The Perthshire I met in June 1962 was devoid of Motorways; steam trains still worked the branch lines and MOT tests for cars were far in the future. This story of my time with the Forestry Commission is really the sequence to my National Service in Germany that I wrote of in "Two Years" with the Pied Piper of Hameln. Forestry was changing; coal mining was scaling down and the labourintensive pit prop market was being replaced by the need for the more easily mechanised pulp wood to feed the new pulp mill outside Fort William. Timber Lorries were becoming both longer and heavier and the forest roads and bridges had to be strengthened to cope. The natural forests had been depleted by the demands of two world wars and the new forests planted on heather moors torn by tractors and giant ploughs. This was the world I worked in for eight years, and this is the story of the men and machines that made it possible.

Environmental Fate and Safety Management of Agrochemicals discusses residue analysis, environmental fate and safety management, environmental risk assessment, metabolism, resistance and management, and advances in formulation and application technology from the academic, government, and industry perspective.
Meaningful ecological and environmental risk assessment of pest control agents is possible only when accurate and credible metabolic and environmental fate data is available. The advent of affordable and sensitive liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) has greatly increased our ability to detect environmentally relevant metabolites and degradation products following the application of these materials. Furthermore, ecological risk assessment and monitoring of pesticide resistance in field populations has become more feasible and cost effective by employing hig-hroughout molecular diagnostic techniques on the genetic leve3l and LC/MS techniques on the proteomic and meabolomic levels.
Efficient formulations and application technologies have greatly reduced the amount of materials that are required to achieve effective pest control and hence reduce their ecological and environmental impacts. Controlled release, stabilization and dispersion technologies have provided the pest manager with new tools that allow them to use necessary pest control options in "best management strategies."