#dicamba

Excerpt:

The Environmental Protection Agency is slated to reapprove an herbicide for genetically modified soybean and cotton crops, even while acknowledging continued concerns from some growers about spillover effects, according to two EPA staffers and a draft statement obtained by The Washington Post.

The EPA has approved dicamba twice before, and both times federal courts vacated those approvals, saying there was too much risk for the herbicide to drift and harm neighboring farms and gardens.

In the unreleased statement seen Tuesday by The Post, the EPA characterizes the new use guidelines as “the most protective dicamba registration in agency history” and notes the inclusion of “several measures” to head off “ecological risks.”

“For many growers, this is a vital tool that they will see as necessary to their crop production success,” the statement says, before anticipating that other growers and environmentalists may object based on the history of harm.

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The two EPA staffers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media, said the agency would move to register dicamba next week.

The EPA did not respond to request for comment.

Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, whose organization has sued the EPA three times over dicamba, said there is virtually no way to stop dicamba drift.

“The fact that we’re here again after two failed attempts to fix this broken pesticide shows that Lee Zeldin and his army of industry lobbyists are utterly incapable of protecting the public,” he said, referring to the agency’s administrator.

In the proposed registration, released in July, the agency said it would address volatility concerns by requiring the inclusion of drift reduction agents, barring aerial applications and applications when the outdoor temperature is above 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and insisting on downwind buffers and provisions to address runoff risk.Ask The Post AIDive deeper

https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/66738-buy-it-or-else-inside-monsanto-and-basfs-moves-to-force-herbicide-on-farmers

The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms.

Risks were downplayed even while they planned how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid damage, according to documents unearthed during a recent successful $265m lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer.

The documents, some of which date back more than a decade, also reveal how Monsanto opposed some third-party product testing in order to curtail the generation of data that might have worried regulators.

This article. This article makes me so angry I am literally having trouble seeing straight. I can’t even choose which bits to excerpt, but it’s all just so wretched.

In brief: fuckers realize that so much use of Roundup (which they produce and profit from) has created lots of Roundup-resistant weeds, so farmers need another herbicide - and, of course, another bunch of herbicide-resistant seeds, which, of course, Monsanto/Bayer (who are now one big happy fucker of an evil company, because why not) are also more than happy to sell.

So now they are selling dicamba to kill the Roundup-resistant weeds, and dicamba-resistant soybeans and, I forget, something else, read the article.

ANYWAY. The fuckers KNEW that dicamba drifts! Onto other fields! Where it will kill or damage anything not resistant to it, which is . . . a lot.

So they know they can profit by selling dicamba-resistant soy-and-stuff to farmers who don’t need or want dicamba, but DO need to avoid their crop being fucked because some nearby farm IS spraying that shit all over! Oh, what a joyous day to be a purveyor of both an herbicide AND a crop resistant to it!

...In one BASF 2016 strategy update, the company noted “defensive planting” as a “potential market opportunity”. Monsanto also saw “new users” in farmers who suffered drift damage.

In one November 2016 email exchange, a Monsanto distributor noted that “all the dicamba drift damage complaints” were spiking demand for Monsanto’s dicamba-tolerant seed...

But not all plants have been genetically engineered by these fuckers to be resistant to their newest money-maker, so people with, like, orchards, or who want to grow organic crops, are just fucked. Bonus fuckery with the EPA:

Because of farmer concerns that dicamba drift would contaminate fruits and vegetable plots, the internal documents show that Monsanto and BASF devised a plan to ask the EPA to allow certain amounts of dicamba residues to be considered legal in crops such as tomatoes, potatoes, grapes and other foods expected to be accidentally exposed to dicamba spray.

Go Arkansas! Fight the power!

Arkansas Defies Monsanto, Moves To Ban Rogue Weedkiller

Arkansas is on the verge of banning the use, during the growing season, of a Monsanto weedkiller that has been blamed for damaging millions of acres of crops in neighboring farms this year.

The weedkiller is called dicamba. It can be sprayed on soybeans and cotton that have been genetically modified to tolerate it. But not all farmers plant those new seeds. And across the Midwest, farmers that don't use the herbicide are blaming their dicamba-spraying neighbors for widespread damage to their crops — and increasingly, to wild vegetation.

The issue has driven a wedge through farming communities in the Midwest, straining friendships and turning neighbors into adversaries.

Monsanto turned to dicamba because many weeds have evolved resistance to the company's earlier weed-killing weapon of choice, glyphosate, also known as Roundup. Increasingly, Roundup no longer gets rid of farmers' most troublesome weeds.

Dicamba is an old herbicide, but it's now being used much more widely, in combination with a new generation of genetically modified, dicamba-tolerant crops. It's also being widely used, for the first time, in the heat of summer, which makes the herbicide more prone to "volatilizing" — turning into a vapor and drifting in unpredictable directions

Monsanto Now Offering (Legally Required) Free Training for Dicamba

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

A new report released Monday by a federal oversight agency revealed that before former President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency reapproved use of dicamba in 2018, high-ranking officials in the administration intentionally excluded scientific evidence of certain hazards related to the herbicide, including the risk of widespread drift damage.

The Office of the Inspector General found that the 2018 decision by the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs to extend registrations for three dicamba products "varied from typical operating procedures."

Specifically, according to the IG report, "the EPA did not conduct the required internal peer reviews of scientific documents," which paved the way for "senior-level changes to or omissions" of research detailing the drift risks of the weed-killer.

While "division-level management review" of pesticide safety documents is typical, staff scientists at the EPA told the IG that senior leaders were "more involved in the 2018 dicamba decision than in other pesticide registration decisions." In addition, "staff felt constrained or muted in sharing their concerns," the government watchdog's report noted.