LAWMAKERS again vote not to move ahead with dicamba restrictions.

Lawmakers voted for the second time this week against moving ahead with a state Plant Board proposal to restrict the use of the herbicide dicamba on farmers’ crops next year, essentially placing the decision on hold.

After receiving nearly 1,000 complaints of damage caused by dicamba to soybeans, vegetables, fruits and gardens, the Plant Board voted in November to ban incrop spraying of the herbicide from April 16 through Oct. 31 next year.

Dicamba has been linked to crop damage in Arkansas and two dozen other states.

On Friday, the Legislative Council approved a subcommittee’s recommendation to kick the issue back to the Plant Board, with the request to consider other possible cutoff dates by region or temperature. The subcommittee voted on that recommendation Tuesday.

The Plant Board has rejected the idea of different dicamba spraying cutoff dates — north and south of Interstate 40, for example — because south Arkansas farmers would have a longer period of spraying than their counterparts in the north. Dicamba’s chief target, herbicide resistant pigweed, is more prevalent in northeast Arkansas.

Republican Bill Sample of Hot Springs, the state senator who made the recommendation Tuesday and then left the meeting without hearing testimony, later told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette he did so because he was sick and wanted to go home.

Earlier public comment hearings held by the Plant Board drew hundred of farmers, and on Tuesday, five signed up to speak on the topic in front of lawmakers.

Monsanto, the company that developed dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybeans, has opposed the Plant Board’s proposed rules, arguing the problems last summer were from applicant error.

Monsanto developed dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybeans as weeds grew resistant to other herbicides. Limiting dicamba use to pre-planting would effectively remove the herbicide as a tool during the growing season for farmers. The company sued the Plant Board over the proposed ban.

“I want farmers to have every tool to fight weeds, but I also want to make sure we’re not hurting one farmer while helping another,” Sample said earlier this week.

Friday’s vote came after little debate.

The Legislative Council is a group of lawmakers who make decisions over rules and regulations when the full Legislature is not in session.

Also this week, a Missouri man was found guilty of second-degree murder in a Mississippi County Court in a feud that began over dicamba.

Prosecutors said Allan Curtis Jones fatally shot one of his neighbors in Arkansas, Mike Wallace, after Wallace confronted him over dicamba drifting into his fields and damaging his crop.

Jones had argued self defense.