pesticides

Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company (HC&S) is facing a $30 million revenue loss from 2015 with worse projections to come, says The Guardian.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service is on a nationwide mission to train farmers to protect the microorganisms in soil—and their relationship to crops— instead of destroying them with fertilizer and chemical sprays, says an Orion Magazine story produced with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

The world's largest manufacturer of lawn and garden care products, Scotts Miracle-Gro, said it will "immediately begin to transition away from the use of neonicotinoid-based pesticides for outdoor use" sold under the Ortho brand name.

If there’s one fruit to be wary of its conventional strawberries, says the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which put the fruit at the top of its annual "Dirty Dozen" ranking.

Nearly all of the 1,782 animals and plants listed under the Endangered Species Act are at risk from the two most commonly used pesticides, according to a new EPA report.

A massive farm in Central Valley, California, is teaming with Israeli water experts running the first ever experiment with drip irrigation for rice production in the U.S.

Hawaii’s legislature should “undertake a major update of [state] pesticide laws and regulation,” says a draft report commissioned by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture, and by Kauai county.

The USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, it might be said, is harshing the vibe of some growers of industrial hemp. The agency nixed its early signals that some farms would be certified as producing an organic crop, says Harvest Public Media.

Regulators set exposure limits for pesticides based on comprehensive studies of the individual product. Scientists from UCLA say in a new report that this approach should be reconsidered because growers often apply pesticides as a mixture.

The government is moving ahead to cancel the registrations for flubendiamide, a pesticide sold under the trade name Belt, with Bayer CropScience and Nichino America vowing to fight the decision, says Agri-Pulse.

"Fields of toxic pesticides surround the schools of Ventura County," by Liza Gross, won third place in the investigative category for smaller circulation news organizations in the Association of Health Care Journalists' annual Awards of Excellence contest.

Ten employees at Syngenta Kauai were taken to the hospital when they walked onto a corn field 20 hours after the application of chlorpyrifos, reports The Civil Beat. Typically, workers are supposed to wait 24 hours before going back into the fields after a chlorpyrifos spray. Three of the workers stayed overnight at the hospital, but all have since been released and cleared for work.

In the wake of an appellate court decision, the EPA barred the sale or distribution in the U.S. of sulfoxaflor, a pesticide used on produce but toxic to honeybees.

"It's inevitable that glyphosate is all wound up in GMOs," writes Tamar Haspel in the Washington Post. Many of the strains of GMO crops on the market were designed to tolerate the herbicide, so the crops survive when the chemical is sprayed in fields to kill weeds.

Although marijuana is legal, either medicinally or recreationally, in half the states, growers "don't have a clear understanding of which pesticides and fungicides are safe to use - for workers or consumers," says Rocky Mountain PBS I-News in a piece produced in partnership with FERN.