Arkansas Democrat-Gazette – 650,000 Acres of Soybeans Damaged by Dicamba this Summer, State Estimates
By Stephen Seed
July 19, 2021
An estimated 650,000 acres of soybeans have been damaged by dicamba in Arkansas this summer and dicamba complaints filed with the state have increased at a clip not seen since 2017.
The estimate by the University of Arkansas System’s Division of Agriculture is based on the collective experiences of extension agents, weed scientists and crop consultants who have been inspecting soybean fields across the state’s eastern third the past few weeks. About 400,000 of the affected acres are in Arkansas, Prairie, Poinsett, Cross and St. Francis counties, the division said.
Of the state’s estimated 3 million acres of soybeans, about 1 million are of varieties that aren’t tolerant of the herbicide. The other 2 million acres are soybeans genetically modified by Monsanto to be tolerant of dicamba and released commercially in 2016 as part of its Xtend crop system. The 650,000 damaged acres equate to 1,106 square miles, more than Union County, the state’s largest county at 1,039 square miles.
Arkansas farmers this year had a June 30 cutoff on spraying federally licensed dicamba formulations across the top of their dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton. By calendar days, it was their longest legal spray season yet for the herbicide, although heavy and persistent rainfall in late May and early June disrupted spray schedules.
Sen. Ron Caldwell, R-Wynne, chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture Forestry and Economic Development, on Wednesday organized a dicamba-damage tour consisting of a half dozen stops at farms along a 100-mile loop from Stutttgart south to DeWitt, east to Holly Grove and Marianna and north to Forrest City and Wynne.
Some 50 farmers and others were at the stops in Stuttgart and Wynne; there were fewer participants in the caravan tour as it progressed east.
“At every stop we saw damage at varying levels,” said Caldwell, whose Senate committee will meet jointly with its House counterpart today in Hot Springs, with dicamba damage on the committees’ agenda.
“Some had just curled leaves that will probably grow out of the damage,” Caldwell said. “Some plants will have reduced yields. Some won’t live. We relied on weed scientists and agronomists, not the farmers, who could point out that this was damage from dicamba, not some other source, and explain to the layperson what plants could have reduced yields and what plants wouldn’t live. We wanted qualified people there to answer questions, folks who knew the science. I wanted scientific answers, not emotional ones.” The state Plant Board, a division of the Department of Agriculture, in December initially retained a May 25 cutoff set for the 2019 and 2020 crop seasons but, with a change in membership, voted three months later for June 30 cutoff. The progress of a lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court challenging how the board complied with state law in making that reversal has been halted by the Arkansas Supreme Court.
In another ruling this spring unrelated to the board’s reversal of the cutoff, the Supreme Court ordered removal of nine of the Plant Board’s 16 members with voting privileges, saying the General Assembly had unconstitutionally allowed trade groups to select the members.
The board hasn’t met since that ruling because of its inability to legally muster a quorum. A state law revamping the board’s composition takes effect July 28, but the board’s return to full membership might not happen until late summer or early fall. The new law permits the trade groups to nominate Plant Board members, with the governor then making selections subject to confirmation by the Senate.
COMPLAINTS NEAR 300
As of noon Friday, 292 complaints of possible dicamba damage had been filed with the Plant Board, with all but about 30 filed since July 1. Another 126 complaints filed since January don’t specify a particular pesticide or herbicide.
Farmers and others filed 1,014 dicamba-specific complaints in 2017, when the Plant Board adopted a mid-season emergency ban. Investigations confirmed dicamba as the cause of damage in 900 cases. About 200 dicamba complaints were filed in each of the 2018, 2019 and 2020 crop seasons, with dicamba confirmed in 70% of those cases.
The coronavirus pandemic, which prevented in-person board meetings last year, and the Supreme Court’s ruling on the board’s membership have stymied the board’s work on 2019 and 2020 dicamba violations — with some violations eligible for fines of up to $25,000.
Arkansas Secretary of Agriculture Wes Ward, who attended last week’s farm tour, declined to compare damage in past years with that in 2021, citing facts that vary over the years.
“We don’t know the end result [of complaints],” Ward said by telephone Wednesday at the end of the tour. “I suspect that number will continue to go up but, hopefully, we are nearing the end of that. We hope people will follow the rules and not apply [dicamba].” A surge of complaints is coming from counties that didn’t have many dicamba problems in the previous four years of the state’s saga with the herbicide.
Arkansas County had four complaints from 2017-20 but 60 as of Friday, the most in the state. Complaints from Woodruff County numbered 26 over four crop seasons, but 24 have been registered so far this year. Fourteen complaints have been filed from Jackson County this year, compared with five from 2017-20.
Meanwhile, the number of complaints has been sharply reduced this year from counties that had major problems with dicamba in past years.
Mississippi County had 261 complaints in 2017 and about 150 from 2018-20 but just two so far this year. Complaints from Crittenden County have dropped from 271 from 2017-20 to five this year; complaints in Craighead County have dropped from the four-year total of 141 to 14.
That change, according to weed scientists and others, is partly because farmers in counties such as Mississippi, Crittenden and Craighead are almost exclusively planting dicamba-tolerant crops and spraying dicamba, reducing by simple math the planting of crops susceptible to the herbicide.
The widespread use of dicamba, critics say, is loading the atmosphere, posing a bigger threat each year to other crops and vegetation not tolerant of the herbicide. Counties west of Crowley’s Ridge, usually a natural barrier to dicamba’s spread from Delta counties, are seeing more complaints this year.
Research plots at five UA research stations in Mississippi, Lee, Arkansas, St. Francis and Desha counties have sustained damage this summer. Depending on the aim of the research project, some of those plots have been rendered useless. While a weed study might still be salvageable, for example, a yield study wouldn’t be because dicamba exposure would ruin any controls or baselines.
Most damage has been attributed to dicamba’s volatility — or tendency to lift off plants as a vapor hours or days after application and move miles away to susceptible crops and vegetation. Weed scientists say it’s almost impossible to determine the source in those cases. The source of physical drift, which occurs as the herbicide is applied, is more easily traced, as it leaves a distinct pattern through affected fields.
It generally takes a couple of weeks for dicamba damage to appear on soybeans and then, varying times for a farmer to spot that damage, resulting in a timeline that means officials expect complaints to continue into late July or early August.
The UA estimate on acres damaged involve only soybeans, not cotton or other commercial crops, or possible damage to backyard gardens, trees and ornamental shrubs on private property or vegetation on public lands such as right-of-ways, city and state parks and wildlife management areas.
Monsanto genetically modified soybeans and cotton to be tolerant of dicamba as “super weeds,” including pig-weed in Arkansas, developed resistance to glyphosate and other herbicides. Monsanto in 2017 released new dicamba formulations that were supposed to be less susceptible to off-target movement.
While not specifically addressing alleged dicamba problems in Arkansas, a Bayer spokesman said Friday the company stands by its Xtend crop system. “Based on our conversations with growers and our observations so far this season, we believe our customers are having a very successful season with XtendiMax herbicide,” the spokesman said, adding that the company believed new rules by the Environmental Protection Agency improved the effectiveness of the crop system.
Officials at Corteva Agriscience, developers of Enlist varieties of soybeans that have sustained damage this season, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Dicamba manufacturers said in 2017 there would be fewer problems as farmers received more training and got more experience with the herbicide.
‘LANDSCAPE DAMAGE’
“I’ve been working in several counties that had some problems in years past but now have landscape damage,” Tommy Butts, a UA weed scientist, said, referring to widespread damage across multiple fields in a localized area and stretching from one end of a field to the other.
While Butts has spent time in fields across the Delta, most of the past couple of weeks has been spent in Arkansas County.
“They’ve had soybean injury across that entire county, and it’s fairly severe injury,” Butts said. “I’ve walked fields from around Stuttgart, to south of DeWitt and over to St. Charles and Crocketts Bluff. I’ve seen injury anywhere and everywhere in Arkansas County.” Soybean production in Arkansas County generally is opposite the state average, with about 70% non-Xtend, or crops not tolerant of dicamba, and 30% Xtend, Butts said.
Yield loss is difficult to project and really won’t be known until harvest this fall, Butts said, citing several factors, including growth stage of the soybeans when exposed to dicamba and the number of times exposed.
While yield losses have often been downplayed by dicamba-use advocates, Bayer last year agreed to settle class-action “legacy” lawsuits filed against Monsanto before Bayer bought the latter company in 2018 for $63 billion. Without admitting wrongdoing, Bayer set aside $300 million to pay farmers for soybean losses from 2015-20 through an on-going claims process.
Farmers and custom applicators who spray dicamba now are required by the EPA to use an approved “volatility reducing agent” in their dicamba tank mixes and keep records of the agents’ use. The agents are supposed to reduce dicamba’s volatility by stabilizing pH levels in the tank mix; the lower the pH the more volatile dicamba becomes.
The EPA said last fall it was 90% certain the new agents — produced by makers of lower-volatility dicamba formulations — would reduce damage.
“Apparently the so-called volatility reduction agents are working about as well as the low-volatility dicamba formulations, which is to say they aren’t working well at all,” said Ford Baldwin, a crop and weed consultant and retired UA weed scientist who warned the Plant Board in 2015 of problems that would be caused by the Xtend seedand-dicamba crop system.
“We’ve seen this train wreck before over the last six years,” Baldwin said. “The EPA, the Plant Board and Department of Agriculture are on the wrong side of the science.” Dicamba manufacturers refused to allow independent testing of the volatility-reducing agents just as they prohibited independent testing years ago of the volatility of the low-volatility dicamba formulations, Baldwin said.
Now that the volatility reduction agents are commercially available, weed scientists in Arkansas and other states are testing the agents for their effectiveness.
Baldwin said the agents reduce dicamba’s volatility in a tank mix but, considering widespread crop damage this season, they apparently don’t reduce its volatility after application, when some dicamba converts to an acid on plants and soil.
“The acid form is volatile, and that is a problem that hasn’t been solved and might not ever be solved,” Baldwin said. “It’s a product that never should have been registered for the use we’re using it for. By the end of the season there won’t be a non-Xtend bean that won’t be hit and there won’t be any help for those who want to grow commercial vegetables or raise a garden or who don’t want their trees and shrubs damaged.”
A surge of complaints is coming from counties that didn’t have many dicamba problems in the previous four years of the state’s saga with the herbicide.
AgUpdate – Dicamba Still an Issue
By Benjamin Herrold
April 27, 2020
Farmers and weed control experts continue to monitor the dicamba herbicide situation heading into another growing season.
Kevin Bradley, University of Missouri weed scientist, says last year brought continuing drift damage from dicamba.
"There was plenty of injury apparent last year, and plenty of injury still occurred," he says. "The difference is more of it isn't being reported anymore. Farmers have gotten used to the situation. It appears to be the new normal."
Jason Norsworthy, University of Arkansas weed scientist, says the herbicide has proven to be volatile and susceptible to drifting since it was first approved for widespread use in 2017. Most farmers in the parts of Arkansas with widespread dicamba use have switched their crops to the trait, partly for protection.
"In northeast Arkansas, there's been widespread adoption, and that's helped with the soybean areas impacted," Norsworthy says.
Likewise, Bradley says many farmers have opted to plant dicamba-tolerant soybeans in areas like southeast Missouri's Bootheel region where dicamba use is widespread, in part to protect their crops from drifting herbicide.
Farmers continue to have more options as new herbicides get approved, Bradley says. This year is the first year the Enlist trait will be approved in time for widespread use in soybeans. The 2, 4-D herbicide technology had previously been available in cotton.
"We're getting ready to have another trait option this year, the Enlist trait," Bradley says.
Norsworthy expects to see significant Enlist acreage this year.
"We're going to see a pretty sizable increase in Enlist acres, and that's going to allow for an increase in 2,4-D use," he says. "Enlist One and Enlist Duo, both of which contain 2,4-D, are not as volatile as dicamba. I know there's a lot of enthusiasm around the Enlist technology headed into this growing season."
Norsworthy says cutoff dates have also helped reduce complaints in Arkansas. Last year, the cutoff date for dicamba applications was May 25.
"Outside of northeast Arkansas, there hasn't been a lot of dicamba used, especially after the cutoff date, because of fear of damaging neighbors' crops," he says.
Researchers continue to look at options for additives to the spray tank to reduce volatility. Norsworthy says the labels for the products can be "incredibly complex," and when the dicamba labels expire in December the Environmental Protection Agency will have to make some decisions about the technology.
"The EPA is looking at what can they do to further decrease the risk of off-target movement of dicamba," Norsworthy says.
Controlling drift damage goes beyond just making a proper application, he says.
"If dicamba moves one day or two days after application, it doesn't matter how good the application was," Norsworthy says.
"It goes beyond just the physical drift. How do you manage the volatility component of the herbicide?"
Bradley says the regulatory and management aspects of dicamba use will continue to play out.
As for how dicamba is being used, Bradley surveyed over 1,000 people, and he says the most common response was growers using it as a post-emergence herbicide.
The second most common response was people using it for both burndown and post- emergence.
"If they're paying for the trait, they're using it for burndown or post-emergence, or both," Bradley says.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette – Dicamba Rules of Usage Focus of Little Rock Meeting
By Stephen Seed
December 8, 2019
Farmers, conservationists, others expected to join talks
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 dicambatolerant 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.
Normally, 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 underrepresentation 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.