The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is looking to make it easier for farmers to use certain insecticides by retooling its protections under the Endangered Species Act.
The EPA recently released its final draft of the final Insecticide Strategy that identifies practical protections for federally endangered and threatened species from the use of insecticides.
Some of EPA’s modifications include:
- Reducing buffer distances across all application methods.
- Providing credit for any reduction in the proportion of a treated field for ground applications.
- Developing a process to qualify conservation programs that will give growers more credit for being part of a conservation program than initially proposed.
- Developing a process to qualify external parties that would assess a grower’s farms and determine the existing mitigation points that could be achieved by practices a grower already has in place.
- Updating key data sources and identification of invertebrate species that may occur on agricultural fields.
- Adding a Pesticide Use Limitation Area (PULA) group for generalist species that reside in wetlands to reduce mitigations applied outside of wetland habitats.
“So, the administration has been developing an ESA work plan, which was mandated by court order for EPA to expedite their compliance with the Endangered Species Act in terms of pesticide registration. So, they have been releasing these strategies to comply with the Endangered Species Act by classes of pesticides,” according to John Walt Boatright, Director of Government Affairs with the American Farm Bureau Federation.
He says that farmers should watch for impacts to pesticides and pesticide application practices.
“It could impact farmers and ranchers as chemistries are being reviewed by EPA. They will pull from this strategy, this document, to potentially apply new mitigation measures to pesticide applications based on their chemistry. The good news is that we won’t see these new requirements immediately.”
Boatright says this is an ongoing process.
“The next step in the process is for those insecticides moving forward to have the strategy applied to them at the normal length of the process. Another next step to be watching is that we also expect a new Fungicide and a rodenticide strategy to be finalized.”
Several ag groups—including the National Corn Growers Association and American Soybean Association—have applauded the recent efforts of the EPA to ease the burden on America’s farmers.
CLICK HERE to read the EPA’s final draft of their Insecticide Strategy.
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