Board near vote on divisive herbicide

The state Plant Board will decide Friday whether to accept a committee recommendation to further restrict the use next growing season of certain herbicides after some farmers this year illegally sprayed the weedkiller dicamba and damaged or ruined their neighbors’ crops.

Arkansas agriculture experts had predicted that the summer mash- up between farmers and a new seed technology from Monsanto would cause problems.

Monsanto, the St. Louisbased seed conglomerate, began selling two versions of its new soybean seeds last spring: Xtend, which is dicamba tolerant, and Roundup Ready 2 Xtend, which is tolerant of both dicamba and glyphosate, a herbicide commonly known as Roundup. Monsanto released the new seeds before the federal Environmental Protection Agency had approved an accompanying herbicide called Xtendimax VaporGrip, a dicamba formulation that Monsanto says is less susceptible to drift, and Roundup Xtend VaporGrip, a pre- mix of glyphosate and dicamba.

“[ B] y not having a dicamba labeled for use [ with the new seeds], we are most likely headed for a train wreck,” Tom Barber, a weed specialist for the UA system extension service, wrote in his blog Feb. 3, well before planting time. “This is disturbing because never in the past has other herbicide- tolerant technology been released without the herbicide being labeled for use in the crop.”

To battle Roundup resistant pigweed infestations, some farmers planting the new seeds sprayed available formulations of dicamba. That caused damage to crops planted with earlier- generation seeds and vegetation sensitive to dicamba. Because certain formulations of dicamba are highly volatile and likely to drift, it’s illegal to spray the herbicide across soybean and cotton fields once the plants have emerged.

Twenty- five complaints

were filed in July with the Plant Board by farmers against farmers after finding cotton and soybeans with damage consistent with being hit by dicamba. Those complaints are still being investigated. Many other farmers reported damage but chose to not file complaints.

The EPA said last month that it is investigating dicamba complaints in 10 states: Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. The EPA noted that Missouri reported 125 complaints affecting some 40,000 crop acres, mostly in four counties that make up that state’s “bootheel,” just across the state line from several northeast Arkansas counties.

The extent of damage to soybean, cotton and fruit crops won’t be known until after harvest. Of Arkansas’ 25 complaints, 13 came from just two counties: Craighead and Mississippi.

THE PROPOSALS

To help prevent dicambadrift damage next year, the Plant Board on Friday is scheduled to consider:

Banning the use of dicamba herbicides of dimethylamine ( DMA) salt and acid formulations, except on pastures, but only if all susceptible crops are at least 1 mile away in all directions.

Prohibiting the spraying of dicamba composed of diglycolamine ( DGA) salt and sodium salt from April 15 through Sept. 15 — five key months of the growing season — except on pastures or rangeland, again with a 1- mile buffer.

Requiring farmers who use a salt dicamba called Engenia, by BASF, on Xtend cotton and soybeans to have a quartermile downwind buffer zone and 100- foot buffer in all other directions. Research by the University of Arkansas System’s Agriculture Division has shown that Engenia is less volatile than other salt dicambas.

Requiring anyone who uses any of the DGA- based herbicides on genetically modified seed by Dow Chemical Co. or Monsanto to be trained and certified through a program to be determined.

The first proposed Plant Board restriction — the banning of DMA salt of dicamba — affects the most readily available, and least expensive, herbicides on the market. DMA salt of dicamba also is considered to be among the most volatile herbicides, especially on warm, humid days when the chemical can vaporize and spread to other fields. None of those herbicides was made by Monsanto.

The second proposal — banning DGA dicamba on fields after April 15 — would affect Monsanto’s herbicides M1691 and the two VaporGrip formulations, none of which have been approved yet by the EPA. “That proposal will really limit growers’ access to technology that they need today,” Boyd Carey, Monsanto’s lead representative for cropprotection systems in North America, said Friday.

The fourth restriction affects Monsanto’s Extend cotton and soybean crops because it puts Xtend growers into a certification program, at their own expense, before they can use herbicides not yet approved by the EPA. “We have robust training in place, and we’ll work with the Plant Board in seeing that training continues,” Carey said. “But if VaporGrip is limited or banned in the state, it will completely eliminate a tool that farmers need.”

The Plant Board’s pesticide committee, which also handles herbicides, met five times since the dicamba outbreak before coming up with its recommendations.

If and when Monsanto’s new herbicides are approved by the EPA, there’s no guarantee their use will be allowed in Arkansas.

The Plant Board has been consistent in its desire that chemical companies allow UA weed scientists to study herbicides — a process that the scientists say will take at least two years. Monsanto hasn’t allowed any other third- party studies, citing proprietary reasons. Instead, Monsanto said it has 33 farmers conducting field tests in North Carolina, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota.

The UA weed scientists announced early this year that, in a greenhouse study, they found that pigweed began growing resistant even to dicamba after just three generations of exposure.

“One pesticide quits working and so we replace it with another, and so on and so on, until you are left with a weed population or insects, for that matter, that can tolerate multiple modes of action,” said Bob Scott, another UA weed scientist. “This is the inevitable result of using a single effective mode of action to control a given pest.”

Monsanto critics say the company never should have sold, or been allowed by regulators to sell, the new seed without having the accompanying herbicide available.

Ford Baldwin of Stuttgart, a farm consultant and former UA weed scientist, said farmers who sprayed dicamba illegally should have known better but placed special blame on Monsanto. “The seed side has not made full eye contact with the weed- science side of the genetics,” Baldwin told state regulators during a hearing July 25. “Mainly from the seed side you hear ‘ yield, yield and yield.’”

Baldwin said he hasn’t seen proof yet of Monsanto’s assurances of higher yields with its Xtend beans. “They certainly will out- yield any other soybeans that are injured by dicamba,” he said then. “The marketing model appears to be ‘ we are committed to this technology, we have all this seed, we are going to sell this seed and anything happening after that is someone else’s problem.’ Companies simply must assume more ownership in the herbicide side of the seed. Weed control and the ability to manage the herbicide will ultimately drive the choice of seed.”

Danny Finch of Jonesboro, a member of the Plant Board representing cotton farmers, accused Monsanto of essentially forcing farmers to buy their seeds.

Monsanto representatives pushed back. “We’re not forcing anyone to plant them,” a Monsanto lawyer said.

“You’re not giving them any options. They’re going to plant them for defense,” Finch said, referring to farmers who buy dicamba- tolerant Xtend beans only because a neighbor did.

Another Monsanto representative said the company worked hard to tell Xtend buyers not to use dicamba.

But, upon questioning from Finch, the Monsanto representative said it has no plans to

take action against those who planted the Xtend seeds and sprayed dicamba illegally.

Monsanto told investors in August that it had sold 1 million acres of Xtend soybeans this year, with expectations of selling 15 million acres in 2017 and 55 million by 2019.

Baldwin warned that rowcrop farmers aren’t the only ones with something at stake, noting dicamba damage to fields of watermelons, cantaloupes and peanuts, peach orchards, cultivated broadleaf vegetation and trees, including oaks, sycamores, and the Bradford pear. “The issue could easily get outside of agriculture, and that could be a game changer,” he said.

Farmers who planted Xtend crops had a choice: spray dicamba illegally, fight a likely ineffective battle against battletested pigweed using Roundup or other herbicides, or disk up their fields.

The fine for illegally spraying dicamba is $ 1,000; losing an entire field could cost many times that.

Perry Galloway of Gregory in Woodruff County was the state’s top soybean grower last year with a yield of 108.76 bushels per acre. This year he plowed up 150 acres of Roundup Ready soybeans overrun by pigweed.

He replanted the acreage with LibertyLink soybeans, and the fields have been clean. But the late in- season replanting will cost him about 30 bushels an acre, Galloway said Friday.

He doesn’t believe in a ban of any formulations of dicamba and said the Plant Board shouldn’t take any “extreme measures.”

“We need all the technology we can get because we are out of bullets against pigweed,” Galloway said.

While the Plant Board grapples with pesticide regulations, another of its committees has recommended increasing the fine from $ 1,000 for illegally spraying dicamba to $ 25,000. Any such increase cannot be applied retroactively and must be approved by the General Assembly.

Charlie Fleeman, a farmer in Manila in Mississippi County, recently estimated he had 200 acres of soybeans damaged.

Fleeman won’t know how much the dicamba cut his yield for a few more weeks. “Every farmer around me has complained about all this to some extent,” Fleeman said.

The $ 25,000 fine, if approved, “certainly would make a farmer think twice” about improperly using dicamba again, he said.

The Plant Board’s approval of the herbicide restrictions will not put them automatically into place.

A public hearing, likely in November or December, and another vote of the board would be necessary. If approved then, the recommendations would go to the governor for his approval and then to the Legislative Council, lawmakers who conduct the Legislature’s business when it is not in session.

“If he [ Gov. Asa Hutchinson] declines, we’re back at square one,” Terry Walker, director of the Plant Board, said after the pesticide panel made its herbicide recommendations Sept. 14. “At that point, I don’t know,” he said.

The upshot of the pesticide committee’s work doesn’t alter one central fact: Spraying dicamba over the top of crops is illegal, Walker said.

“Illegal is illegal,” Walker said. “You can’t prevent it unless you outright ban the entire product.”