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Tom Burdick swoops in fast and low, the wheels of his airplane almost brushing the tops of the trees standing along the edge of the field. He levels the wings and dips the bright yellow nose toward the ground. He’s zooming in at 130 mph, with the afternoon sun behind him. From the ground, Burdick looks like he’s lining up for a strafing run as he aims the sleek, single-engine propeller-driven plane at a field.

In a sense Burdick is making a strafing run, although it’s not a line of enemy planes he’s attacking, but a row of crops. From a height of only eight feet, he triggers the release of the plane’s payload, and a line of nozzles along the trailing edge of the wing spews an aerosol cloud that swirls in the wake of his prop wash.

Burdick roars across the field in seconds. He pulls back on the control stick and rockets skyward. At the top of his climb, he kicks the rudder over and banks into a steep turn, setting himself up for another diving pass at the field.

In the business, he’s known as an A.G.—an agriculture pilot. His munitions of choice aren’t bombs or bullets, but pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.

Not that he hasn’t seen a few bullets.

“I was shot at once,” he says. “I found two holes—one in the tail and one in the wing.”

Burdick, a stocky 55-year-old who exudes quiet confidence, started flying right out of high school. He paid for his pilot training by working the flight line at an airport in his hometown of Madison, Wis. As a newly winged commuter pilot, Burdick flew VIPs around Wisconsin, including the governor on a campaign tour. Later, he spent four years as an air traffic controller at the hyperkinetic Los Angeles Center in Palmdale, Calif., directing commercial jets and other aircraft over central California and northern Mexico. Burdick lost that job when the air traffic controllers’ union staged a walkout in 1981, a move that prompted President Ronald Reagan to fire all the strikers.

Fortunately, a crop duster training school in Casa Grande, Ariz., 460 miles away, was accepting new students.

“I rode my motorcycle from Palmdale to Casa Grande in the middle of the night,” Burdick recalls. During the ride he hit a patch of black ice with his Kawasaki 550 and went down, knocking off his windshield. He froze for the rest of the trip. “It was so cold my face was stuck.”

At crop duster school Burdick met a guy from Louisiana looking to hire an ag pilot, so in February 1982, he packed up what few belongings he had and moved to South Louisiana. He’s been here ever since.

He’s the owner and chief pilot (there’s only one other pilot) of Aerial Crop Care in Port Barré, 50 miles west of Baton Rouge on U.S. 190. Like Burdick himself, his operation is basic—just a hanger, an office, a grass airstrip and, of course, an airplane.

Burdick flies an Air Tractor AT-502 crop duster, an impressive machine that costs $600,000. The sleek, long-nosed, low-wing plane packs a 750-horsepower propeller-driven turbine engine that runs on jet fuel. It tops out at about 150 mph and has a 500-gallon hopper built into the nose to hold chemicals or seeds.

Inside, the single-seat cockpit is packed with instruments, including a Microsoft Windows-powered GPS navigational system that allows Burdick to “paint” an image of the field he’s working so he can keep track of what he’s sprayed.

Spraying a field bears some similarities to cutting a lawn in that the person doing it has to keep track of the ground already covered. The difference is that hurtling through the air at 130 mph and only eight feet off the ground, while simultaneously monitoring a panel full of instruments, keeping track of hundreds of gallons of expensive chemicals and trying not to clip a tree or snag a power line, is about a thousand times more complicated.

And dangerous. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says in 2006 the job of pilot was the second most dangerous in the country, up one notch from 2005 when pilots ranked No. 3. (Topping the list both years—commercial fishermen.)

Inside, the single-seat cockpit is packed with instruments, including a Microsoft Windows-powered GPS navigational system that allows Burdick to “paint” an image of the field he’s working so he can keep track of what he’s sprayed.

“I’ve lost several friends in this industry,” Burdick says. “When an accident occurs, we all take a close look at circumstances and learn. We are not the wild, whiskey-drinking daredevils that onlookers might perceive us to be.”

One danger lurking on the edge of nearly every field is power lines.

“I’ve broken two,” Burdick says. The first one he chopped in half with his propeller. The second power line clipped his canopy and sliced off the top of his vertical stabilizer.

Weather is another constant concern. Ag pilots can’t afford to be fair-weather flyers. Their livelihood depends on their ability to navigate through wind, rain and fog.

Then there are unexpected mechanical problems, like an engine conking out over a sugarcane field. There’s not much room for error when a crop duster suddenly turns into a glider just a few yards above the ground. It’s happened to Burdick twice.

The first time was just after a takeoff. He was barely in the air, and near the end of the runway, when his engine stopped. The plane shuddered and nearly stalled.

“It came down like a toolbox,” Burdick says.

Another nearly catastrophic engine failure happened while he was spraying a field of crops. His old radial engine backfired and its power output dropped to nearly zero. Burdick chopped back on the throttle and got ready for a crash landing in the field. Miraculously, when he put the nose down the engine sputtered back to life, barely, but it gave him just enough power to reach the airstrip.

New turbine engines and improved technology have made crop dusting aircraft more reliable. They’re also faster. Speed makes spraying more efficient, but also potentially more deadly.

“There are far less accidents now, but with these faster airplanes I’d say the fatalities per accident are higher,” Burdick says. “Speed kills and we’re going faster today.”

So after more than 25 years of buzzing farm fields, why does Burdick continue to do it?

“I still have a passion for it,” he says. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do for a living.”

Burdick’s son, Marcus, 23, says the speed and inherent danger of crop dusting fits his father’s personality. “He’s somewhat of a daredevil,” Marcus says. “He probably wouldn’t admit it, but he is.”

Dangerous Jobs -- One in an occasional series