of the world through a farmer's eyes, I'll be thrilled.