The state Plant Board expects another big crowd Wednesday when it meets at a Little Rock hotel to hash out rules for the use of dicamba next crop season.
The board has recommended a May 25 cutoff date on spraying a herbicide that, while effective against weeds now resistant to other herbicides, can damage or kill other vegetation, including fruits and vegetables, and ornamental shrubs and trees.
The hearing begins at 9:30 a.m. in the main ballroom of the Embassy Suites hotel in west Little Rock. Two other public hearings on dicamba have been held there, each one attracting 250 to 300 farmers, conservationists and others. The ballroom seats about 500.
This year's cutoff date also was May 25, yet the board received 210 complaints of dicamba damage.
The board received some 470 comments from the public during a 30-day comment period that ended Nov. 30.
Only a dicamba manufacturer -- Bayer -- and a lone farmer wrote to say that farmers needed a longer spraying season, according to a listing of comments on the state Department of Agriculture's website.
One comment came from a dicamba critic and agriculture director of Red Gold, an Indiana tomato processor. Steve Smith, who also is chairman of the Save Our Crops coalition, said the May 25 cutoff was a good compromise.
All other comments, most of them generated in an email campaign waged by Audubon Arkansas, said the board should set an April 15 cutoff date and limit dicamba's use to the "burndown" period, or when fields are prepped before planting.
Weed scientists in Arkansas and other states say all formulations of dicamba, including new versions by Bayer and other companies, have a tendency to move off target hours or days after application with the rise in temperatures and humidity.
Some farmers who plant dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton say dicamba's use during the height of the growing season is their only defense against pigweed.
The Plant Board has wrestled with dicamba since at least 2016, when there were no dicamba formulations approved by the federal Environmental Protection Agency for in-crop use on dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton.
Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, developed the dicamba-tolerant seeds and put them on the market in 2015 (cotton) and 2016 (soybeans), even though its XtendiMax dicamba was still being evaluated by the EPA.
Without an EPA-approved dicamba, some farmers in Arkansas and other states who planted the dicamba-tolerant crop systems also sprayed older, more volatile formulations of the herbicide. Other varieties of soybeans and cotton are susceptible to dicamba.
The Plant Board received 31 complaints in 2016, a crop year that reached its lowest point when an Arkansas farmer was shot and killed that harvest during a dispute over dicamba damage to his crops.
Complaints mounted to more than 1,000 in 2017, prompting a mid-season emergency ban on dicamba's use. The board has received about 200 complaints for each of the 2018 and 2019 crop seasons.
In normal times, the Plant Board meets quarterly, but the hearing Wednesday will be the board's 31st meeting since Sept. 30, 2016, with almost all of those meetings focused on dicamba.
IN-CROP DICAMBA
"I am sympathetic to the farmer's wanting to clean up their fields, however the damage dicamba is doing [throughout] the state is unreasonable," Jerry W. Brown of Walnut Ridge wrote. "I have a small vegetable garden and since this chemical has been used in my area my garden efforts have been useless."
Audubon Arkansas' campaign garnered similar comments from hundreds of others.
The conservation group this summer dispatched staff and volunteers across the Arkansas Delta to scout for dicamba damage on public lands such as parks and wildlife management areas, roadside ditches and cemeteries.
In a report to the Plant Board in September, Audubon Arkansas detailed 243 "observations of apparent dicamba symptomology on a variety of plants across 17 eastern Arkansas counties." Plant species affected were sycamore, oak, maple, redbud, hackberry, mulberry, muscadine, morning glory, peppervine and trumpet vine, the group said, noting all those species are vital to the health of birds, bees and other animals.
Bayer has contended that its dicamba is safe, as long as farmers adhere to the lengthy directions for application, and said complaints in Arkansas and other states have declined as part of a learning curve. Other dicamba formulations approved by the EPA for in-crop use are Engenia by BASF, FeXapan by DowDuPont and Tavium by Syngenta.
Most damage likely goes unreported, Dan Scheiman, Audubon Arkansas' bird conservation director wrote to the Plant Board.
"Whether or not a complaint results in a violation, someone's property has been damaged, often without compensation," the group said. "Yet the number of misuse complaints due to damage to private property you receive is an under-representation of the extent of dicamba's off-target impacts, limited by the number of inspectors proactively investigating and number of citizens willing to file a complaint."
Along with a May 25 cutoff, the board has proposed requiring applicators to equip their spray rigs with a GPS device to map when and where dicamba is applied. It also recommended a mile buffer between fields where dicamba is applied and fields with "susceptible" crops and specialty and organic crops. A mile buffer also is proposed for dicamba-sprayed fields and their distance to research stations.
Similar buffers were in place this year and did little good, according to critics, who point to the number of complaints filed deep into the growing season and who believe the late damage shows that some farmers disregarded the spray ban.
The EPA has approved in-crop dicamba use through 2020. States can tighten, but not loosen, the federal restrictions.
Bayer, in wanting a longer spraying season for farmers who plant the Xtend dicamba-tolerant system, also opposes the buffers and the requirement of a GPS device. A Bayer senior vice president, Scott Partridge, said the GPS requirement "would impose unnecessary financial costs" on Arkansas growers.
TANK CONTAMINATION
Jason Norsworthy, a weed scientist for the University of Arkansas' Agriculture Division, had to shut down his plots at UA's research center in Mississippi County this summer after they were hit by dicamba. He moved his experiments to Prairie Grove.
During an hourlong presentation last week to the Plant Board, Norsworthy said his experiments continued to show dicamba's "volatility," or ability to move off applied plants. He also pushed back against claims this summer by some farmers and at least one board member, Sam Stuckey of Clarkedale, that the damage in Keiser was caused by tank contamination.
Norsworthy said damage was uniform across the field, indicative of a wide swath of off-target movement of dicamba. He also said the research station hasn't used dicamba in a sprayer since June 2018.
A weed scientist at the University of Illinois also has debunked the tank-contamination theory, Norsworthy said.
In a blog report this summer, Aaron Hager noted that some 3,000 applicators are licensed in Illinois.
"It's logical to conclude that each of these 3,000 applicators operates a spray rig, so is industry suggesting that hundreds of agrichemical facilities and thousands of tender trucks and application equipment in Illinois are contaminated?" Hager wrote Aug. 2, when Illinois regulators had received about 200 complaints of dicamba damage.
"[Does] anyone have physical evidence of this, or is it just more speculation? If contamination is the cause of even half the instances of soybean leaf cupping, commercial applicators might question the prudence and legal ramifications of applying a product that seemingly cannot be removed from their chemical formulation, transportation and application equipment."
After Norsworthy's presentation and conclusion of the meeting, Ford Baldwin, a retired UA weed scientist, said, "Either you believe the science or you don't."
The Plant Board has 16 members, including two who don't have voting privileges. Nine votes will be needed Wednesday to approve a new rule.
A public hearing in February that led to this year's dicamba rules lasted nearly nine hours, and finished with a flurry of motions and votes that left board members and those in the audience scribbling notes on the margins of copies of the proposed rules.
This year, the members will sit in a "v" formation of tables, rather than along a straight line of tables, to make discussion easier. A screen and projector also will be set up, allowing staff members to make any real-time adjustments clearer for board members and the audience.
SundayMonday Business on 12/08/2019