YES, a grassroots movement initiated, by Rose Marie Raccioppi, led to legislative protection... A law representing the Precautionary Principle held by Rockland County, New York, relating to the public lands of Rockland County, has been in place since 2008... a precursor to the pesticide restrictions on parkland, and school grounds. YES, change begins with a commitment, ongoing action, awareness and revelation of effect!!
NOW it is the time, the pressing need for each home owner, each land, owner, each local farm owner, each business owner, to NOT use toxic pesticides on their property grounds. My neighbor is NOT to have the 'right' to poison my property, my body, my children, my wellbeing from the runoff of toxic pesticides such as Roundup by Monsanto. Our environment, our health, are not to be adversely compromised!! We are called upon to revisit the documented harm, and as responsible consumers eliminate the use of poisons that have been shown to have ill effects upon our growing children and our community populace.
(Beyond Pesticides, June 19, 2008) Rockland County, NY legislators passed a bill on June 17, 2008 to eliminate the use of toxic pesticides on all county-owned or leased land. Rose Marie Raccioppi, the community organizer behind the bill, is a member of Beyond Pesticides, the National Pesticide-Free Lawn Coalition, and Orangetown’s Environmental Committee. She brought her concerns about pesticide exposure to the Rockland County Legislature last year, and advocated strongly for the passage of the Rockland County Non-Toxic Landscape Maintenance Act. “This is the beginning of what is hoped to be a continuing campaign,” Ms. Raccioppi said. “We hope it moves from county to towns to school districts and eventually, the consciousness of the individual homeowner.” As the law currently stands in New York, and most other states, municipalities may not pass legislation regulating the use of pesticides on private land and buildings, reserving governance of such matters to the state government. However, towns and counties throughout the U.S. (See Daily News of April 15, May 12, May 13, and June 16, 2008) are passing regulations restricting the use of pesticides on publicly-owned land.
Allow yourself to be fully aware of the effects of GMOs ... you, our children are being adversely effected... I watched this last evening and certainly feel compelled to bring this forward.
Dr. Zach Bush gifts us with a most learned, riveting and enlightening presentation, YES, A MUST see, a must listen!!
NEW YORK (Reuters) - As the U.S. growing season entered its peak this summer, farmers began posting startling pictures on social media: fields of beans, peach orchards and vegetable gardens withering away.
The photographs served as early warnings of a crisis that has damaged millions of acres of farmland. New versions of the herbicide dicamba developed by Monsanto and BASF, according to farmers, have drifted across fields to crops unable to withstand it, a charge authorities are investigating.
As the crisis intensifies, new details provided to Reuters by independent researchers and regulators, and previously unreported testimony by a company employee, demonstrate the unusual way Monsanto introduced its product. The approach, in which Monsanto prevented key independent testing of its product, went unchallenged by the Environmental Protection Agency and nearly every state regulator.
Typically, when a company develops a new agricultural product, it commissions its own tests and shares the results and data with regulators. It also provides product samples to universities for additional scrutiny. Regulators and university researchers then work together to determine the safety of the product.
In this case, Monsanto denied requests by university researchers to study its XtendiMax with VaporGrip for volatility - a measure of its tendency to vaporize and drift across fields.
The researchers interviewed by Reuters - Jason Norsworthy at the University of Arkansas, Kevin Bradley at the University of Missouri and Aaron Hager at the University of Illinois - said Monsanto provided samples of XtendiMax before it was approved by the EPA. However, the samples came with contracts that explicitly forbade volatility testing.
“This is the first time I’m aware of any herbicide ever brought to market for which there were strict guidelines on what you could and could not do,” Norsworthy said.
The researchers declined to provide Reuters a copy of the Monsanto contracts, saying they were not authorized to do so.
Monsanto’s Vice President of Global Strategy, Scott Partridge, said the company prevented the testing because it was unnecessary. He said the company believed the product was less volatile than a previous dicamba formula that researchers found could be used safely.
“To get meaningful data takes a long, long time,” he said. “This product needed to get into the hands of growers.”
‘JEOPARDIZE THE FEDERAL LABEL’
Monsanto employee Boyd Carey, an agronomist, laid out the company’s rationale for blocking the independent research at a hearing of the Arkansas Plant Board’s Pesticide Committee in the summer of 2016.
A meeting summary by the Arkansas Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee described Carey’s testimony as follows: “Boyd Carey is on record on Aug. 8 stating that the University of Arkansas nor any other university was given the opportunity to test VaporGrip in fear that the results may jeopardize the federal label.”
Efforts to reach Carey were not successful. Monsanto declined to comment on his testimony.
To be sure, complaints about damaged crops are still under investigation and there is no evidence that independent testing of XtendiMax’s volatility would have altered the course of the crisis. But it would have given regulators a more complete picture of the formula’s properties as they decided if and how to let farmers use it, agriculture experts said.
In the end, the EPA approved the product without the added testing in September. It said it made its decision after reviewing company-supplied data, including some measuring volatility.
“EPA’s analysis of the data has shown reduced volatility potential with newer formulations,” the EPA said in a July 27 statement.
However, EPA spokeswoman Amy Graham told Reuters the agency is “very concerned about the recent reports of crop damage” and is reviewing restrictions on dicamba labels.
Monsanto Chief Technology Officer Robert Fraley said, “We firmly believe that our product if applied according to the instructions on the label will not move off target and damage anyone.”
(Photo) John Weiss looks over his crop of soybeans, which he had reported to the state board for showing signs of damage due to the drifting of Monsanto’s pesticide Dicamba, at his farm in Dell, Arkansas, U.S. July 25, 2017.
STATES APPROVE WITHOUT MORE TESTING
Companies can limit independent testing because the substances are proprietary. When samples are provided to researchers, lawyers hammer out contracts detailing how testing will be conducted and results will be handled, but rarely do agreements limit what the products can be tested for, according to researchers interviewed by Reuters.
For instance, BASF, which introduced its rival herbicide, Engenia, around the same time, said it allowed several university researchers to evaluate its “off-target impact and application parameters.”
Norsworthy, of the University of Arkansas, confirmed he had been permitted by BASF to study Engenia for volatility and that the results showed less volatility than previous dicamba formulations. BASF says its product is safe when properly applied.
The EPA did not answer questions about whether it noticed a lack of input from university researchers about XtendiMax’s volatility or whether it requested such testing.
It also did not address whether the lack of independent research played into its decision to give the product an abridged two-year registration, less than the 20 years experts say is more common. The agency did the same for BASF’s Engenia.
“The EPA placed time limits on the registration to allow the agency to either let it expire or to easily make the necessary changes in the registration if there are problems,” Graham, the EPA spokeswoman, said.
After the EPA signed off, Monsanto sought approval from individual states, which determine whether agricultural products are suitable for their climates and geographies.
To help them do that, Monsanto shared its XtendiMax testing results with state regulators. But it only supplied that data in finished form, Monsanto’s Carey told the Arkansas Plant Board meeting, meaning it withheld underlying data that could be analyzed independently by the regulators.
Only Arkansas wanted more. Terry Walker, the director of the Arkansas Plant Board, said the state asked Monsanto for extra testing, but the company refused.
“As the system progressed and it got closer to EPA approval, the board kept asking for local data,” Walker said. “That did not happen.”
Monsanto’s Fraley said the company could not honor Arkansas’ request within the EPA’s timeline. “Given the timing of the approval… there simply wasn’t the opportunity to do the additional testing,” he said.
Arkansas blocked Monsanto’s product because of the lack of extra volatility testing by universities, but approved BASF’s because it had not limited such testing and the results were acceptable. Thirty-three other states - every other state where the products were marketed - approved both products.
After Arkansas blocked XtendiMax in December, crop damage began to appear in the state anyway. Investigators trying to determine the cause of the damage are considering a range of possibilities including problems with or improper use of Engenia or illegal use of XtendiMax or earlier formulations. In July, the state banned all products containing dicamba.
Some states including Illinois, Missouri and Tennessee said they do not seek the more data if products pass EPA scrutiny.
“The EPA is the federal agency responsible for approving and registering pesticides for sale and use,” said Missouri Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Sarah Alsager. “The Department does not perform field testing or solicit local input.”
Some states are now forming task forces to determine what should be done about the damage.
The damage across the Midwest - sickly soybeans, trees and other crops - has become emblematic of a deepening crisis in American agriculture. Farmers are locked in an arms race between ever-stronger weeds and ever-stronger weed killers.
The dicamba system, approved for use for the first time this spring, was supposed to break the cycle and guarantee weed control in soybeans and cotton. The herbicide - used in combination with a genetically modified dicamba-resistant soybean - promises better control of unwanted plants such as pigweed, which has become resistant to common weed killers. The problem is that dicamba has drifted from the fields where it was sprayed, damaging millions of acres of unprotected soybeans and other crops in what some are calling a man-made disaster. Critics contend that the herbicide was approved by federal officials without enough data, particularly on the critical question of whether it could drift off target.
As dicamba use has increased, so too have reports that it "volatilizes,â" or re-vaporizes and travels to other fields. That harms nearby trees, as well as nonresistant soybeans, fruits and vegetables, and plants used as habitats by bees and other pollinators.
According to one 2004 assessment, dicamba is 75 to 400 times more dangerous to off-target plants than the common weed killer glyphosate, even at very low doses. It is particularly toxic to soybeans - the very crop it was designed to protect - that haven't been modified for resistance.
Kevin Bradley, a University of Missouri researcher, estimates that more than 3.1 million acres of soybeans have been damaged by dicamba in at least 16 states, including major producers such as Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota. That figure is probably low, according to researchers, and it represents almost 4 percent of all U.S. soybean acres.
"It's really hard to get a handle on how widespread the damage is," said Bob Hartzler, a professor of agronomy at Iowa State. "But I've come to the conclusion that [dicamba] is not manageable."
Critics say that the approval process proceeded without adequate data and under enormous pressure from state agriculture departments, industry groups and farmers' associations. Those groups argued that farmers desperately needed the new herbicide to control glyphosate-resistant weeds. Such weeds have grown stronger and more numerous over the past 20 years - a result of glyphosate overuse.
State weed scientists expressed unanimous concern that dicamba is more volatile than manufacturers have indicated.
Regulators did not have access to much of this data. Although Monsanto and BASF submitted hundreds of studies to the EPA, only a handful of reports considered volatility in a real-world field setting, as opposed to a greenhouse or a lab, according to regulatory filings. Under EPA rules, manufacturers are responsible for funding and conducting the safety tests the agency uses to evaluate products.
And although pesticide-makers often supply new products to university researchers to conduct field tests in varied environments, Monsanto acknowledged it did not allow that testing on its commercialized dicamba because it did not want to delay registration, and scientists said BASF limited it.
Frustrated scientists say that allowed chemical companies to cherry-pick the data available to regulators.
Environmental Working Group's Scott Faber says farmers have become "trapped on a chemical treadmill" driven by the biotech industry. Many farmers say they think they could not continue farming without new herbicide technology.
"We're on a road to nowhere," said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. "The next story is resistance to a third chemical, and then a fourth chemical - you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see where that will end. The real issue here is that people are using ever-more complicated combinations of poisons on crops, with ever-more complex consequences."
