In a parched field near Mercersburg. Pa., Dairy Farmer Jack K. Beck pointed a finger toward a distant mountain rim. "We always used to get rain when the clouds came across that mountain," he said. "But not any more, with that cloud seeding going on. I've stood here and watched the plane fly into a black cloud, and within five minutes that cloud scattered and the sun shone. I tell you, somebody's going to get hurt over it unless they stop."
Throughout the Appalachian region where corners of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia tangle together, hundreds of farmers agree with disgruntled Dairyman Beck in blaming cloud seeding for the worst drought in a generation. The farmers are furious at the area's fruitgrowers, who are sponsoring the seeding—and with increasing frequency, the threat is heard that somebody's going to get hurt.
To Prevent Hail. During the warm months, the Appalachian fruit region is occasionally pelted by hailstones as big as golf balls, which smash and bruise the ripening apples and peaches. In 1957, after a year of especially heavy hail damage, fruitgrowers in the four states got together in an organization called the Blue Ridge Weather Modification Association. They hired a cloud-seeding firm to combat the costly hail.
The cloud-seeding team, headquartered in Martinsburg, W. Va., sends up two planes, a T-6 and an elderly P-51, to attack threatening clouds with sprays of silver iodide crystals. The seeders also maintain no generators that send forth invisible streams of silver iodide particles. These rise into the air and—the weathermakers hope—eventually reach the clouds. The notion is that silver iodide in either form prevents hailstones from forming. As for the farmers' conviction that the seeding also prevents rain, the weathermaking team argues that this year's dry spell is simply part of the widespread drought afflicting much of the Northeastern U.S.
To Get Rain. Such protestations of innocence have not diluted the drought-stricken farmers' bitterness. In several towns, farmers have held protest meetings against seeding. In Falling Waters, W. Va.. Farmer Bruce Kitchen and two neighbors are collecting signatures on a petition in hopes of getting an anti-seeding bill introduced in the state legislature. Farmers have threatened to shoot at cloud-seeding planes. In Mercersburg, they were blamed for cutting down 138 plum trees belonging to Orchardist Henry Heisey; he decided to withdraw from the Weather Modification Association.
The irony of the conflict is that, according to most meteorologists, both sides are completely mistaken: the seeding does not make much difference either to rainfall of hail formation. Under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation, scientists at the University of Arizona carried out an elaborate investigation of cloud seeding from 1957 through 1960, concluded that it has no statistically detectable effect.