Plant Board sets Engenia-vote redo

As complaints about crop damage continue to mount, the state Plant Board will meet today to decide how, or whether, to correct a mistake made Tuesday during a vote on an emergency proposal to ban the sale and use of Engenia, a dicamba herbicide.

The proposal — an emergency ban of no longer than 120 days — received eight votes in favor and six against.

Believing that all 16 members of the Plant Board were participating, either in person or by telephone, Wade Hodge, the new attorney for the state Department of Agriculture, said the measure failed because its supporters needed nine votes, a majority. The department is the umbrella agency of the board.

However, Robert Campbell, a member from Witts Springs in Searcy County who represents the cattle industry, didn’t participate in the meeting, and his absence apparently went unnoticed until after the meeting ended.

During the vote, Hodge also said Danny Finch, as acting chairman, could vote only to break a tie. Finch, a Jonesboro farmer who said his crops in Craighead County have been damaged, would have voted for the ban.

Terry Fuller, a Plant Board member from Poplar Grove in Phillips County who made the motion for the ban, later pressed the matter.

“As soon as [the meeting] was over and I got a chance to settle down and clear my head, I thought, ‘eight votes out of 14 is a majority,’” Fuller, who represents seed growers, told the Democrat-Gazette Wednesday. Fuller said he walked down the hallway to talk to Wes Ward, the state’s agriculture secretary, and

Terry Walker, director of the Plant Board.

“I told them that Mr. Campbell wasn’t there or on the phone and that eight votes were enough for the ban to pass,” Fuller said. “Their response eventually was that I was right. They verified that we never had Robert Campbell on the phone, that he never checked into the meeting. I believe it was just an honest mistake.”

Ten members with voting rights attended the meeting; five others participated by telephone. (Two other members, as representatives of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, don’t have voting privileges.)

A little more than an hour after the meeting ended late Tuesday afternoon, the agriculture department sent out a statement by email: “Due to a procedural error, the vote to consider a ban on in-crop use of dicamba by the Arkansas State Plant Board will be revoted on at a later time.”

That meeting is at 10 a.m. today.

Options include expunging the two votes taken Tuesday and taking a new vote on the proposed ban, expunging only the second vote and allowing the 8-6 vote on the ban to stand, or taking no action, according to the agriculture department. Expunging a vote requires a two-thirds

majority.

Through midafternoon Thursday, the board had received nearly 250 complaints of suspected dicamba damage across 19 counties, up from 25 complaints just two weeks ago. Mississippi County led with 76 complaints, followed by Craighead County with 28. Poinsett and Crittenden counties have 23 each, according to Plant Board records.

After taking more than an hour of testimony from farmers and others during the 3½-hour meeting on Tuesday, the board won’t take public comment today. “The primary purpose of the meeting is to clarify the board’s intentions due to the procedural error” of Tuesday, the department said Thursday.

Only one dicamba herbicide — BASF’s Engenia — is legal this year in Arkansas for in-crop use, but officials believe older, more volatile formulations are being sprayed illegally.

The Engenia brand is marketed for soybeans and cotton genetically modified by Monsanto to be tolerant of dicamba, a broadleaf herbicide being used to fight pigweed that has grown resistant to other weed-killers. However, other varieties of soybeans, cotton, vegetables, fruits, peanuts, shrubs and trees aren’t dicamba tolerant.

Monsanto’s dicamba herbicide won’t be allowed in Arkansas until studies of potential off-target movement

are completed.

The number of complaints this year exceeds the total of about two dozen filed last year. Of the state’s 3 million acres of soybeans this growing season, about 2 million are of the Xtend dibama-tolerant variety, far higher than last year, according to estimates.

Plant Board inspectors are investigating those complaints by studying crop damage and demanding a look at pesticide records that farmers and chemical dealers are required to keep.

After the proposed ban was ruled defeated, the board voted 11-3 to tighten restrictions on Engenia’s continued use, including a 1-mile downwind buffer to susceptible vegetation and to require that all sprayers be hooded, or covered.

The current buffer is a quarter of a mile.

Campbell said Thursday he was working in hayfields on Tuesday and tried without success to join the meeting by telephone. “I planned to call in but couldn’t get service,” he said. “I was trying to get the hay in before the rains came.”

Campbell said he is against the ban. “I think farmers need all the tools they can get,” he said. He also said he plans to participate in today’s meeting by telephone.

Fuller said his focus now is not so much on farmers on both sides of the problem but on “regular people, homeowners, people in town” who

are finding damage to shrubs, trees and vegetable gardens. Most damage isn’t being reported, and most people with damage aren’t filing complaints, he said.

“As I said during the meeting Tuesday, the problems today are worse than the ones yesterday, and tomorrow’s problems will be worse than today’s,” Fuller said.