pesticides

After shutting down row-crop use of dicamba for the rest of this growing season, Arkansas has appointed a 21-member task force to look for a long-term solution to the nearly 900 complaints about the herbicide this year. "The task force will attempt to reach consensus on a set of recommendations for the use of dicamba products n Arkansas as quickly as possible in order to provide certainty for the 2018 growing season," said the state Agriculture Department.

Where your yellowfin tuna was caught can dramatically change the level of pollutants in its flesh, say researchers at the University of San Diego’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography, after testing 117 yellowfin tuna from 12 locations in a first-of-its-kind global study.

A group of Democratic Senators, led by Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico, introduced a bill to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos over health concerns, after the EPA refused to take it off shelves earlier this spring. “Udall's bill calls for the EPA to conduct a broad review of the use of the pesticide to determine which groups are most vulnerable to its harmful effects,” says Reuters.

Although the EPA dragged its feet for a decade on whether to ban the insecticide chlorpyrifos, "it has now done what we ordered it to do" and made a decision, said the federal appellate court in San Francisco. For that reason, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals refused to consider a lawsuit by two environmental groups contesting EPA administrator Scott Pruitt's decision to keep the chemical, criticized as a risk to children and farm workers, available for use in agriculture.

Researchers at Washington State University are gathering bee sperm from across Europe to try to save American honeybees from the varroa mite — a key factor in colony collapse disorder, says Ryan Bell in FERN’s latest story with NPR’s The Salt.

Two new farm-based studies have provided some of the most compelling evidence to date that neonicotinoid pesticides are harmful to domestic and wild bees.The first study, paid for in part by $3 million from Syngenta and Bayer and published in the journal Science, “took place at 33 large farmland sites spread across the UK, Germany and Hungary.

Due to a procedural error on Tuesday, the Arkansas state plant board will re-vote on Friday on whether to temporarily ban use of the weedkiller dicamba, suspected of drifting out of cotton and soybean fields to damage neighboring crops, reported DTN. Some 167 complaints alleging misuse of the herbicide, mostly along the eastern edge of Arkansas, were filed with the state board as of midday Wednesday.

An official at the Department of Veterans Affairs, speaking about Agent Orange, "downplayed the risks of the chemical herbicide and questioned the findings of scientists, journalists and even a federal administrative tribunal that conflict with his views," ProPublica reported. Agent Orange was a defoliant sprayed in rural areas during the Vietnam War and has been linked to a range of illnesses suffered by veterans of the war.

The European Commission will propose granting glyphosate — the world’s most common weedkiller and the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup — a 10-year renewal of its license. The commission had held off on making the proposal over controversy that the chemical was carcinogenic.

The EPA has proposed delaying, by a year, the implementation of a pesticide-application rule made tougher under the Obama administration, said the agency in a press release.

President Trump will sign an executive order today for a government-wide review of regulations, policies and laws "that hinder economic growth in agriculture," said White House agriculture adviser Ray Starling. Ag groups typically regard USDA as their advocate in the federal government and generally say their problems come from other agencies, EPA most prominently.

Cornell University says its researchers found that honeybees, used to pollinate orchard and fruit crops, "encounter danger due to lingering and wandering pesticides, according to an analysis of the bee's own food," called beebread and made form pollen. In the study, based on 120 colonies placed near 30 apple orchards in New York State, the beebread in 17 percent of the colonies showed the presence of acutely high levels of pesticide exposure after several days of foraging by the bees while apple trees were in flower.

Pesticide makers sent letters to federal regulators asking them to "set aside" agency research into the risks to endangered species from three organophosphate pesticides — chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion — says The Associated Press. Dow Chemical (whose chief executive "is a close adviser" to President Trump), FMC Corp. and Adama, sent letters to the EPA and the Commerce and Interior Departments to argue the studies should not be used.

In testing an array of foods and beverages for the weedkiller glyponsate, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found excessive residue levels in 3.9 percent of the grain products sampled, says The Western Producer. The agency ran tests on 3,188 food samples, and while it detected traces of glyphosate in nearly 30 percent of them, only 1.3 percent of the samples overall exceeded the government limits.

The $43 billion purchase of Swiss-based Syngenta by state-owned ChemChina has the approval of U.S. and EU regulators, keeping in motion a wave of consolidation in the seed and ag chemical sector. ChemChina agreed to divest a large part of its European pesticide operations to satisfy the competition concerns of regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.

The EU voted to block two kinds of GMO crops, but weren’t able to get the “qualified majority” required to completely ban them. Instead, the vote has been kicked to the European Commission’s executive, President Jean-Claude Juncker, says Reuters.