美国国家公共电台 NPR Wave Of Dicamba Complaints Prompts Pesticide Regulators To As（在线收听）

NOEL KING, HOST:

In some of the big farming states, officials have become overwhelmed by complaints about a weedkiller that farmers are using. The demand for enforcement is so high that these officials say they don't have time to think about anything else. Some of them argue the federal government should really just take this product off the market. Here's NPR's Dan Charles.

DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: For the past three summers, the phones have been ringing like crazy in the Office of the Indiana State Chemist. Farmers and homeowners were reporting a kind of chemical hit-and-run. Their soybean fields and tomato plants looked sick with curled-up leaves, and they blamed pesticides from nearby farms. So Andy Roth, one of the field investigators, had to jump in his car and head to the scene.

ANDY ROTH: It's sort of a mad rush at the beginning. You rush out, you do the field work, you take the pictures, you take the samples, you get them back here.

CHARLES: Back to the lab to test those samples of leaves and soil for pesticides. Lab supervisor Ping Wan says her people were overwhelmed, too.

PING WAN: The first issue was we quickly reached our maximum storage capacity.

CHARLES: They had to buy more freezers to store the evidence.

WAN: There is not an inch of wall space left.

CHARLES: And their tests showed the same thing over and over - dicamba. Dicamba's a herbicide. Four years ago, the federal Environmental Protection Agency approved a new use for it. Farmers now can spray special versions of dicamba right over some soybean varieties that are genetically engineered to tolerate it. The weeds die, but these crops are fine.

A lot of farmers love this technology. A majority of all soybeans planted in America this past year were dicamba-tolerant. Others, like Lewis Flohr in Frankfort, Ind., who's growing soybeans that can't tolerate dicamba, they think it's a plague.

LEWIS FLOHR: I had about an 80-acre field that was whacked pretty hard with dicamba.

CHARLES: He says it cut his harvest on those acres by a third. Dicamba has this problem - it does not always stay where it's sprayed. On hot days, it can evaporate and drift across the landscape, damaging other plants. And it's been happening on an enormous scale across the soybean farming belt from Minnesota in the north to Arkansas in the south.

Millions of acres of old-style soybeans have been damaged, also vineyards and orchards. Friendships have ended over this. In one dispute between farmers in Arkansas, one farmer shot and killed the other. Lewis Flohr now sees neighboring farms as a potential threat.

FLOHR: And I just flat out tell people, I've got a lawyer. You know, watch it.

CHARLES: What do your neighbors say to that?

FLOHR: They think I'm an [expletive].

CHARLES: It's up to state governments to investigate reports of pesticide drift and figure out if anybody caused it by breaking the rules. But in Illinois, the number of complaints went from about 120 four years ago to over 700 in 2019. In Indiana, it went from about 60 to 200. And Dave Scott, who's in charge of Indiana's pesticide inspections, says everybody is overwhelmed.

DAVE SCOTT: We're just running ourselves ragged just trying to get out there, collect the evidence.

CHARLES: It's also frustrating. Field investigator Andy Roth often sees dicamba damage across entire fields, and he can't figure out where it came from, who to hold accountable.

ROTH: Some days you go, am I doing any good? Am I making an impact here? Or am I just spinning my wheels?

CHARLES: Meanwhile, because of dicamba, the inspectors don't have time to do everything else they're supposed to do to, like check on pesticide uses at schools or golf courses or businesses. Leo Reed, another Indiana official, is also president-elect of the Association of American Pesticide Control Officials.

LEO REED: I think the most affected states would all agree that it's not acceptable to continue with this number of complaints. It's just not acceptable.

CHARLES: But the EPA re-approved dicamba just a year ago, before the 2019 growing season. It decided the problem could be addressed with a few new restrictions on where dicamba can be sprayed and more training for people who use it. I asked Reed about that.

So what was the experience in 2019? Did it fix the problem?

REED: No. As a matter of fact, the complaint numbers went up.

CHARLES: In some states, the numbers did go down, but not necessarily because there was less damage. According to a survey of farmers in Missouri, 80% of them are not bothering to file formal complaints anymore. They don't think it does any good. Leo Reed from the Office of the Indiana State Chemist says he understands why.

REED: You know, I've used the phrase dicamba fatigue, and it's a very real thing.

CHARLES: Another possible sign of dicamba fatigue - all but one of Missouri's eight pesticide inspectors left their job within the past year and a half. A Missouri official said there was not any single reason for the rapid turnover. But according to minutes of meetings between state pesticide enforcement agencies, heavy workload and burnout was at least one reason.

Last fall, a group of state officials, including Leo Reed, had a conference call about dicamba with officials at the EPA. They had a question.

REED: The question is, are crinkled soybean leaves an unreasonable adverse effect? Because if they are, then this product is federally misbranded. If a product is found to be misbranded, then it can no longer be sold or used.

CHARLES: An EPA spokesperson said damage to plants can be an unreasonable adverse effect, but it depends on the extent of the damage and on the benefits of spraying the pesticide. A lot of farmers don't want to give up those benefits, nor does the company Bayer, formerly Monsanto, which sells dicamba herbicide and dicamba-tolerant soybean and cotton seeds. It's a billion-dollar business. At the end of 2020, the EPA will have to decide once again whether to let farmers keep spraying this chemical.

Dan Charles, NPR News.

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