Historic Hood River
Crop Dusting
6-4-2025
Notes
We’ve seen many images of various land based spraying systems deployed through the Hood River valley, but this is the only image we have of crop dusting by airplane. Hopefully someone with orchard experience can fill us in on why we don’t see crop dusting airplanes around here.
This is from the Ruth Guppy collection.
Dale Nicol
WAAAM has a modified crop duster in the North side of Air Museum Rd and Tucker by the big Oak tree.
There is a crop duster in the Museum but I don’t recall the exact model….it was a local aircraft.
JKG
Both the image and the WAAAM plane on display out front look like Boeing Stearman Model 75s (though the latter appears to have been more heavily modified with the canopy and shortened wingtips). Since these were abundant (10k+ built), they were often modified for ag uses, especially in the PNW where they were used for large scale forestry projects like spraying for spruce budworm. Here’s a link to some history on the one out front of the WAAAM: https://www.aerialvisuals.ca/AirframeDossier.php?Serial=25733
jn
Crop duster told me he was used to large plats to spray, not relatively small individual orchards. Also, the land here is not flat like most sprayers are used to. Very difficult area to spray.
Thorn
All the more impressive how low they flew.
Jeffrey Bryant
The orchards used to get sprayed by plane (and bi-plane) when I was growing up, but only on calm days. I seem to remember one crashing because it hit power lines.
DAVID
I was able to fly in one of those aircraft a few years ago in Madras.
The Erickson Aircraft collection.
What a kick in the rear I will never forget flying upside down.
I asked for it and took pictures.
Yippie!
DAVID
I just remembered it’s the same model plane flying in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.”