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[quote=Anonymous][quote]...In 1948, advertisements for Scotts’ new product, “Killex,” began appearing in Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies Home Journal, Horticulture and other magazines of the day. Comely barehanded homemakers were depicted sprinkling Killex onto their lawns to remove dandelions, plantain, chickweed and 50 or so other so-called weeds. Soon after, an even more popular amalgamation emerged. When the first bag of Scotts Weed ’n Feed rolled off the conveyor belts at the Scotts headquarters in the central Ohio town of Marysville, it changed the very nature of lawn care. Instead of applying fertilizer in one pass and weed killer in another, homeowners and gardeners could now put down weed ’n feed to do both jobs at once — usually across the entire lawn — thereby creating an explosion for the demand for Milt Carleton’s new miracle acid.
The fact that 2,4-D smelled acutely toxic, ironically, was not the first big dilemma facing the product. Early activists rallied because Killex and Scotts Weed ’n Feed eradicated the clover that theretofore had been North America’s favorite lawn plant.[b] Since it was evergreen, drought-tolerant, low-growing and capable of manufacturing its own fertilizer by attaching nitrogen from the atmosphere to its roots, clover had been a part of virtually all seed mixes ever since Americans began consciously cultivating lawns.[/b] No matter how hard Carleton and others tried, though, they couldn’t come up with a formulation of 2,4-D that allowed the clover and grass to live in harmony. The issue was acknowledged in Carleton’s 1957 book titled A New Way to Kill Weeds:
[b]“The thought of white Dutch clover as a lawn weed will come as a distinct
shock to old-time gardeners. I can remember the day when lawn mixtures
were judged for quality by the percentage of clover seed they contained.
The higher this figure, the better the mixture. . . I can remember the loving
care which old-time gardeners gave their clover lawns. The smug look on the
face of the proud homeowner whose stand was the best in the neighborhood
was really something to behold.”[/b]
The clover quandary was deftly handled by the same marketers who had, seemingly overnight, made the phrase “weed ’n feed” part of American vernacular.[b] In this case, clover was re-branded as a weed by use of the oldest promotional ploy in the book: manufacturing fear. Clover, you see, attracts bees by the thousands when the flowers bloom in mid summer. Bees, claimed the deft advertisements, sting children. Young mothers took note and, within a generation, clover was gone from most seed mixes. Soon, the three- and four-leafed plants, just like the bees, were disappearing from lawns.[/b]
As for those pesky and persistent claims that exposure to 2,4-D also carried other side effects — among them diarrhea, blurred vision, respiratory irritation, confusion, numbness and tingling, bleeding from the nose and chemical hypersensitivity — they were quickly cast aside by a hearty gulp in clear public view. The man who had effectively launched the weed ’n feed industry utterly scoffed at the notion that his product was harmful to human or environmental health....[/quote]
http://www.safelawns.org/blog/index.php/2011/03/book-excerpt-heres-the-history-of-clovers-demise-as-a-lawn-plant/[/quote]

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