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]]>About 35 percent of the world’s food crops are dependent on pollinators, which means that we have them to thank for about one in every three bites of food that we eat. Whether or not you welcome the presence of bees at your picnic or party, there’s no denying our tables would be poorly set without them.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson and Amy Burtaine, co-authors of The Wisdom of the Hive, understand this about bees—and much, much more. Johnson began keeping bees at her home in North Carolina in 2019, prompted by a vivid dream about them at a time when her mother was gravely ill. Still half dreaming, she got online and ordered “everything that one needs to tend bees—the suit, the boxes, the bees, everything,” she says.
Soon afterward, she learned that in many cultures, bees are thought to help people through times of grief or uncertainty. “This is when I began to understand their mystical power,” she writes in the book. (Her mother eventually recovered.) “And when the shipment of bees arrived, I began to realize the very practical magic they embody.”
“What does it mean for us as humans to labor in a way that will support future generations, even if we won’t experience that ourselves? To me, that kind of laboring is a condition that needs to be in place for us to create justice.”
Burtaine started keeping bees a year later at her home off the coast of Washington state. Though she still does not feel like a master beekeeper, she’s had great teachers—millions of them. “I am always learning from the bees,” she says.
The two longtime friends, who both work as equity educators, experienced the joys and heartbreaks of beekeeping in their respective backyards—from the sweet taste of a hive’s first honey harvest to the silence of a colony lost to a bitter cold winter day.
Then, one day, Johnson called Burtaine and invited her to a shamanism workshop about the principles of the sacred feminine and bees. Burtaine recalls, “At the end of it, we turned to each other with so much excitement. It felt like everything that bees do is a metaphor for humans, which could be a lesson to us.”
That excitement sparked a creative collaboration that eventually took form as their new book, in which the authors invite us to reflect on the myriad complex relationships between humans, bees, and the planet we all share. They encourage us to reimagine the relationship between humans and bees as one defined not only by what the bees can provide us tangibly in the form of honey, but also by the life lessons they can offer if we really pay attention. And, as bee populations the world over have plummeted, resulting in resounding chants of “Save the bees!” Johnson and Burtaine ask instead: “What if the bees are here to save us?”
Civil Eats recently spoke with the authors about bees and what they can teach us about the attunement, caretaking, and interconnectedness that are vital to their survival—and, the authors believe, to ours.
What are some of the ways that we all live in relationship with bees, even if we don’t tend beehives?
Burtaine: Michelle and I did not write this book only for beekeepers. We wrote it as a love letter to bees and as a love letter to humanity. We see how bees treat one another and care for the hive as a superorganism in ways that we wish human beings modeled. Our mission with the book is to help people become students of bees, like we are. Even if you’re not a bee-tender, you’re a food eater—and there’s food injustice across the planet because of systems of oppression. We have things out of balance as humans because of our hierarchies, with us at the top, even though we couldn’t survive without pollinators.
There are also incredible statistics—something like two million flowers go into a pound of honey. It’s just one example of how bees work. Even if they won’t be able to benefit from or taste the fruits of their labor, bees are constantly laboring for future generations, and for us.
Johnson: I think we have forgotten who we are to each other and how to be in reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world, which is making us suffer. Most of what we ingest is in some way touched by the honey bees, which should call us into a deeper relationship with them.
It makes me think about the life cycle of most bees, which is about six to eight weeks, with the exception of the queen. Throughout that cycle, they’re moving through different roles within the hive. Their final stage is being a forager, where they go out and gather resources, like pollen and nectar and water, for the hive. Often, they will not benefit from those resources directly, because they’re going to die soon.
So, a question we ask is: What does it mean for us as humans to labor in a way that will support future generations, even if we won’t experience that ourselves? To me, that kind of laboring is a condition that needs to be in place for us to create justice.
What are some of the surprising things you’ve learned about how bees interact with each other? What can they teach us about community?
Johnson: As a superorganism, bees do not think of themselves as individual bees—they think of themselves as an extension of the hive. Everything they do is for the hive. They also work with the ecosystem. They understand seasons and weather systems—they know if it’s going to storm well before we do. They work with the sun and light. They work with the things that are blossoming outside their hive. Bees have to understand all that to survive. What if we understood and were aligned in that way with the larger ecosystem?
Bees are also an indicator species—how well bees are doing is an indication of how well we are doing.
“We’re in a time of great uncertainty, and it’s scary. What if we were to—as the bees do—huddle together in the dark, instead of just figuring out ‘how do I survive?’ or ‘what do I need?’”
Burtaine: Bees attune to one another. Their vibration tells you how they are doing. When they are agitated, their vibration is higher. When they are calm, their vibration is lower. They work well together, whether under stress or not.
We as humans tend to fall apart under stress. We are not resonating with ourselves. We are not resonating with one another or doing what is best to help those right next to us. We are not tuning into the whole. We in the West are from a “save mine, get mine, hoard mine, figure out mine” culture that is antithetical to what the bees do. The bees could never do anything for individual gain.
How do you think bees should inform our response to the present moment, to what’s happening in politics and social systems?
Burtaine: So much of what bees do is in the dark [of their hive], but as human beings, we tend to fear the dark. It’s the land of our nightmares, myths, and legends; it’s full of monsters or the wild beasts that would eat us in the days before electricity.
There’s a beautiful writer, Francis Weller, who does a lot of grief work and talks about the period we’re in being “the long dark.” We’re in a time of great uncertainty, and it’s scary. What if we were to—as the bees do—huddle together in the dark, instead of just figuring out “how do I survive?” or “what do I need?” What if we embraced the unknown? What if we sit more kindly with ourselves and one another in the unknowing to create new visions, new ideas, new possibilities?
I think we’re at a time on the planet where we have to learn by doing. We cannot wait until we’re ready with things figured out. We’re not going to just get it right. We’re going to move messily through it together.
Johnson: One way we can learn to mirror the ways of the bee is to attune to our internal and external landscapes. People right now are dysregulated, distracted, and overwhelmed, so it’s very hard to show up moment after moment.
The bees tend to one another, and they tend to the hive. That laboring and care and attunement feel like skills and tools that people in our ancestral lineages understood, because they were more connected to natural rhythms and engaged in ceremony related to seasonal shifts. They were more closely aligned to agriculture in the sense of “what’s growing now?” not “what do I want to eat right now?”
It’s going to require us to understand that things are urgent, and also that a response to this urgency is us slowing down enough to understand what is happening. The bees model that all the time. They’re aware of everything that is happening within and outside the hive, and they’re communicating about it through their antennae, vibrations, and movements.
How can folks become more attuned to bees and begin to learn for themselves what bees have to teach us?
Johnson: A practical thing people can do is plant a pollinator garden or support a community garden. That practice of gardening with one another generates a sense of hive mind.
Burtaine: Honey tasting is a practice we suggest, as long as folks aren’t allergic. Sit with the incredible complexity that unfolds when you really taste it. There are stories in honey.
Johnson: There are hints of multiple plants and places [in honey]. It can be a beautiful meditative practice to both nourish your body and be really present to the complexity and sweetness of what the bees offer.
What are some things we can all do now to better care for the bees, ourselves, and those around us?
Burtaine: There are very practical things we can do. If you have the means, support local, organic farmers and beekeepers. Don’t use pesticides. Try humming—it’s a powerful nervous-system-settling practice that you can do by yourself. You can also put on a YouTube video to listen to the bees and hum along with them, or try a humming practice or attunement meditation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Trump Cuts Threaten Federal Bee Research appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Public support for pollinators is nearly ubiquitous. Surveys show that 95 percent of Americans want to protect the bees, butterflies, and other creatures that are essential to ecosystem health and boost crop production, adding billions of dollars in value to U.S. agriculture—especially at a time when pollinator populations are declining. However, the Trump administration is pushing cuts that would make bee research and pollinator conservation slower, more expensive, and far less effective, experts warn.
Through proposed layoffs and budget cuts, the administration has taken multiple actions that threaten an obscure division of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS): the Ecosystems Mission Area, or EMA, which houses almost all federal biological research.
Eliminating the division was prescribed by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, despite the amount of research EMA provides. The 1,200 biologists and staff who work there document contamination in private and public wells, study the effects of wildfire and drought, and track wildlife disease outbreaks, including avian influenza.
They perform long-term monitoring of native and invasive species from avocets to zebra mussels—enabling management agencies to, for example, set sustainable waterfowl hunting limits, manage livestock predators, and keep waterways healthy. They also inventory, track, or study every known native bee species in the country, along with other pollinators.
Efforts to dismantle federal biological research show “a fundamental misunderstanding of what ecology is and does,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. “I don’t believe Americans voted for the end of being able to gather native blueberries, or for the end of wildflower meadows.”
“I don’t believe Americans voted for the end of being able to gather native blueberries, or for the end of wildflower meadows.”
The White House claims that getting rid of EMA would eliminate duplicative programs and stop federal work on “social agendas” like climate change, while trimming about $300 million from USGS’ $1.6 billion budget. Though unspoken, historical records show the proposal also fits a much older, far-right vision of upholding private property rights by eroding the awareness and protection of imperiled species.
But biologists and conservationists nationwide say these cuts would actually dismantle irreplaceable, largely uncontroversial programs and drive out experts whose work is key not only to the government’s ability to manage natural resources, but also to a broad swath of work led by states and nonprofits.
In 2015, the Obama administration announced measures to protect bees, as beekeepers like Steve Corniffe (above), pictured at the time in Homestead, Florida, grappled with colony declines. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Cutting Bee Research
Importantly, dismantling EMA would mean the elimination of the USGS Bee Lab—a tiny, two-person office in Maryland that is a linchpin for the study and protection of all U.S. native bees. “Every bee researcher, possibly every pollinator researcher in the U.S. has at some point worked with the USGS Bee Lab,” said Rosemary Malfi, the conservation policy director at the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
With a vast collection of high-resolution photographs, more than 700,000 specimens, and the unrivaled expertise of the lab’s director, biologist Sam Droege, the lab is the only U.S. entity with the resources to identify the nation’s more than 4,000 native bee species. Distinguishing different bees can be exceptionally difficult—but is essential for understanding their health, distribution, and needs.
This makes their work as important for preventing needless endangered-species petitions for bees that are simply hard to find, as it is for protecting the genuinely at-risk ones, Droege told Civil Eats. A federal biologist since 1978, Droege has risked his job to speak in defense of EMA.
“There’s a lot of inappropriately analyzed data out there saying there’s a bee apocalypse, that all bees are declining, but it’s more nuanced than that,” he said. “Wouldn’t you want someone to point that out that has scientific credibility? That’s what we do.”
In recent weeks, Droege has drummed up vocal support for the lab, and hundreds of biologists, volunteers, and partners have written to Congress on their behalf. “But in general, scientists—we’re just doing our job. We’re a little invisible,” he said.
Outside the Bee Lab are many other EMA scientists who could also be fired: Experts like Tabitha Graves, a Montana ecologist whose assessments of the Western bumblebee have become the framework for that species’ recovery in the Pacific Northwest or Wayne Thogmartin, a Wisconsin ecologist whose research on monarch butterflies has been internationally important for understanding their decline.
State agencies, federal resource managers, and nonprofits all rely on EMA’s centralized, consistent, and freely accessible data and guidance, which they say minimizes collective costs and effort.
States aren’t well-equipped to study creatures like bees, which don’t heed their borders, nor to ensure their work harmonizes with that of other states. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages protected species, isn’t funded to track all the other species—that’s EMA’s purview. Universities, though full of biologists exploring novel research questions, don’t usually do long-term monitoring. And there are few experts like Droege for any of these groups to hire if they need help.
So without the federal bee research division, “we cannot understand how pollinators are doing,” said Malfi at the Xerces Society—nor how to protect these creatures, without which North American ecosystems and crops (among them blueberries, tomatoes, and squash) would collapse.
Bees are essential to agriculture, including California’s almond industry (above). Researchers at Ecosystems Mission Area say they need to be monitored by the federal government, because pollinators migrate across state lines and international borders. (Getty Images)
An Office Under Multiple Threats
In recent weeks, EMA and its research has faced at least five existential threats: two from the Supreme Court and several from congressional budget processes. If any one of them succeeds, EMA could disappear before the end of the year. Most imminently, President Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to allow mass layoffs without congressional approval, seeking to fire more than 100,000 federal workers, including reportedly up to 80 percent of EMA staff.
These reduction-in-force (RIF) layoffs have been paused since May by a District Court injunction, which a federal appeals court has so far upheld. Trump’s emergency appeal to the highest court put it on their “shadow docket,” so although justices are now in recess until October, they could rule on it at any time.
Last week, the Supreme Court did rule on a seemingly unrelated case that nonetheless posed a sideways threat to EMA: Federal workers feared that when the court decided to limit nationwide injunctions, it would also undo the RIF injunction that has so far protected their jobs. To their relief, a footnote in the ruling likely blocked its application to this case.
Trump has also asked Congress to drastically cut EMA funding from USGS appropriations, proposing just $29 million for unspecified EMA programs in his 2026 budget request. But appropriations bills require 60 votes to clear the Senate, and tie individual legislators to unpopular cuts. In Trump’s first term, Congress rejected his attempts to gut science agencies, but amid this year’s funding fights, many biologists fear that legislators will not prioritize natural resources.
Trump has also asked Congress to drastically cut EMA funding from USGS appropriations, proposing just $29 million for unspecified EMA programs.
A second threat in Congress may not require any votes at all: In a recent House briefing, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum indicated the administration will send a budget rescission request to Congress later this summer, asking them to claw back a portion of the Interior Department’s 2025 budget, which still has not formally been allocated.
A rescission only needs a simple Senate majority—but if the request comes within 45 days of the fiscal year end (the window legislators have to take up a proposal), Congress could effectively cancel funding without ever needing to vote, since the paused money wouldn’t roll into the new fiscal year. The legally untested move, called a pocket rescission, would free individuals from blame—though it would almost certainly face lawsuits.
One other threat to federal biologists and other workers has so far been neutralized. In June, senators added a provision to Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” that would have given his administration the power to downsize the federal workforce “without obstruction” from Congress or the courts.
If included in this budget reconciliation bill, it would have allowed the administration to implement RIF layoffs without approval from the Supreme Court. But the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that this and numerous other provisions violated Senate rules, so struck them from the bill.
While federal biologists have survived these attempts so far, they underscore the precarity bee research is facing. Many fear the division’s demise is imminent, especially if Congress doesn’t decide its fate through the appropriations process. So while conservation groups and supporters rally behind these scientists, Droege has been gauging other ways to preserve the lab’s collections, which form the foundation of all U.S. bee taxonomy.
The Smithsonian would probably take the lab’s hundreds of thousands of identified specimens, he said, but likely couldn’t provide the hands-on support the lab does. They also wouldn’t take the up to 200,000 specimens that haven’t yet been identified. As a last resort, Droege said, he’d move these to his own home and establish a private lab; at 66, he had no plans to retire, anyway.
“My motivation is not saving my job,” he said. “My motivation is the bees.” With continued study and science-based protection, he added, “it’s not that difficult to keep them around.”
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]]>The post Honey Bees Learn to Fight Deadly Varroa Mites appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In April, clutching the steering wheel of my old truck, I rattled down narrow dirt roads in southern West Virginia with my mother. We were on a mission to secure a nucleus colony, or “nuc,” of locally bred honey bees from the “bee monks” of Holy Cross Monastery.
The monastery rises like a fairytale castle out of the wooded hills, with its crisp white sides and dark green domes. Just beyond it lies a sunny hillside dotted with humming stacks of hives. Though they may seem perfectly ordinary, something special is going on within them.
Were you to peek inside, you might spot a returning worker bee stamp its legs and rhythmically sway from side to side, inviting another bee to groom it. Another worker might take up the offer by roughly cleaning the dancing bee with her mandibles and forelegs, removing pathogens, debris, and parasites like the Varroa destructor mite, which feeds on honey bee brood, or the immature bees still developing in cells, as well as adult worker bees. Since 2000, the monks have been breeding the bees at the monastery to resist this mite, which is among the many dire threats facing U.S. honey bees.
The accidental introduction of Varroa destructor to North America in the 1980s has been a disaster for western honey bees.
Starting in 2006, beekeepers have reported an average annual loss of 30 percent of their colonies with no apparent cause—a phenomenon that has come to be known as colony collapse disorder. The situation has gotten much worse in recent years: A survey released this April by the Honey Bee Health Coalition confirmed the loss of 1.1 million U.S. honey bee colonies between June 2024 and February 2025, with commercial beekeepers sustaining an average loss of 62 percent.
The loss is likely caused by a combination of factors, including pesticide exposure, climate change, habitat and food source loss, bacterial diseases like American foulbrood, and parasites like Varroa mites—which have been found to develop resistance to amitraz, the insecticide most commonly used to treat them.
If you were to look closely at an infected worker bee, you could probably spot these dark brown or reddish mites, flattened oval-shaped insects about the size of a pinhead. As the mites feed, they weaken the bee and make it more susceptible to disease. A high number of mites will weaken the entire colony.
While there are some treatments for Varroa mites, some brave beekeepers—like the monks at Holy Cross—are taking a new approach by abstaining from treatment. By not treating for mites and letting susceptible colonies die off, they hope to breed new, stronger generations of bees that can reduce mite numbers on their own through behaviors like grooming and taking care of each other.
An Invasive Mite Wreaks Havoc
Beekeepers across the United States rely on western or European honey bees (Apis mellifera), of which there are a number of strains, including Italian, Carniolan, Russian, and Buckfast bees. These bees populate the backyard hives of hobbyist beekeepers, honey production apiaries of small farms, and wild colonies in rotten trees.
They’re also essential for the vast pollination operations, made up of thousands of hives, that beekeepers rent to farms across the United States to support crops like grapes, almonds, strawberries, kiwis, and melons. The continued loss of these bees would lead to disruptions in the food supply worldwide.
The mites we now find plaguing western honey bees are native to Asia, where they co-evolved alongside the Asian honey bees (Apis cerana). Thanks to a long period of coevolution, Asian honey bees have developed strategies to keep mite populations in check. For example, Asian nurse bees can detect and seal up infected cells, entombing the mites. Unfortunately, western honey bees evolved in Europe before colonists brought them to North America. Without any mite pressure, they had no reason to evolve defenses.
The accidental introduction of Varroa destructor to North America in the 1980s has been a disaster for western honey bees.
A Varroa destructor, perched on a beekeeper’s fingertip.
While it’s difficult to assess the full impact of the mites, we know that wild populations of honey bees experienced major crashes and even disappeared from certain areas. Today, 90 percent of the colonies sampled by the APHIS National Honey Bee Disease Survey have Varroa mites.
In the years following the introduction of Varroa, scientists, beekeepers, and agriculture experts scrambled to fight the mites. They developed both natural and synthetic treatments, but most commercial beekeepers since the late 1980s have relied on amitraz, which kills lice, ticks, and mites.
Unfortunately, amitraz is a potent neurotoxin for other insects too, and because it can have detrimental effects on egg-laying and bee development, beekeepers must walk a tightrope between treating enough to kill the mites and not harming too many bees in a colony.
Another challenge to amitraz use is insecticide resistance: Each season, the mites that survive exposure pass their genes to the next generation, eventually creating a population of mites not affected by the treatment.
This year, the EPA registered a new pesticide for mite control with two more on the way. Only time will tell if these products offer safer, more long-term alternatives to amitraz.
The Rise of the Mite-Resistant Bee
Since the mid 1990s, researchers and beekeepers have observed mite resistance in several wild and domestic bee populations. More recently, scientists have linked it to a set of behaviors collectively known as Varroa Sensitive Hygiene, or VSH. These behaviors include cleaning and removing larvae in parasitized cells, removing adult mites from the bodies of adult bees with a grooming behavior, and uncapping and recapping infested brood cells, which may disrupt the mites’ life cycle.
While Asian honey bees had hundreds of years to adapt to the mites, scientists have found that it may not take that long for bees to develop natural resistance behaviors. A decade ago, a group of scientists started taking a hard look at samples of wild bees collected around Ithaca, New York from 1977 to 2010, a period which conveniently spans the introduction of Varroa to the U.S.
They found that when Varroa was first introduced, the population of wild bees plummeted, but they didn’t go extinct. In response to this new pressure, the bees adapted. The scientists found that by 2010, these wild honey bees exhibited 232 genetic changes.
While scientists don’t fully understand the consequences of these changes, they were able to determine that about half were related to pupal development, a key period for the mites and the bees, because the mites breed in the brood cells that house the bee larvae as they develop into pupae. Scientists also found genetic changes related to bee dopamine receptors, body shape, and wing size. While these adaptations require further research, they have hypothesized that the changes in dopamine receptors encouraged grooming.
Beekeepers Breed to Fight the Mites
Many beekeepers are now watching their hives closely for these behaviors. The bee monks in West Virginia, for instance, open their hives once a month from May to October to do Varroa mite counts. By observing the bees, they can sometimes catch glimpses of VSH behaviors like grooming in action, but the real data comes from the mite counts.
In Vermont, Troy Hall of Hall Apiaries opens hives in the field during the summer and examines the pupae to measure VSH. He looks at the percentage of reproductive mites—those with daughter mites—and non-reproductive mites in the brood. Because colonies with VSH traits will remove pupae with reproductive mites and ignore non-reproductive mites, the higher the percentage of infected cells with non-reproductive mites, the more VSH traits the colony displays. Hall uses the colonies with high levels of VSH traits to breed new generations of bees for his apiary.
Hall began raising mite-resistant bees about 20 years ago and was skeptical of traditional treatments like amitraz from the start. “Early on,” he said, “I decided it would be best to develop systems of management that would be good for the future.”
The earlier years were tough. When he started with around 100 hives, there wasn’t much advice available for beekeepers looking to take on this journey. “We had no real way to measure resistance,” Hall said. “The only logical way was just to withhold treatment. It was simple: Those who survived were bred. No one was sharing methods or success. At the time, we all had to be our own trailblazers.”
For many smaller beekeepers, that’s still their breeding method. In Pennsylvania, Micheal K. Scott, who goes by The Renaissance Beekeeper, doesn’t monitor for VSH, but he does carefully select his bees. His most successful bee yard started with a few untreated hives that survived when all the others failed. He still adds to this bee yard, but only with colonies that survive into their second season.
Denise Fletcher, a hobbyist beekeeper and retired operating nurse in Kentucky, believes that one of the keys to good beekeeping is being open-minded. After researching VSH, she’s spotted signs of it in her own hives, but these days she says, “I’m pretty hands off.” Fletcher isn’t up for the kind of frequent monitoring that Hall and the Bee Monks perform. Instead, she is experimenting with thyme, oregano, and wintergreen essential oil, which may be effective in killing Varroa mites and reducing disease issues.
Hall is the first to admit that this style of beekeeping is tough. He says it comes with a significant financial investment, plenty of labor, and a steep learning curve. But it’s worth it, he says. His goal is “to prove to people it’s possible to have a small family farm and live peacefully” without too many inputs.
Live and Let Die?
Still, many beekeepers and experts remain skeptical about breeding resistant bees. Some of the traits that help wild hives survive, like an increase in swarming—when part of the colony leaves to start a new hive—aren’t ideal for honey production. Swarming breaks the bee’s brood cycle and interrupts the mite’s breeding cycle, resulting in fewer mites, but it also reduces a hive’s population and honey production. If this is one of the key ways wild bees survive the mites, it’s unlikely to help beekeepers.
Breeding mite-resistant bees may come with other challenges and drawbacks as well. Honey bee queens and drones have large mating ranges, and if a non-resistant population is within flight range, the mixing of genes could delay or prevent success.
Additionally, the “live and let die” approach of allowing weak colonies to collapse could turn those colonies into targets that other, healthy hives might rob for honey, the primary food source for an overwintering colony. This contact could spread mites and pathogens back to an otherwise healthy colony.
Despite the challenges, some scientists, like Varroa and honey bee expert Dr. Melissa Oddie, think this method is worth the cost. Working with Norwegian beekeepers, Oddie studied what happens when you stop treating honey bees for Varroa mites.
“It’s like an arms race,” she said. The bees that survive quickly build up defenses, or behaviors, faster than the Varroa mites can kill the colony. Rather than being a major threat, the mites become a minor annoyance.
When beekeepers stick with it and only breed from the colonies that survive, Oddie found it takes just four years for the bees to adapt. A study released in December 2024 supports this technique, finding that “many Varroa resistance traits have a genetic determinism.” This confirms that VSH can be passed from one generation of honey bees to the next.
Still, the years required to create mite-resistant colonies can be long time for beekeepers working to make ends meet. Hall said his losses were substantial over the first several seasons. He estimates that as Varroa became prevalent, he went from a 20 percent loss each winter to 50 or 60 percent.
While Hall’s early losses may sound scary, they correspond with the current dramatic losses among commercial beekeepers, according to April’s Honey Bee Health Coalition survey.
Thankfully for Hall, his initial sacrifice may have paid off. Despite increased losses nationwide, Hall says he had about a 30 percent loss each winter for the last three years— well below the national average.
Being able to breed his own mite-resistant bees is crucial to his success, he said. He plans to go into each winter with double the colonies he actually needs in case of significant losses.
Adam Davidson, a small Kentucky farmer raising Dexter cattle and honey bees, shared a similar experience. He says that modern practices encourage beekeepers to buy packages of bees and restock each year. “The sustainable approach is to use swarms [from your own hives] and create enough hives this year to make up for your losses next season.”
Davidson says he doesn’t actually see himself as aligned with the buzzword “sustainable” that’s tossed around; he just wants to “provide for himself and his animals without input from Big Ag.”
He started beekeeping with a wild swarm of bees. He says those wild bees showed him that it must be possible to raise bees without mite treatments even when everyone was saying it wouldn’t work. Now he sees breeding his own bees as the only way forward.
‘Keep Open Minds and Work Together’
We know that breeding for mite resistance has been working for some small to medium-sized commercial honey apiaries and hobbyist beekeepers. However, doubling the number of hives they care for may not be feasible for many of the enormous pollination operations that keep thousands or even tens of thousands of hives in support of the almond orchards in California, strawberry farms in Florida, and other pollination-dependent crops.
For larger operations or beekeepers worried about the initial loss of bees, Oddie recommends taking a hybrid approach. She says of treatments like amitraz, “don’t stop cold turkey.” Instead, she advises beekeepers to check mite levels three times per year and treat the colonies that exceed a certain threshold. For these poor-performing colonies, she says, “either remove them far enough from your breeding apiary that they cannot contribute drones, or else castrate them by drone cutting.”
Slowly reducing treatments, she said, can help identify successful colonies and promote mite resistance while still maintaining hives for honey production and pollination.
Whatever method you use, and regardless of whether you’re a commercial beekeeper or a hobbyist, Oddie believes that it’s essential to be flexible—and to share your experience, so that beekeepers like Hall, Davidson, Scott, and Fletcher don’t have to go it alone, like they have in the past. Online beekeeping groups and local breeding programs are great resources. “One thing is for certain,” she says, “if we keep open minds and work together, I think we can achieve anything.”
The Hives May Survive
As I stand next to my truck, a monk in a black habit and bee veil gently places the nuc of mite-resistant bees I ordered into the bed. It’s my second attempt at keeping honey bees, after my first hive from Georgia failed to make it through a single winter. Like many hobbyist beekeepers, I don’t know if Varroa ultimately led to their collapse, but it’s not hard to imagine that the mites played a role.
U.S. honey bees are still in dire straits, and only time will tell if breeding mite-resistant bees will have a meaningful impact on colony collapse. But the buzzing nuc in the truck feels like a warm spark of hope.
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]]>The post Op-ed: Why Most No-Till Agriculture Is Not Actually Regenerative appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>I sat down to write this piece after a five-inch April snowstorm gave our newly planted wheat fields their first drink of the season. Wheat is one of five crops we raise on our farm just outside Belgrade, Montana, that work in rotation to help build our soils, minimize weeds, and produce high yields—all without using expensive and toxic synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides.
We also grow flax, yellow peas, alfalfa, and durum; you might have seen our peas and durum in Annie’s mac & cheese. Our flax is grown for seed and also ends up in bulk bins at grocery stores, our durum is made into pasta, and our alfalfa keeps organic dairy cows producing delicious milk, butter, and cream.
“As the term ‘regenerative’ has gained ground, many have lost sight of the fact that organic is the oven-ready set of standards to define regenerative ag.”
When I started my first-generation farm in 2004, I dove head first into regenerative practices, partly out of interest in the fascinating agronomy, but mostly out of necessity. If I was going to make a career in farming, producing high yields without expensive inputs would be my only way towards profitability.
As regenerative agriculture has gained steam in recent years, I’ve been thinking about its potential and how important it is that we direct the energy behind it towards real solutions. Since there’s no set definition of the term, I’ve seen “regenerative” increasingly being used to describe practices most farmers can agree don’t regenerate much soil.
The idea of “no-till” has become nearly synonymous with “regenerative” agriculture, the farming practice of reducing tillage and plowing. A new report from Friends of the Earth sheds some light on why this is concerning. It shows that, while no-till can be done without harmful chemicals, most no-till systems are so dependent on herbicides to manage weeds—since a key reason farmers till their soil is to get rid of weeds—that a full one-third of the U.S.’s total annual pesticide use can be attributed to no- and minimum-till corn and soy production alone. (The term “pesticide” includes herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides.)
A tractor sprays pesticides on a farm. (Photo credit: sircco, Getty Images)
This impacts a lot of land. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data shows that 107 million acres—about 60 percent of both corn and soy—are under no- or minimum-till management. The report’s analysis of USDA data shows that 93 percent of those acres use herbicides linked to health and environmental risks, like Roundup.
This means the majority of no-till farming in this country is focused on herbicides, not regeneration. These chemicals devastate soil life—the microbes and bugs that farmers need to regenerate soil and to build resilience to droughts and floods. And they threaten our health, with scientists linking them to cancer, birth defects, infertility, and more.
No-till corn also uses a massive amount of synthetic fertilizers that can harm soil life and our health—about 7.6 billion pounds each year.
On top of that, the report shows conventional no-till farming is not scientifically linked to increasing carbon in the soil, despite most investment in no-till as “regenerative” being based on the faulty assumption that it is.
If conventional no-till is not regenerative, then what is? The key question is not “to till or not to till.” A narrow focus on single practices like tillage is misleading. Truly regenerative agriculture works with the farming system as a whole. Research shows that careful tillage in holistic farming systems can achieve better soil outcomes than chemical-intensive no-till systems.
Reducing tillage has its benefits and should be a target in all farming systems. Tillage tools available today are vastly improved over those available to farmers in the 1980s. Reducing tillage also saves time, steel, and fuel, helping improve farmers’ bottom line. Less tillage means less soil erosion and greater soil water-holding capacity. But as a farmer for more than two decades, I can say that in order to truly address soil health, supporting organic farming is a better path than a sole focus on no-till.
“It’s not farmers’ fault that chemical-intensive agriculture predominates in the U.S.—that’s what our public policies and markets support.”
When I purchased my first cows at age 12 as an offshoot of a 4H project, I quickly realized that I needed to find a market that adds value. As I built my operation and found markets, the demand for certified organic crops and beef offered a consistent premium I couldn’t ignore.
Later, as I expanded from 10 acres to over 1,000, I was able to grow my operation not only because of premium markets, but also because I didn’t have to navigate the expense of high fertilizer and herbicide bills—these synthetic inputs are prohibited in organic production. Not only do I have a healthy business, I have a healthier community, because my neighbors, my employees, and I have avoided exposure to many known toxic chemicals.
Some people have the misconception that organic can’t be regenerative because organic farmers use tillage to manage weeds and soil fertility. As the term “regenerative” has gained ground, many have lost sight of the fact that organic is the oven-ready set of standards to define regenerative ag. The organic standard includes pillars of soil health and provides an enforcement mechanism to ensure regenerative practices are actually implemented on the farm.
Decades of research shows that organic farming is one of the most comprehensive and time-tested ways to build healthy soils and protect the natural resources we need to grow food for ourselves and future generations, from helping pollinators thrive to preserving clean water. And unlike “regenerative,” the definition of organic is enforced through a rigorous legal standard.
This is a critical moment for agriculture here in Montana for my farm, and across the country. The fact that so many farmers have adopted no-till practices is indisputable evidence they’re interested in protecting their soil. It’s not farmers’ fault that chemical-intensive agriculture predominates in the U.S.—that’s what our public policies and markets support.
If we’re serious about regeneration and making America healthy, companies and policymakers need to help farmers thrive by investing in reduction of harmful, expensive inputs in conventional farming systems while expanding organic agriculture in our country.
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]]>The post Proposal Could Threaten Endangered Species’ Survival in Farm Country appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The Trump administration is proposing a significant change to one of the country’s most important—and contentious—environmental laws, which could give farmers more leeway to use pesticides without regard to their impact on critical habitats.
In a proposed rule change announced on March 17, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service want to change the way they interpret the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which they collectively administer, by rescinding the definition of “harm.”
“We are undertaking this change to adhere to the single, best meaning of the ESA,” the agencies say.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service want to change the way they interpret the Endangered Species Act (ESA) by rescinding the definition of “harm.”
Under the proposed rule change, habitat would not be protected, which could have huge consequences. It would open more of the United States to drilling, logging, and other industries. And it would represent a significant development for farmers, ranchers, and other food producers, affecting the ways they use land, make decisions about conservation, and treat crops. That’s especially true of pesticide use.
“Redefining ‘harm’ to not include habitat would really have a lot of impact,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Pesticides are habitat-destroying chemicals. They kill plants. They destroy water quality and soil health. If you’ve ever driven through the rural Midwest, it quickly becomes apparent that that the only living things allowed to thrive there are corn and soy and wheat, and that’s brought to you by pesticides. So habitat and pesticides really go hand in hand.”
The move comes just a few years after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally began regulating pesticides’ impacts on endangered species and the habitats that support them—and after 50 years of the agency’s failure to address that responsibility under the ESA.
Narrowing the Scope of Law
The Endangered Species Act prohibits the killing of protected species under the term “take.” Under the current law, that term means to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture or collect or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.”
The agencies say that there is a “well-established, centuries-old understanding” of the word “take”: to kill or capture a wild animal. But the agencies argue that federal regulations have since expanded the reach of the law, and the meaning of “harm,” to include habitat modification. The best reading of the statute would mean adhering to a stricter definition of “take” and “harm,” to exclude what they call “habitat modification.”
Conservation groups say that such an interpretation would impair a key feature of the law, habitat protection, because it is an essential part of the preservation of endangered or threatened species.
Wild salmon migrating upstream in the Columbia River, Oregon. (Photo credit: DaveAlan, Getty Images)
“I think it changes the equation, because it removes concerns about one of the biggest impacts to listed species, which is loss of habitat,” said Mike Leahy, senior director of wildlife, hunting, and fishing policy at the National Wildlife Federation. “So, in the grazing or ranching context, a rancher could allow cattle or sheep to destroy spawning grounds for salmon, to graze all over it and trample through it, and they wouldn’t have to worry about ‘take.’ They’re saying, ‘Well, my cattle are not actually stepping on the head of the fish, so they’re not actually killing any fish.’ And if harm to habitat doesn’t count as take, then they don’t have to worry about that.”
In their proposal, the agencies cite a 2024 decision by the Supreme Court that put less emphasis on agencies’ expertise—a legal doctrine called Chevron deference—and more emphasis on the reading of a statute. The agencies are arguing that the best reading of the Endangered Species Act should not include interpretations of harm to a species through habitat loss.
Impact on Farmers and Ranchers
The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is under the Interior Department, and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is under the Commerce Department, are the agencies in charge of implementing the Endangered Species Act. And while some of their decisions directly impact farmers and ranchers, often through the use of public land, they also influence the way the Environmental Protection Agency manages chemicals.
Like all federal agencies, the EPA has a legal obligation to adhere to the Endangered Species Act. That includes approving or reviewing the use of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, rodenticides, and fungicides. Under a traditional reading of the Endangered Species Act, the EPA should protect against the loss of habitat, cover, or food sources for protected species, in consultation with Fish and Wildlife or National Marine Fisheries.
Essentially, the EPA ends up doing “homework” for those agencies during chemical registrations and reviews, said Hardy Kern, director of government relations at the American Bird Conservancy.
But the new rule raises questions about this process, Kern said. “If ‘harm’ no longer encompasses habitat, is EPA to consider pesticide impacts on habitat anymore? Do they only consider direct impacts to species (ingestion, direct exposure, etc.)?”
Kern also questioned whether, under the new interpretation, EPA would consider matters related to drift and runoff, or attempt to identify habitat impacts from chemicals, and if it does, whether the two agencies would also consider those impacts.
Conservation groups have long claimed that the EPA fails in its ESA obligations, leading to a raft of lawsuits. In 2002, for example, the Center for Biological Diversity sued the EPA, alleging it had not considered impacts to the California red-legged frog, a threatened species, during the registration review of 66 active pesticide ingredients. The EPA has faced similar lawsuits for protected species of salmon and trout, and many others.
Under the Biden administration, the EPA overhauled how it regulated thousands of chemicals, to streamline the process and to come into closer compliance with the ESA. The agency signed a legal agreement in 2023 and has been working with industries, conservation groups, and others to develop a process of “strategies” aimed at aligning its chemical reviews with the ESA and clearly communicating with people who use chemicals.
Conservationists and industrial groups alike are watching the proposed rule change, to understand whether a new reading of the Endangered Species Act would disrupt this process—across the federal government. If the rule goes through, said Donley at the Center for Biological Diversity, “quite a bit more agency actions are just not going to be analyzed at all under the Endangered Species Act.”
If habitat destruction is not an issue under the law, farmers may be less inclined to join conservation programs.
As of now, the EPA is still relying on a traditional interpretation of the law. On April 29, the EPA issued a major update intended to streamline the regulation of insecticides and curb their impacts on endangered species. The agency said it has a responsibility to ensure that pesticide registration doesn’t jeopardize protected species, “or result in the destruction or adverse modification of their designated critical habitats.”
EPA released a similar strategy for herbicides last August. In that strategy, habitat protection is even more central, since weedkillers tend to also kill plants that various species depend on.
Under the interpretation proposed by Fish and Wildlife, critical habitat would not be considered. Farm groups are watching to see whether that new interpretation will impact the EPA’s strategies and process going forward.
“It’s something we’re keeping close tabs on,” said Kyle Kunkler, senior director of government affairs for the American Soybean Association. “We don’t feel that these ESA strategies are where we want them to be yet. But the other thing is, we want to make sure that there isn’t going to be anything that overturns the apple cart as well, that would completely disrupt those processes. If there is some major, disruptive factor, some sort of rule-making, or something that comes along that could jeopardize that path that we’re on, that’s something that we’re going to have to really think long and hard about.”
EPA officials were not available for direct comment by press time.
Beyond the EPA, taking habitat loss out of the Endangered Species Act could have other implications. It could change the way species are protected on private land. An agricultural producer may be less inclined to enroll in government land conservation programs, which sometimes provide legal protections against accidentally killing endangered species.
The monarch butterfly, for example, is currently proposed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, and agencies and others are looking for ways to incentivize farmers to protect milkweed on their properties, since it’s the only food source for monarchs. If habitat destruction is not an issue under the law, farmers may be less inclined to join conservation programs.
“For a pollinator like the monarch, that habitat is just really widespread, that’s part of the problem,” said Lekha Knuffman, a senior agriculture program specialist at the National Wildlife Federation. “So how does this play out in that scenario?”
Broadly speaking, she said, the proposed rule change “weakens or significantly narrows the ability of Fish and Wildlife Service to make ‘take’ determinations or require consultations of EPA, since habitat modification is a pretty significant portion of those determinations.”
Threats Beyond Habitat
The proposed rule change could have broad implications beyond habitat. Currently, both Fish and Wildlife and the National Marine Fisheries Service seek to prevent incidental acts of harm under the law—the striking of endangered birds by wind turbines, for example. But under the proposed change, the agencies say they want to interpret harm to require an “affirmative act” that is “directed immediately and intentionally against a particular animal.”
“Ninety-six percent of birds that live in North America eat bugs at some point in their life.”
That could mean the loss of legal protections for many species interwoven in ecological systems that often include farms, fields, and pastures—birds, especially.
“Ninety-six percent of birds that live in North America eat bugs at some point in their life,” Kern, at the American Bird Conservancy, said. “Most birds rear their chicks on bugs. They need them to fuel up during migration. Even birds like hummingbirds, which we think of as nectar eaters, feed their babies primarily spiders and small flies.”
A rule that changes the definition of harm might change the way federal agencies think about habitat, he said, but it also could change the way they think about the protection of other crucial elements of a species’ survival.
“That can include feeding, sheltering, and breeding,” he said. “So, we’re talking about more than just the places that birds and other species live, we’re talking about the actions that contribute to their survival. And if you talk to anybody, of course that should constitute harm.”
The public comment period for the rule change ends on May 19. Kern believes this is the moment for the public to speak up: “This is a fabulous opportunity for people to weigh in and say, ‘I stand up for the Endangered Species Act; I think that it is an important law, and I understand that habitat is just as important as direct attacks on individuals of a species.’”
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]]>The post Bayer’s Effort to Block Roundup Lawsuits Kicks Into High Gear appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>April 28, 2025 Update: North Dakota’s governor signed the first bill protecting pesticide companies from liability into law last week. In Georgia, the bill is still with the governor.
On March 21, a jury in a Georgia courtroom awarded John Barnes $2.1 billion in damages, affirming his claim that using Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that the company that made the product should have warned him of the risk.
It was one of about 177,000 lawsuits to date filed against Bayer, which acquired Monsanto, the maker of the world’s most widely used weedkiller, in 2018. The company has set aside $16 billion to handle the litigation, and this case looked like another major loss.
On the contrary, it may be the last Roundup litigation case in the state.
The week prior, Georgia’s state lawmakers passed a bill that would protect pesticide manufacturers from the same kind of legal liability in the future. It is now awaiting Republican Governor Brian Kemp’s signature.
If the bill becomes law, it will mark a turning point in Bayer’s long search to find the right strategy to beat back the lawsuits claiming that Roundup causes cancer. Bayer maintains that Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe when used as directed, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repeatedly found it is not likely to cause cancer.
“The fact these chemical companies want immunity from the harm that their pesticides may have on an individual or many individuals, it’s just not fair.”
International health agencies and multiple juries, presented with scientific research and documents that show Monsanto worked to hide evidence of harm, have reached different conclusions, affirming its connection to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
In addition to many other approaches to mitigate the cost of litigation, the agrichemical giant first began writing and lobbying for the passage of “pesticide immunity” laws in a handful of states last year.
The laws eliminate individuals’ ability to bring “failure-to-warn” claims, which most Roundup litigation has been based on to date. Essentially, these laws declare that if the EPA has approved a chemical as safe, companies cannot be held liable for failing to warn users of risks. Opponents point out that the EPA’s approvals do not always keep up with emerging risks. Chlorpyrifos and atrazine, for example, have remained in use with EPA approval despite known risks.
Last year, Bayer lobbied lawmakers in Iowa, Idaho, and Missouri to push immunity bills, but the bills failed to pass. The company then ramped up its campaign heading into 2025. It created the Modern Ag Alliance to promote farmer support for the bills and began a cross-country ad blitz. Since the beginning of this year, lawmakers have introduced similar immunity bills in about a dozen states. Bills were defeated in Montana, Mississippi, and Wyoming and are still pending in Idaho, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Missouri, Florida, Tennessee, and Iowa.
“People who know about the bill are opposed to the bill and really don’t want their rights curtailed. We don’t need to have the Iowa legislature making this decision on behalf of Bayer,” said Jennifer Breon, an organizer at advocacy group Food & Water Watch who has been coordinating opposition to the Iowa bill. “If they feel that their cancer or whatever illness has been caused by using a pesticide, people should have a chance to make that case in court.”
While action continues in the states, Bayer is actively supporting two current pathways to federal law changes that could achieve a similar result: The first is a petition submitted by the attorneys general of 11 Republican-led states asking the EPA to initiate a rulemaking process that would further affirm the EPA’s authority on pesticide labeling. The second, a piece of legislation called the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, could be attached to a future farm bill.
There is also a wild-card factor in the mix: While Republicans have mostly supported Bayer’s efforts in the past, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was one of the lawyers who won the first verdict against Monsanto (now Bayer) based on claims Roundup caused Dewayne “Lee” Johnson’s cancer. And some of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) followers have been speaking out against the bills.
Bayer did not respond to questions from Civil Eats by press time.*
State-Level Messaging and Momentum (or Lack Thereof)
On April 1, Iowans stood in front of their state capitol building in Des Moines holding letters that spelled out, “NO CANCER GAG ACT.” State Representative Megan Srinivas, a Democrat, who has been leading opposition to the bill in the legislature, stepped up to the podium.
“This bill only gives corporate profits a boost,” she said. “It tells Iowans, ‘Your lives don’t matter.’ ”
The bill, SF 394, passed in the Senate, although all Democrats and six Republicans voted against it. House lawmakers had an April 4 deadline to take it up in their chamber or it would be dead for the session, and the press conference at the state capitol was organized in support of that outcome. A coalition of 31 advocacy groups also sent a letter to House lawmakers, urging them to oppose the bill.
At the rally, Srinivas brought up Iowa’s high and rising cancer rates, a rallying cry from last year’s battle. Srinivas linked those rates to widespread use of agricultural chemicals in the state.
Bayer has been running ads, including the one on the left, that emphasize glyphosate’s safety when used as directed. Many of the Modern Ag Alliance’s ads, like the one on the right, emphasize support for farmers and don’t disclose Bayer’s involvement.
In 2024, farmers sprayed glyphosate on an estimated 15.5 million acres of corn and soybeans fields across Iowa. That’s not including its use in fields sown with other crops like wheat and oats, or across lawns, golf courses, and gardens.
“There’s just more exposure in Iowa,” said Dani Replogle, an attorney with Food & Water Watch.
However, health agencies disagree on the carcinogenic effects of glyphosate, and cancer is a complicated disease with many causes. It’s difficult to tease out how much of an impact agricultural chemical use has on cancer rates overall or to distinguish the impacts of one chemical from another when so many are used across the landscape.
Roundup is less toxic compared to many other approved pesticides but is used at a scale that is exponentially greater than other chemicals, so its association with non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma risk has had a much broader impact. In 2019, for example, U.S. farmers used about 275 million pounds of glyphosate. Atrazine was the second most widely used herbicide, at 75 million pounds.
Roundup is also more widely used by individuals outside of agriculture, including landscapers and gardeners. (Bayer is now in the process of taking glyphosate out of home use Roundup products as another prong in the plan to end lawsuits.) However, advocates say it’s important to note that the pesticide immunity bills won’t just apply to Roundup, they’ll apply to any pesticide.
In support of the pesticide immunity bill, Bayer sent four lobbyists to the Iowa state house and forged alliances with powerful agricultural groups. The Agribusiness Association of Iowa, Iowa Soybean Association, and Iowa Corn Growers Association are all partners in the Modern Ag Alliance and registered lobbyists to support the bill.
In an effort to pass state bills, the company has focused on a public messaging campaign that included ads on television, news sites, and social media. In the first three months of the year, the Modern Ag Alliance spent about $171,000 on Meta ads alone, $21,800 of that targeted to Iowa.
Some of the ads go directly to a page on the Modern Ag Alliance website where one can click on a state and send a pre-written letter to lawmakers supporting a specific bill. In Iowa, the website reports that more than 600 individuals have done so. Meta only requires companies to report spending on political ads, so the $171,000 does not include spending on a deluge of Bayer ads on glyphosate that have been flooding this reporter’s Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn feeds, for example, ever since reporting began for this story.
The political ads cover a range of messages: Some draw unsubstantiated connections between glyphosate litigation and food prices, set up Roundup lawsuits as a battle between trial lawyers and farmers, and claim the research that links Roundup to cancer is from a “discredited foreign study.” But many of Bayer’s larger set of ads simply hammer away at a simple message: Glyphosate is safe, farmers need it, and if these bills don’t pass, it might not be available anymore.
The agrichemical giant first began writing and lobbying for the passage of “pesticide immunity” laws in a handful of states last year.
“They’re promoting this idea that farmers need access to glyphosate to grow corn and soybeans in Iowa, and that’s, of course, not what the bill’s about,” Food & Water Watch’s Breon said. “Glyphosate is not going anywhere. This is just about their bottom line and their profits that they’re protecting.”
Civil Eats sent questions to Bayer asking specifically about whether the company would stop making glyphosate but the company’s representative did not send answers by press time.
Farmers, Breon noted, are among those most often exposed to agricultural chemicals, who might want to retain their right to sue in case at some point they are diagnosed with an illness and find that chemical companies knew about undisclosed risks.
While the Iowa Farm Bureau lobbied for the bill, the Iowa Farmers Union lobbied against it, declaring in a statement that farmers should be able to seek relief if they’re harmed by a chemical and that “Iowa law should protect our farmers and our communities instead of pesticide companies.”
In Idaho, Jonathan Oppenheimer, the government relations director for the Idaho Conservation League, which led opposition to Idaho’s pesticide immunity bill, said the one message he saw building support for the bills was the idea that Bayer would stop making Roundup if states did not grant them immunity and litigation continued. In his state, the Modern Ag Alliance spent more than $20,000 on targeted Meta ads and close to 700 people filled out its legislative action form. The bill died in the legislature without getting a hearing.
And in February, the Idaho Conservation League released the results of a survey commissioned by advocacy groups to gauge support of pesticide bills among residents in Idaho, Iowa, and Missouri, where pesticide immunity bills were introduced in 2024. The pollsters found 90 percent of Idahoans surveyed opposed the bills. “It was overwhelming to the point that the polling firm said they had never seen numbers this high,” Oppenheimer said.
Given the fact that very few of the state bills have passed so far, he said, the sentiment may extend beyond those states. “It surprises me that Bayer pushed so hard and spent so much money this year with relatively—except for Georgia—no success,” he said. “They’ve succeeded in one state and one state alone.”
In Iowa, on April 3, Republican House Speaker Pat Grassley announced that the bill did not have enough support to pass.
Pushing for Protection at the Federal Level
A full-page Bayer ad placed in The New York Times on March 30, 2025. The ad reads in part, “Relentless litigation threatens the future of American Agriculture,” and includes the logos of 99 members of the Modern Ag Alliance. (Click image for larger version)
While Bayer’s state-level efforts appear to be stalled in most places, the company could still succeed in Washington, D.C. In January, Bayer hired Ballard Partners, the lobbying firm with the closest ties to the Trump administration. At the same time, their ad campaigns began targeting spaces where federal lawmakers and other Beltway insiders with influence on agricultural policy gather and get their news.
For example, in late March, Bayer’s Modern Ag Alliance ran full-page ads in The Washington Post and The New York Times with the headline “Relentless Litigation Threatens Future of American Agriculture.” The ads warned farmers can’t achieve high yields and keep costs low without glyphosate. “This is a real crisis but we have the power to fix it,” it read. “We urge elected officials to stand with farmers over the litigation industry and anti-ag activists.”
In February, the company sponsored Politico’s Morning Ag newsletter. One ad read, “Farming brings $1.5 trillion to America. Bayer is proud to partner with the country’s farmers to help make that possible.” The ad linked to the company’s “glyphosate guide” with information attributing lower food prices, environmental gains, and economic growth to glyphosate use.
And on March 13, the company sponsored a Politico Live event focused on agriculture policy. Bayer’s CEO, Bill Anderson, appeared on stage right after interviews with senators Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska) Tina Smith (D-Minnesota), and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee.
At the event, Anderson started by framing Bayer as a company that helps farmers meet pressing challenges. Early in his remarks, he said one of the biggest challenges growers face today is “regulatory ambiguity” around glyphosate. “If a manufacturer can do 50 years of safety studies and be endorsed as safe by every regulatory agency on Earth but still end up with billions of dollars of litigation, that’s really hard, frankly, on the future of innovation,” he said. “So, that’s something that we think is pretty important, and I’ve talked to many farmers. There are a lot of farm groups in Washington, obviously, and they see it the same way. This is essential.”
In support of the pesticide immunity bill, Bayer sent four lobbyists to the Iowa state house and forged alliances with powerful agricultural groups.
When the moderator asked about the upcoming farm bill, Anderson spoke about the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act. “One thing that is absolutely essential is we need clarity in pesticide labeling,” he said, explaining that what he sees as a current lack of clarity has powered “frivolous” lawsuits. “So, we have an opportunity in the next farm bill to provide clarity around that. That’s clarity for farmers. That’s clarity for the American public. We think that’s essential.”
The Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act would codify the fact that the EPA is the single authority on pesticide labels and warnings, making failure-to-warn claims harder to bring in court. It would also ban states from adding their own labels to pesticides. California, for example, previously added a cancer warning to glyphosate products based on the findings of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which has linked glyphosate exposure to cancer.
Representatives Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and Jim Costa (D-California) introduced the uniform labeling bill in 2023; it has not yet been re-introduced in this Congress. Generally, this kind of legislation would get attached to a farm bill, but since there has been little movement on passing a new farm bill, lawmakers could try to pass it in another way.
In the meantime, Bayer and its allies have been commenting on the petition asking the EPA to introduce a rule that would take similar action to mandate EPA’s authority on labeling and ban additional warnings on its own, without waiting for Congress. When the Trump administration took office, the EPA extended the deadline for comments. Now, the petitioners are awaiting the agency’s review of the comments and, ultimately, a decision.
Advocates in states around the country could turn their attention to those federal efforts.
In Iowa, Diane Rosenberg got her group, Jefferson County Farmers and Neighbors (JFAN), involved in opposing pesticide immunity bills even though it wasn’t their typical fight: JFAN has been opposing the expansion of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) across Iowa for years.
But Bayer’s attempt to gain immunity from Roundup lawsuits, she said, is similar in the way that big agricultural corporations want to call the shots in rural America.
“Everybody—the neighbor, the farmer, everybody—is basically under the thumb of these corporations,” she said. “The fact these chemical companies want immunity from the harm that their pesticides may have on an individual or many individuals, it’s just not fair. To me, it feels morally bankrupt.”
An earlier edition of this article misstated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role as the lead lawyer in the Monsanto lawsuit; he was one of several leading the case.
April 8, 2025 update: After we published this article, a Bayer spokesperson emailed a statement to Civil Eats that reads, in part:
“Proposed legislation at the federal and state level—such as bills being considered in a number of states—would simply help ensure that any pesticide registered with the EPA—and sold under a label consistent with the EPA’s own determinations—is sufficient to satisfy requirements for health and safety warnings.
These bills are important because they reinforce the authority of the EPA’s rigorous, science-backed labeling decisions, so that when the EPA determines what a crop protection label should say, that decision is consistent and reliable for everyone.
The notion of these bills being a blanket immunity shield is a false narrative positioned by the Litigation Industry as a distortion of the truth. No company should be afforded blanket immunity. Plaintiffs regularly allege various causes of action/claims including negligence, Breach of Warranty and others. These are different than failure to warn.”
May 9, 2025 update: In May, Bayer stepped up its federal policy efforts with a promotional installation in the center of Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, steps from Capitol Hill. The installation links glyphosate to lower food prices and includes staff who relay that message to passersby:
Photo credit: Lisa Held
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]]>The post Is There Enough Evidence of Health Risks for the EPA to Ban Paraquat? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Farmers use the herbicide paraquat, often sold under the brand name Gramoxone, to clear fields before planting. One of the most popular herbicides in the U.S., paraquat is cheap and effective, able to rapidly kill grasses and perennial weeds, but a growing body of research has connected it to Parkinson’s disease, thyroid cancer, and harm to birds, amphibians, reptiles, and plants.
One of the most popular herbicides in the U.S., paraquat is cheap and effective, able to rapidly kill grasses and perennial weeds, but a growing body of research has connected it to Parkinson’s disease, thyroid cancer, and harm to birds, amphibians, reptiles, and plants.
The mounting research, however, has so far failed to convince federal and state regulators to ban its use in the U.S. It is illegal in more than 70 countries, including the European Union, as well as the U.K. and China, where it is manufactured.
Parkinson’s disease is the world’s fastest-growing neurodegenerative disease. Epidemiological studies linking it to paraquat are at the root of roughly 7,000 lawsuits filed in federal court against Syngenta, the company that manufactures paraquat.
At the same time, environmental groups are engaged in a 2021 lawsuit against the EPA for re-approving paraquat. As these two separate lines of legal action move forward, it remains to be seen how the scientific research will be considered. Studies linking paraquat to Parkinson’s disease haven’t moved regulators to outlaw the pesticide, but lawsuits seeking damages for the neurological disorder will almost certainly depend on them.
The EPA’s Delay
Paraquat was first registered for use in the U.S. in 1964. The registration process, which involves a risk assessment of the pesticide’s potential human health and environmental impacts, with data from the manufacturer, must be done every 15 years to ensure that no new science proves the pesticide poses “unreasonable” risks to people or the environment.
In 2021, to mitigate risks as part of the re-registration process, the EPA implemented some interim paraquat safety measures—including limits on aerial spraying and a respirator requirement. However, the agency allowed paraquat use to continue, claiming it hadn’t found a clear link between paraquat exposure and adverse health outcomes such as Parkinson’s disease and cancer.
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to abandon its newly established mitigation measures for paraquat applications, which included limits on aerial spraying and a respirator requirement.(Photo credit: mladenbalinovac/Getty Images)
Environmental groups sued, saying the protections were inadequate. “EPA is so focused on the limitations of individual studies, they didn’t meaningfully consider the broad consistency of evidence across multiple lines of evidence,” says Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, senior attorney for toxic exposure and health at Earthjustice, which sued the EPA over its 2021 interim decision.
On January 17, EPA took two actions. The federal agency abandoned their 2021 interim protections and required the manufacturer, Syngenta, to conduct tests to better understand how the pesticide volatilizes—becomes airborne as a gas—and drifts beyond the application site. And now, with chemical industry insiders recently appointed to steer the EPA’s regulation of chemicals, the future of restrictions on paraquat is in question.
On February 10, Kalmuss-Katz filed a legal response to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, requesting the court deny both of EPA’s January 17 actions. Abandoning interim safety measures, the motion stated, “Not only prolong risks but potentially make them more severe by weakening the safeguards that EPA itself found were necessary to address paraquat’s unreasonable adverse effects.” As well, the motion pointed out that the EPA did not state how they would meet the October 2026 re-registration deadline while waiting years for volatilization studies.
“It’s the tired old industry tactic of delay, delay, delay,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of several advocacy groups that sued the EPA over its 2021 interim decision.
The EPA did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or to emailed questions about its paraquat decision, sent before publication.
California’s Evaluation of Paraquat Studies
The EPA’s decision last month to abandon protections and order more testing cited a recent preliminary report published in California, one of the nation’s largest users of paraquat. The report, which EPA said it had not had time to evaluate, was released by the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), and is the initial stage of the state’s own comprehensive evaluation of recent science to determine whether to continue allowing the use of paraquat in California.
“EPA is so focused on the limitations of individual studies, they didn’t meaningfully consider the broad consistency of evidence across multiple lines of evidence.”
The report, which followed an initial review of 4,000 public comments and 150 scientific studies, highlighted research indicating paraquat can cause thyroid cancer and have ecological impacts on wildlife. However, DPR stated that, so far, its “review of existing human health studies, including epidemiological studies, does not indicate a causal association between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s Disease.”
When asked for comment, DPR Deputy Director of Communications and Outreach Leia Bailey wrote in an email to Civil Eats, “DPR considered epidemiological studies along with all other toxicology studies to determine areas of risk that can lead to restrictions on pesticide use.”
She further noted that epidemiological studies span several decades. “It is expected that the legal label restrictions for paraquat use currently in place at the federal and state level would significantly reduce exposures compared to exposures that study subjects recall experiencing in the past,” she wrote.
In other words, the epidemiological studies span decades of paraquat exposure before 2021’s more stringent application rules for the herbicide, which lowered exposure—and presumably the risk.
California DPR’s review continues, with a final decision due by 2029.
California’s Central Valley: A Parkinson’s Laboratory
Over 1 million people suffer from Parkinson’s disease in the U.S., and each year, 90,000 new cases are diagnosed. Parkinson’s disease can develop when the nerve cells that produce the chemical dopamine die; dopamine controls critical body functions such as memory, mood, and movement.
In recent years, it’s become clear that Parkinson’s is largely caused by interactions between genetics and environmental factors, including exposure to metals, solvents, or pesticides. According to a recent study that offered free genetic testing for Parkinson’s disease to more than 10,000 participants with the disease, only 13 percent were predisposed genetically.
Said another way, 87 percent of the Parkinson’s cases analyzed had no known genetic risk factor. As a result, researchers are investigating how genes and environmental exposures interact to create hot spots of Parkinson’s disease.
California’s Central Valley, which produces one-quarter of the nation’s food, is one such hotspot. “I call California’s Central Valley my personal lab,” says study co-author Beate Ritz, a Parkinson’s disease researcher at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a retained expert consultant in lawsuits against Syngenta. “The levels of Parkinson’s disease there are outrageous.”
In 2021, California dedicated $8.4 million to fund and expand the California Parkinson’s Disease Registry, one of 14 state registries. Registries provide data sources that help researchers identify high-risk groups, determine accurate prevalence rates, and improve links between the disease and risk factors such as pesticide exposure.
In addition, a number of Parkinson’s studies have focused on California, because it has the most rigorous reporting of pesticide usage in the country; in 2023, California farmers bought over 92,000 pounds of paraquat. Between 2017 and 2021, over 5.3 million pounds of paraquat were sprayed in California, according to the Environmental Working Group. These data makes it possible to begin identifying correlations and better understand how pesticides impact the health of agricultural communities.
“I call California’s Central Valley my personal lab. The levels of Parkinson’s disease there are outrageous.”
It’s not just farmworkers or those who apply pesticides who face risks. Ritz and co-author Kimberly Paul, also a Parkinson’s disease researcher at UCLA, published a 2024 epidemiological study that shows that people who live or work within 500 meters of fields on which paraquat has been applied for at least two decades had double the risk of Parkinson’s disease compared to the rest of the region’s population.
A separate Ritz and Paul study also identified 10 additional pesticides that kill neurons and result in Parkinson’s disease. And a new paper by Brittany Krzyzanowski, a researcher at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, found that people who live near sunflower, winter wheat, and alfalfa fields—where paraquat is just one of dozens of pesticides used on these crops—have increased risk of Parkinson’s disease.
One of the biggest oversights, many scientists agree, is that the EPA only considers one pesticide at a time. Farming communities are often exposed to multiple pesticides at once, so the EPA’s assessments don’t reflect real-world exposures, says Paul.
What the Science Shows, and How It’s Selected
For many scientists, numerous studies, both epidemiological and in-vitro cell studies conducted over decades around the world, leave little doubt that paraquat exposure is associated with Parkinson’s disease. Paraquat is, after all, a neurotoxin that can damage the central nervous system and kill lung, liver, and kidney cells when ingested or inhaled. One teaspoon can cause extreme respiratory and gastrointestinal distress—and even organ failure or death. The EPA’s website says: “One small sip can be fatal and there is no antidote.”
“Studies from researchers around the world link paraquat exposure to Parkinson’s disease in humans and laboratory animals,” says Ray Dorsey, a professor of neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York and co-author of the 2020 book Ending Parkinson’s Disease: A Prescription for Action.
The financial benefits of reducing pesticide-related Parkinson’s disease are striking. Global sales of paraquat are $400 million each year, yet the economic burden of Parkinson’s disease, in terms of health care costs, is $52 billion a year, according to Dorsey. “Even if paraquat was responsible for just 1 percent of Parkinson’s disease cases, the economic value of preventing its use is $500 million per year,” says Dorsey.
Meanwhile, Syngenta has been aware of possible long-term health impacts of paraquat for decades. A trove of Syngenta’s internal documents—dubbed the “paraquat papers” by a 2022 Environmental Working Group Investigation—detailed how as early as 1975, the company feared it could face legal liability for paraquat’s long-term health impacts. “One company scientist called the situation ‘a quite terrible problem’ for which ‘some plan could be made,’” The Guardian reported.
“[Syngenta’s] own researchers demonstrated that paraquat exposure led to features of Parkinson’s disease in three different mammalian species in the 1960s,” Dorsey says. “I am not sure what additional evidence is needed to conclude that paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease.”
The most recent lawsuits could cost Syngenta and co-defendant Chevron USA—the successor to the company that distributed paraquat in the U.S. until 1986—roughly $1 billion to settle cases, predicted one of the plaintiff’s lawyers.
The EPA gives the greatest weight to studies that demonstrate paraquat causes direct harm in lab mice. The agency places lesser value on in-vitro cell studies or epidemiological studies. In the cell studies, paraquat introduced to cells sharply increased the amount of damaged proteins inherent to Parkinson’s disease; it is these damaged proteins that clog brain cells, causing them to deteriorate.
It’s all about how you interpret correlation versus causation, Donley says. “EPA is looking for a level of confidence for causation that is nearly impossible to achieve in public health research,” he adds.
Ideally, the EPA wants studies that test the blood and urine of people who have been exposed to paraquat for years, explains Donley. “Those studies cost millions of dollars—yet federal funding for academic research is plummeting,” he says. Donley has never seen the EPA require the pesticide makers to produce that data.
The question of cause is already proving contentious in the Parkinson’s disease lawsuits; judges have ruled that they won’t allow testimony from an expert on whether paraquat is capable of causing Parkinson’s disease in the lead up to the first trial, scheduled to start in October. As a result, epidemiological studies that demonstrate links to paraquat exposure and cell-based studies revealing how paraquat damages dopamine cells may be even more important.
“In every other country, industry has to bring a chemical to the regulatory agency with proof that it’s safe,” says Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “In the U.S., it’s more like, ‘Here’s the chemical. [EPA] has 90 days to prove it’s dangerous.’ It’s totally backwards.”
What’s Next
For the time being, it will be business-as-usual with paraquat until October 1, 2026, when EPA is legally required to finalize paraquat’s re-registration review—a timeline that doesn’t allow for the four years needed to conduct volatilization studies.
In California, Paul and others plan to use the Parkinson’s disease registry to continue their research using a state-wide database of patient information to better identify risk factors. Unfortunately, she notes, the registries often can’t get data on everyone potentially affected. “One of the most vulnerable populations are migrant workers,” she says. “Many of those will be missed.”
That’s increasingly likely in the future, given the Trump administration’s new restrictive immigration policies, which may make migrant workers less willing to participate in any kind of government study—even at the state level.
Reporting for this piece was supported by the Nova Institute for Health.
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]]>The post Why Are Pesticide Companies Fighting State Laws to Address PFAS? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>- Several states are trying to phase out the use of pesticides containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), long-lasting chemicals linked to serious health risks including cancer, liver damage, and reproductive effects that have already contaminated farm fields, drinking water, and human bodies.
- CropLife America and Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment (RISE), the pesticide industry’s trade organizations, have been working to stop and slow those efforts.
- CropLife America and RISE hire local lobbyists, some of whom also head up farmer organizations and represent local farmers in comments, hearings, and meetings with legislators.
- RISE also deploys a “grassroots network” of individuals who work in and with pesticide companies—e.g., retailers, golf courses, and landscapers—to contact their state lawmakers using tested “key” messages and encourages them to emphasize their personal experiences as citizens.
- Beyond PFAS, when state lawmakers introduce bills to restrict pesticide use in other ways, CropLife America and RISE often utilize a similar playbook to influence legislation.
About five years ago, regulators in Maine started to find alarming levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—commonly called PFAS or forever chemicals—in farm fields. They soon discovered the main source: sewage sludge spread as fertilizer. Some farmers could no longer produce safe food due to PFAS’ links to cancer and other health risks. Some had to shift what and where they planted, while others shut down their operations for good. Tests found water in hundreds of rural wells unsafe to drink, and families faced an uncertain future with fear.
Adam Nordell is one of the farmers who lost it all. After he was forced to hang up his hoe and relocate his family, he went to work for a local nonprofit called Defend Our Health, where he now uses what he calls his “unwanted knowledge base” to do outreach and education in farm communities and connect affected farmers with resources.
Nordell is still living with the consequences of PFAS contamination, and he prefers not to linger on the topic of the trauma it caused his family. But if there’s one positive thing he remembers about 2020, when all of this was coming to light, it’s that the state’s often fractured farming community came together.
“I was an organic vegetable farmer, and conventional dairy farmers were reaching out expressing concern,” he said. “The prospect of chemical contamination is something that nobody wants on their farm and that everyone recognizes as posing a potential threat.”
Sensing a public health and food security crisis of epic proportions, Maine’s legislators got to work. In short order, they wrote and passed trailblazing state laws to tackle the thorny problem from multiple directions. They created a $60 million fund to support affected farmers, for example, and started a phaseout of consumer products that contain “intentionally added” PFAS. Most importantly for farmers at the time, they banned the spreading of sludge, a move Nordell said drew enthusiastic support from many, but not all, farmers.
At the same time, in 2020, watchdog groups first discovered PFAS in certain pesticides, which directed national attention to whether farm chemicals might be another source of contamination.
How significant of a PFAS source pesticides might be remains unresolved, especially because different highly accredited labs have produced conflicting tests. One initial study found high levels of PFAS in common pesticides, but when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did its own testing on the same products, it reported none. Environmental groups are currently contesting the agency’s report.
“The prospect of chemical contamination is something that nobody wants on their farm and that everyone recognizes as posing a potential threat.”
Regardless of those results, a few things have become clear: Based on the most commonly used global definition of PFAS, more than 60 pesticides registered by the EPA contain an active ingredient defined as PFAS. Other pesticides may contain PFAS as undisclosed additives or from chemicals leaching from the plastic containers in which they’re stored.
When Maine lawmakers turned their attention to tackling pesticides as a source of PFAS, they encountered new opposition. Between 2021 and 2024, CropLife America and Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment (RISE), the pesticide industry’s trade organizations, paid lobbyists in the state more than $100,000 to work on multiple bills, including PFAS regulations.
At the same time, RISE alerted Maine-based members of what it calls its “grassroots network.” To create that network, RISE recruits individuals who make, sell, or are heavily invested in the use of pesticides (like golf course superintendents and landscapers) around the country, provides trainings and messaging, and then sends advocacy alerts when laws are introduced in a given state.
So, while Maine passed the country’s first laws requiring companies to disclose whether pesticides they sell contain PFAS and to eventually phase out those that do, the fight continues. After the trade groups pushed for delays in the implementation of the law, legislators in 2023 delayed the phaseout of PFAS in pesticides by two years. Then, in 2024, based on Maine lobbying records, CropLife and RISE advocated for a bill to exempt agriculture entirely from the requirements. Although it initially failed, lawmakers expect it will be introduced again next year.
In 2023 testimony submitted to Maine legislators supporting rollbacks to the regulations on PFAS in pesticides, Karen Reardon, vice president of public affairs for RISE, argued that the state’s PFAS definition is overly broad and lacks a scientific basis. She also said companies were worried that submitting affidavits on PFAS in their products could expose their trade secrets, and state regulators needed more time to develop a system that would adequately protect “confidential business information.”
Some farm groups, including the Maine Potato Board and Maine Farm Bureau, also oppose the rules for PFAS in pesticides and have called for the agricultural exemption, citing the fact that losing access to certain pesticides could hurt the state’s farmers. In arguing for an exemption for agriculture last March, Donald Flannery, then the executive director of the Maine Potato Board, cited the economic value Maine’s farmers bring to the state. He noted that pesticides used in Maine “are all approved and licensed by EPA,” and said that while he acknowledged the need to clean up PFAS pollution, business and industry should be allowed to move forward in the meantime.
If pesticides are not exempt from PFAS regulations, he said, “there is risk of losing products, which will have a negative impact on our ability to grow and protect our crops.”
Supporters of the PFAS regulations dispute that idea because the law contains a safeguard allowing farmers to use pesticides that contain PFAS if there is a “currently unavoidable use.” (For example, if a farmer shows there is no alternative product that can address a pest issue they face.)
A Well-Worn Playbook
The battle over regulating PFAS in pesticides in Maine looks a lot like another heating up in Maryland. In fact, it illustrates a scenario repeated in states nationwide each year, where the pesticide industry activates a well-worn playbook in an effort to stop restrictions on pesticide use that are intended to address a broad range of impacts. And it involves some of the same tactics Civil Eats reported on in this series, in our story on Bayer’s lobbying efforts to pass laws limiting their liability for alleged harms caused by glyphosate.
First, CropLife, RISE, and the companies they represent fund state-level lobbying. At the same time, they activate individuals within companies that sell and use pesticides to advocate for what the companies want. Lastly, they align with farmer organizations that likely have more clout in the eyes of lawmakers and the public.
Rick Zimmerman, a New York lobbyist who has represented both pesticide companies and farm groups to oppose state pesticide restrictions, said that alignment was not about using farmer capital. Instead, he said, it happens because farmer groups and the pesticide industry are generally opposed to state governments getting involved in the regulation of farm chemicals. “The various organizations and companies that I represented are on common ground,” he said. “It’s just a natural opportunity for organizations and companies with similar interests to be able to collaborate and work together.”
However, whether the issue is neonicotinoid use in New York or small towns in Colorado passing their own pesticide laws, the strategy has real impacts. In the case of PFAS, Nordell and others said that it could mean consequences for farmers, farmworkers, and broader communities.
“Are there large out-of-state corporations that have a financial incentive engendering opposition to [Maine’s pesticide] laws? Yes, certainly. They show up in committee every session, and I think there’s a lot of misinformation about what will happen as we regulate PFAS out of the economy.”
Maine’s initial assessment found close to 1,500 pesticide products that are made with an active ingredient that meets the state’s definition of PFAS. Nordell said that while the contamination from sludge was relatively easy to test and trace, pesticides may not be as visible as a source of PFAS.
“We should really think about farmworkers who are spraying the pesticides. We should think about the neighbors of the farmers who depend on clean water like we all do. All of us are dependent on a clean food system. When, for the sake of commerce, we turn a blind eye to environmental toxins, we all suffer in any scenario—but certainly when we’re talking about the safety of the food supply,” Nordell said. “Are there large out-of-state corporations that have a financial incentive engendering opposition to [Maine’s] laws? Yes, certainly. They show up in committee every session, and I think there’s a lot of misinformation about what will happen as we regulate PFAS out of the economy.”
Representatives from CropLife America and RISE did not respond to Civil Eats’ repeated requests for interviews, or to detailed questions sent asking for their comments on points covered in this article.
CropLife and RISE Lead the Way
While Maine grappled with PFAS within its borders, other sources of PFAS, like fire-fighting foam and takeout containers, entered the national conversation. PFAS pollution was increasingly measured in drinking water and human bodies, and information on the health risks linked to exposure to common PFAS like PFOA and PFOS, even at very low levels, began to accumulate.
A few states to the south, Maryland has also been trying to stay ahead of the game, and the Maryland Pesticide Education Network (MPEN) is central to that effort. MPEN has been one of the most active pesticide watchdog groups in the country for three decades, and over the last few years, they turned their attention to PFAS.
PFAS expert Linda Birnbaum is a toxicologist who spent 20 years at the EPA and directed the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. As she put it during MPEN’s annual conference in November, “You give me a physiological system, and it’s likely there will be evidence that PFAS disrupt it,” she said, pointing to associated harms including kidney cancer, liver toxicity, high cholesterol, and birth defects.
Even so, Ruth Berlin, MPEN’s executive director, was not surprised when CropLife and RISE showed up earlier this year, after Delegate Sheila Ruth introduced a state law to ban selling pesticides that contain PFAS as an active ingredient starting in June 2025.
Berlin said that RISE representatives came with many of the same talking points they’d used to fight previous pesticide restrictions. For example, if lawmakers take away the use of any pesticide, “they’re going to destroy farming. They’re going to destroy public health. And it’s safe because EPA vets these pesticides.”
CropLife America is a well-known trade association that advances the interests of the farm chemical giants it represents. RISE presents itself as a separate organization that represents the “specialty” pesticide industry and tends to work on the off-farm side of things. They operate under the same 501(c)(6) and share a D.C. address. They hold joint conferences and share lobbyists.
But RISE flies more under the radar than CropLife America, even though it played a pivotal role in a coalition that helped pass laws now on the books in more than 40 states that prevent local governments from further restricting pesticide use. Those laws make it illegal, for example, for a given city council to ban pesticide spraying at schools.
Astroturfing 101: Creating a ‘Grassroots’ Network
Developing and operating its “grassroots network” is key to how RISE responds to state laws.
As RISE’s director of state affairs, Jon Gaeta, explained in a webinar at the start of 2022, “When there’s a regulatory issue at the state level, RISE is ready to spring into action.”
“This committee is very interesting because we do have what I like to call ‘activist legislators’ . . . that truly do believe in the environmental cause, and, unfortunately, they have run a significant amount of pesticide legislation that can be detrimental to our industry.”
During the presentation, Gaeta showed participants where that was currently happening. He flagged Maine as a “battleground situation,” particularly with pesticide regulation bills coming out of the state’s committee on agriculture, conservation, and forestry.
“This committee is very interesting because we do have what I like to call ‘activist legislators,’” he said. “These are legislators that truly do believe in the environmental cause, and, unfortunately, they have run a significant amount of pesticide legislation that can be detrimental to our industry.”
However, Gaeta noted that RISE had been able to leverage the fact that the committee provides easy opportunities for testimony. “We had a lot of great people show up last year and tell their stories about how they use certain pesticides and what they do for a living and that really does make a difference,” he said.
Gaeta pointed to Colorado as another focal point. RISE was anticipating that lawmakers there would try to pass a bill that would again allow local communities to restrict pesticide use where they saw fit. “This is going to be an uphill battle,” he said. “We really do need folks to flex their grassroots muscle in Colorado.”
Kate Burgess, conservation manager for the National Council of Environmental Legislators, tracks state pesticide laws around the country. She pointed to Colorado as “an example that saw intense lobbying from the pesticide industry.”
The Colorado bill failed to gain traction, and RISE touted its role in its 2024 annual report: “With mounting political pressure for local control, 36 pesticide applicators showed up to testify in person against the bill. Leveraging these voices, our in-state lobbyist managed the vote count throughout the session, ultimately preventing a full floor vote in both legislative chambers.”
Two screenshots from the RISE 2024 Annual Report. At left, a “legislative heat map” showing the states where the most bills were introduced that could affect the pesticide industry. Right: A list of “successes in the states” that notes how the group’s targeted lobbying efforts tracked 684 bills nationwide, and through lobbying pressure in Colorado was able to prevent a vote on the state’s pesticide preemption law.
Ensuring those applicators showed up with effective talking points is a key function of RISE’s grassroots network. During another 2022 RISE webinar on messaging, McGavock Edwards, a senior vice president at PR firm Eckel & Vaughn, presented key messages that would later be provided to members in a toolkit.
The messages had been developed using RISE public survey results and tested for resonance. They are also prominent on RISE’s public-facing website. They include that pesticides improve quality of life by enabling green spaces like athletic fields and by eliminating invasive species, and that they benefit public health by controlling disease-carrying insects like mosquitos and ticks.
At left, a screenshot from a RISE webinar spotlighting the key messages the group asks their network of advocates to use when communicating with policymakers. At right: A screenshot of a RISE webinar with Jon Gaeta showing how members of the group’s advocacy network can get involved.
The National Association of Landscape Professionals, a RISE member, deployed several of those messages in its comments submitted in opposition to the Colorado law. It also included that, “Experts at the Environmental Protection Agency rigorously evaluate each pesticide’s active ingredients for human and environmental safety and efficacy before deciding to register the product for sale and use.”
That language is similar to points on a list of five key regulatory messages provided in the 2022 RISE messaging webinar by Karen Reardon, vice president of public affairs at the organization. They were selected as being especially resonant based on the results of the RISE survey. “These are the ones that work,” she said, mentioning, specifically, that they’d also tested the word “rigorous.”
In Maryland, the same language was applied to argue against phasing out pesticides that contain PFAS. “EPA subjects all new pesticide products to rigorous human health and environmental review and testing requirements to satisfy these standards for registration,” Reardon wrote in RISE’s testimony.
Some of RISE’s grassroots training webinars are created and presented in conjunction with CropLife America, but CropLife also does its own trainings of industry professionals who advocate for pesticides in state legislatures.
In a 2021 grassroots advocacy webinar hosted by RISE and CropLife America, Leslie Garcia, manager of sustainability and stewardship at Valent USA, a California-based pesticide maker owned by Japanese chemical giant Sumimoto Chemical Company, talked about bringing the CropLife AgVocate training program to employees at Valent.
In particular, she said, Valent focused on training employees in departments such as IT and finance, who might not have expertise in agriculture or chemistry and “who aren’t always aware of the legislative threats to our industry or how to be a voice for the industry within their own personal networks,” Garcia said. After a series of trainings at Valent, she reported in the webinar, 80 percent of employees signed up for the CropLife America “Call-to-Action Network.”
CropLife also works closely with the Clyde Group, a D.C.-based branding and communications agency, to train advocates and affect state laws. According to Clyde’s website, its team has done more than 100 CropLife trainings “to prepare advocates to confidently speak to their elected officials, give testimonies, and engage media.” They have also “engaged advocates to speak” on CropLife’s behalf in 15 states.
In October 2022, the California Association for Pest Control Advisors dedicated more than a day of its annual conference to advocacy training. There, Anthony LaFauce from the Clyde Group told the pest control advisors that they should never show up to advocate in a business suit. Instead, he said, they should dress the part of a farmer.
Farmer or Pesticide Lobbyist?
Back in Maine, Representative Bill Pluecker, an Independent, is one of the “activist legislators” Gaeta referred to in the RISE webinar. Pluecker is an active farmer who has served in the House of Representatives since 2018 and also works for the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. For several years, he’s been one of the lawmakers leading the charge to get pesticides that contain PFAS out of Maine.
“PFAS is something that Mainers across the political spectrum are paying attention to,” he told Civil Eats. This is because, in Maine as elsewhere, contamination extends beyond farms: “We have large chunks of area where not only can you not eat the fish, but you also can’t eat the turkey, and you can’t eat the deer.”
While not everyone agrees on exactly what bans on PFAS in pesticides should look like, Pluecker said farmers have rarely shown up to oppose the regulations. Instead, he said it always seemed to be representatives of CropLife and RISE.
But Pluecker added that heading into the 2025 legislative session, it seems like the industry is working harder to leverage farmer voices on the issue, because of the political sway they hold. When the session starts, he expects exempting agriculture from the rules on PFAS in pesticides may be back on the table.
At the end of 2023, Julie Ann Smith, former executive director of the Maine Farm Bureau, posted on her LinkedIn that she had started as a lobbyist for a new advocacy organization called the Maine Farmers Coalition. The first publicly available record of the organization’s website is from January 2024, where it says the organization “represents the backbone of the state’s agricultural sector” and lists two members, a large potato company that spans farms and processing and the state’s biggest wild blueberry company.
In March, Smith testified at a hearing on behalf of Maine Farmers Coalition in support of exempting pesticides from PFAS regulations. Smith said the farmers she represents understand concerns surrounding PFAS and their potential health effects but that the EPA has already implemented a roadmap to address PFAS pollution.
Exempting pesticides “would ensure that farmers are still able to grow and protect their crops and strike a balance between protecting the environment and ensuring food security for all,” she said. In April, the Maine Farmers Coalition hosted an online meeting for farmers. PFAS was on a list of discussion topics related to “critical legislation that will impact your farm.”
In August, according to an email provided to Civil Eats, Smith reached out to Maine Senators Henry Ingwersen and Stacy Brenner and Representatives Lori Gramlich and Bill Pluecker, from her Maine Farmers Coalition email, to try to organize a dinner with industry representatives from Syngenta, a global pesticide giant that is a subsidiary of ChemChina. Smith said she would review questions from Civil Eats but did not respond to an email that provided detailed questions or to follow-up emails by press time.
Syngenta did not report lobbying in Maine last year, but it has been active in efforts to slow the implementation of PFAS restrictions in the past. In 2023, CropLife and RISE were pushing the Maine Board of Pesticides to delay reporting requirements for PFAS in pesticides.
When the Board failed to extend the deadline, Syngenta declared in a letter to its distributors and retailers that it would not re-register its products in the state going forward, because reporting on PFAS in their products would pose “too high of a risk” that their formulas would be disclosed.
“Although the BPC [Board of Pesticides Control] confirmed that such information must be held confidential as a matter of law, the BPC has not provided sufficient assurances regarding how it could ensure the protection of this information. Without confidence in that process, the potential economic and competitive harm that would result from such a disclosure (inadvertent or otherwise) is too high of a risk,” wrote Vern Hawkins, president of Syngenta Crop Protection.
Pluecker called the move a “threat” the industry used to try to get regulators to roll back the requirements. According to state records, Syngenta did register a long list of its pesticides for use in the state in 2024. A Syngenta representative said the company would review detailed questions from Civil Eats, including on whether the company is affiliated with Maine Farmers Coalition in any way and why they changed course on registration.
After several follow-up emails from Civil Eats, she said, “We are to unable to help you with this story at this time.“
Meanwhile, between 2022 and 2024, state records show CropLife America and RISE employed the same lobbyists from Mitchell Tardy Jackson, a Maine lobbying firm, to convince lawmakers to oppose multiple pesticide restrictions, including regulating PFAS. Mitchell Tardy Jackson also lobbies for the Maine Potato Board.
This pattern of alignment of farm groups with CropLife America and RISE is in line with how opposition to pesticide restrictions has manifested in other states, where individuals who represent local farmer groups are also being compensated by the pesticide industry.
In Maryland in March, lobbyist Lindsay Thompson submitted comments in opposition to the proposed state law to ban PFAS in pesticides on behalf of the Maryland Grain Producers Association, “the voice of grain farmers growing corn, wheat, barley, and sorghum across the state.”
At the same time, she was being paid to lobby for the Maryland Green Industry Council and the Maryland Association of Green Industries, local trade groups for pesticide sellers and users (like nurseries and turf makers) that often work closely with RISE. A few months earlier, she was registered as a lobbyist on behalf of RISE. She is now registered as a lobbyist for CropLife America. Thompson did not respond to a request for comment.
In New York, Rick Zimmerman, who at one time led the New York Farm Bureau, has a client list that includes CropLife America and Syngenta. Before the state passed a law to ban the use of neonicotinoid coatings on some seeds, he submitted comments in opposition to the law on behalf of the Northeast Agribusiness and Feed Alliance, the Northeast Dairy Producers’ Association, and the New York State Vegetable Growers’ Association.
Many lobbyists work for multiple clients in related industries, said Dan Raichel, director of pollinators and pesticides at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), so the situation is not uncommon. “But there is a tension there,” he said.
In the case of New York, he pointed to the fact that the bill would have restricted the use of chemicals known to be lethal to pollinators so they could not be used on corn, soy, and wheat seeds. Fruit and vegetable growers would have been able to continue spraying the insecticides as needed. Still, Zimmerman opposed the bill on behalf of vegetable growers.
“That always struck me as odd. These are people that rely on pollinators,” Raichel said. “So, here’s a bill that would help with pollinator populations and beneficial insects and soil health. It was not targeted towards the fruit and vegetable industry and would not affect them at all.”
Zimmerman disputed that idea. Many of New York’s vegetable farmers, he said, plant sweet corn, and their ability to use neonicotinoid coatings on those seeds was impacted by the ban. Overall, he added, the farm groups he represents are opposed to state lawmakers regulating specific groups of pesticides because they believe the current registration and review process in place is already science-based and thorough.
“It’s a fundamental question as to whether the state should take the authority to ban a particular pesticide product through legislation,” he said. “Whenever the legislature gets involved in these sorts of decisions, it goes well beyond the science, and it becomes a politically driven campaign to eliminate a particular product.”
“It’s a fundamental question as to whether the state should take the authority to ban a particular pesticide product through legislation. Whenever the legislature gets involved in these sorts of decisions, it goes well beyond the science, and it becomes a politically driven campaign to eliminate a particular product.”
Still, Raichel doesn’t see it as politics; he’s focused on environmental impacts he feels current regulations don’t adequately take into account. And after years of working to support the New York bill, he hadn’t heard a lot from growers on those points. “The people that we were seeing in Albany were the [industry] representatives,” he said. “I’m sure there were farmers involved, but how much of an issue was this, that real farmers actually cared about? It was hard to say.”
Whether or not farmers will show up to oppose restricting PFAS in pesticides is one big question heading into Maine’s 2025 session, Pluecker said.
Lobbying data shows that compared to 2021 and 2022, CropLife America and RISE started to shift spending toward targeting Maine’s executive branch in 2023 and 2024. If the industry successfully organizes more farmers through its network and the new Maine Farmers Coalition, they may have more momentum.
“It’s going to be an interesting conversation in the statehouse, because farmers are going to come forward and they’re going to try to say they’ve been harmed in some way by the existing law, but the existing law hasn’t gone into effect,” says Pluecker. “In fact, it has been pushed back for another two years since it was passed three years ago.”
In the end, Pluecker said, he hears the argument often that there’s no need to regulate PFAS in pesticides because most of the PFAS contamination detected so far came from sludge and that’s been taken care of. But Nordell said farmers and others should look to the situation with sludge as an analogy for how to act now to avoid a similar fate due to other PFAS sources, including pesticides.
“There were strong critiques of the safety of using sewage sludge as a fertilizer back in the ‘80s. There were toxicologists who recognized that it was not a safe practice, and concerns were overridden,” Nordell said. In fact, sludge application was embraced by state and federal regulators. In most states , it still is.
Nordell sees stark parallels to sludge in the 1980s and PFAS in pesticides today—and says that it’s time to learn from past mistakes.
“We need to be asking hard questions and . . . to move as quickly as we can to protect farming communities from further exposure, to protect our farming resources, our farm soils, and our irrigation and drinking water on farms from further contamination.”
This article was updated to correct the spelling of Maine Senator Stacy Brenner’s name.
The post Why Are Pesticide Companies Fighting State Laws to Address PFAS? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Why Farmers Use Harmful Insecticides They May Not Need appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Like so many people whose lives were upended during the pandemic, Sean Dengler returned to his roots. In 2020, he went back to northern Iowa and joined his father in farming 500 acres of corn and soybeans.
As he learned the ropes, he began engaging with Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), a unique organization that attracts out-of-the-box thinkers and tinkerers across a wide spectrum of sustainable agriculture in the Midwest. Soon, he was reading about neonicotinoids—“neonics” for short—now the most common chemicals used to kill bugs in American agriculture.
Farmers can spray them on fields, but these insecticides are also attached to seeds as an outer coating, called a seed treatment. As the seeds germinate and grow, the plant’s tissues become toxic to certain pests.
However, neonics impact beneficial insects, too, like bees and other pollinators. Newer research also shows neonics threaten birds and some mammals, suggesting potential human health impacts. In 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the three most common neonics were each likely to harm more than 1,000 endangered species. Also, neonics move through soil into groundwater, contaminating rivers and streams in the Midwest and beyond. Data from 2015 to 2016 showed about half of Americans over three years old were recently exposed to a neonic.
Dengler suspected he had been planting neonic-treated seed, but he wasn’t sure exactly which chemicals the colorful coating was meant to warn him of. He also had no idea if it would be possible for him to order seeds without the treatment. “The corn is usually either red or purple when it comes,” he said. “That’s how it’s always been. You just get it that way.”
In numerous interviews over the past year, other farmers, researchers, and industry insiders described the same scenario to Civil Eats. While the agrichemical industry claims farmers “carefully select the right pesticide for each pest and crop at issue” and “only use pesticides as a last resort,” when it comes to neonics, that is false in most cases. Nearly all commodity corn farmers receive seed coated with neonics at the start of each season; many cannot identify the chemical that’s in the coating and don’t even know if another option exists.
These findings are significant for a few key reasons.
First, the pesticide industry often calls seed treatment environmentally beneficial because it reduces the amount of insecticide applied per acre compared to spraying. This is true. But research shows that the preemptive coating of seed with neonics has resulted in farmers using insecticides, overall, on significantly more total acres than they were a few decades ago. A 2015 study published by researchers Maggie Douglas and John Tooker at Penn State University found that neonic seed treatments are now used on almost triple the area that had once been sprayed with insecticides, indicating their negative impacts could be more widely distributed.
Chart showing the rise in the use of neonicotinoid pesticides between 1995 and 2011. The majority of neonics are used in corn and soybeans. (Source: Douglas and Tooker, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2015, 49, 8, 5088–5097)
Second, a significant portion of that use may be for nothing. In corn and soy fields, new research and evidence accumulated over the last few years suggest that widespread use of neonic-treated seeds provide minimal benefit to farmers. One study from Quebec helped convince the Canadian province to change its laws to restrict the use of neonic seed treatments. After five years and a 95 percent drop in the use of neonic-coated seeds, there have been no reported impacts on crop yields.
But based on conversations with farmers and other industry insiders, agrichemical companies that sell seeds and pesticides continue to steer farmers toward using neonics on their seeds—and sometimes, there are no other options available. “They scare the farmers and say that you’re going to lose your yield, that you’re going to have crop failure, and the whole grain sector will just collapse,” said Louis Robert, a Canadian agronomist who previously worked for the Quebec government, where he revealed pesticide-industry meddling in research on neonics’ environmental harms. “They go very far in terms of misleading people.”
At the same time, the industry has engaged in a broad, sophisticated lobbying and public relations effort to block regulation in the U.S., muddy the research waters, and even influence Google search results for neonics, all of which has been documented in depth by The Intercept.
So, while Europe and Canada have been moving away from the widespread use of neonics, the U.S. has barely budged in its approach. Neonic-treated seeds are planted on nearly 90 million acres of corn fields and more than 40 million acres of soybean fields each year. Only New York and Vermont have passed bans that include eliminating them as coatings on corn and soy seeds—and those laws do not go into effect until 2029. (Neonic treatments are common on many other seeds, including wheat, cotton, and vegetables, and farmers’ reliance on them varies across different crops. This investigation focused only on corn and soy, by far the two most widely planted crops in the country.)
Over the course of three weeks in October, Civil Eats sent at least four interview requests and detailed questions to CropLife America, which represents the pesticide industry, but did not receive a response. We also sent emails to press contacts at the companies that make or sell pesticide and seed products mentioned in this story: Corteva (which owns Pioneer) and Winfield United (owned by Land O’Lakes) did not respond. A spokesperson for Syngenta directed Civil Eats to “Growing Matters” and sent a statement that reads, “Planting seeds treated with crop-protection products is a more precise way for farmers to protect their crops from early season pests and diseases. As you can see from our global Seedcare Institute website, Syngenta is a leader in providing treated seeds of the highest quality and committed to helping farmers achieve their yield goals sustainably.”
No Knowledge, No Choice
For many years, Kynetec, a global data company, asked farmers to share which insecticides were on their seeds and then provided the federal government with estimates of how many acres were being planted with the chemicals included. But because farmers were so often unable to name the specific chemicals, it was impossible to warrant a reliable data set. They stopped in 2014.
A few years later, in a 2020 paper, researchers reported in the journal Bioscience that only 65 percent of corn growers and 62 percent of soybean growers could name the seed treatment product they were using. Even if they did know the product, that didn’t mean they knew what was in it. In fact, in 15 to 35 percent of cases, corn growers incorrectly identified the pesticides included in the treatment.
It speaks to why Damon Smith’s colleagues at the University of Wisconsin’s Nutrient and Pest Management Program dreamed up a resource dubbed “What’s on your seed?” When Smith, a biologist who studies field crop diseases, started working on it around 2010, the document was a page or two long, and they updated it every few years. Today, it’s a six-page PDF that the team updates at least once a year to keep up with new seed treatments hitting the market.
Very few of those are new chemicals entirely. Most are new combinations of a neonic (or another insecticide) paired with anywhere from one to four fungicides, and maybe a nematicide, a chemical that targets pests called nematodes.
Illustration by Civil Eats (click for a larger version)
“There’s quite a few products out there, and it’s gotten increasingly complicated,” Smith said.
Sales agronomists who work for seed companies, farmers said, sell product packages based mainly on their marketed “yield potential” and are unlikely to talk up the names of pesticides included in the coating. And they emphasize the need for seed coatings as insurance against crop loss.
“The way it often gets marketed to [farmers] is, they get one chance a year to get it right,” explained Mac Erhardt, co-owner of Albert Lea Seed, a small, family-owned seed company based in Minnesota and Iowa. “The big chemical companies have been pretty successful at distributing counter-information where they show, ‘Well, if you plant naked seed, you’re giving up five bushels an acre.’” Six or seven years ago, before his company made a full switch to selling non-GMO and organic seeds, Erhardt said his contracts with big seed companies required him to treat corn seed with neonics before selling it.
With soybeans, the system works a little differently, and farmers are able to select seed treatments at the time of sale.
One Iowa farmer compared soybean seed selection to a car wash. Instead of exterior, interior, and a wax, it’s neonicotinoid, fungicide, and a nematicide.
One Iowa farmer, who asked not to be named, compared the process to a car wash. “You can pick what you want on the screen, and then it formulates it and puts it through,” she said. Instead of exterior, interior, and a wax, it’s neonicotinoid, fungicide, and a nematicide.
Still, farmers said they almost always defer to the seed dealers and are often unaware of what the treatments they’re selecting consist of. “From a farmer’s perspective, we want a seed to be protected, so we just trust that whatever potion they put on the seed, it’s going to be okay. They’re not in the business of selling seed that will yield less, so we just put our trust in them,” she said. “If we had real choices, those that know insecticides like neonics are harmful, we’re not going to push that button.”
Fears About Speaking Out Against Treated Seeds
Pesticide companies are so entrenched in the culture of agricultural communities, asking questions about insecticides and their merits or detriments also can feel taboo. One reason this farmer did not want to be named was because she thought, with all of the seed contracts she’d signed over the years, that it was possible she had signed a non-disclosure agreement without realizing it.
For others, it’s much more personal. After Frank Rademacher, who has been farming corn and soybeans with his dad in east-central Illinois since 2018, talked about neonics to a reporter at a farming publication, another farmer yelled at him in public and accused him of hurting agriculture.
Estimated agricultural use of the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam, by year and crop, between 1992 and 2019. 2014 was the last year that Kynetec provided USGS with data that included seed treatment, so the 2015 drop-off shows how much use is in seed coatings.
(Source: U.S. Geological Survey data)
Rademacher said that many farmers he encounters have a vague, visceral sense that there may be risks associated with the colorful dust that blows into the air as the high-powered vacuum system shoots seeds into the ground and the tractor shakes and bumps around. But pesticides are so commonplace that at a forum he attended, farmers laughed about which ones cause rashes and which lead to headaches. With neonics, he said, they’re grateful to have insecticides that are not as acutely toxic as the ones their parents handled. If they try not to touch the seeds with their bare hands or breathe too much of the dust in, it feels like enough.
“The products that they were using growing up, they were just horrible,” he said of farmers in their 50s and older like his dad, who might have been exposed to insecticides like DDT, malathion, and chlorpyrifos that have now been banned or phased out. “This is kind of an invisible issue. It takes away a lot of the acute exposure, and what you trade is the long-term personal and environmental low-level exposure.”
Illustration by Civil Eats
Sean Dengler worried that even asking questions about neonics when buying his seed would upset others in his small farming community, some of whom he had known since childhood and considered friends. “My dad’s very conventional, and I don’t wanna make him feel uncomfortable in that way. It’s kind of like a peer pressure type of thing,” he said. But Dengler recognized the power that gave the industry. “It’s a good thing for big business. You get everyone on one side, and you can’t have people think differently.”
With the name of Dengler’s product in hand, Civil Eats tried to find out for him if the soybean treatment he had used contained a neonic. Because it was a newer product and wasn’t yet listed in Damon Smith’s resource, it took significant searching and emailing to track down the chemicals included. The insecticide was thiamethoxam—one of the most common neonics.
Later, Dengler got his chance to ask about what was included in his corn seed treatments. Attending a plot tour hosted by Pioneer, one of the major seed companies, he learned that the corn seed had “seven fungicide treatments and two insecticide treatments on it. That’s the first time during my farming career I heard anything about it,” he explained by email to Civil Eats.
Leaving Neonic-Coated Seeds Behind
For those who do decide to swim upstream, the current encouraging them to stay the usual course is strong.
“Even though there’s data showing that, ‘Hey, with a few tweaks, you can change your farming practices and you don’t need to use insecticides on your seed,’ [farmers] still want that protection. They don’t want that one-out-of-every-10-years problem,” said Erhardt, from Albert Lea Seed.
That rare issue is the sticking point: Neonics are very good at killing some pests that can cause serious damage to crops, and companies are quick to point to that. One industry document created by CropLife to promote neonics on seeds highlights a study that found the number of plants that survived the season increased 18 percent, and crop yield increased by 12 percent, “when neonicotinoid-treated corn seed was planted into corn fields with high wireworm populations.”
“Even though there’s data showing that, ‘Hey, with a few tweaks, you can change your farming practices and you don’t need to use insecticides on your seed,’ [farmers] still want that protection.”
In other words, if you use neonics in a field infested with wireworm, it really helps. But using it on every field preventatively is like taking an antibiotic every day in case an infection pops up at some point. “Most of the pests that neonics really work well on are highly sporadic,” said Maggie Douglas, who is now an assistant professor of environmental studies at Dickinson College. “The question is: How many farmers are having a seedcorn maggot infestation in their field in a given year?”
Seedcorn maggots are dreaded for their ability to burrow into seeds and kill a crop off the bat. But in New York, at least, there’s a clear answer. As the campaign to pass a law banning the use of neonicotinoid coatings on corn and soybean seeds heated up, farm groups were concerned, specifically, about how they’d control the pest.
So, researchers at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences set out to quantify how big the problem was. They set up ten one-year trials in four different locations across the state, comparing neonic-treated fields to fields planted with alternative seed treatments. After they pooled and analyzed the data, their preliminary conclusions were that there were no significant differences and that overall, “seedcorn maggots were not a factor in establishing corn” in any of their trials. (They expect to release final results from three years of trials this winter.) In Quebec, researchers did find seedcorn maggot infestations that caused damage to young corn plants, but at the end of the day, the infestations still didn’t result in yield losses.
Another big hurdle facing farmers who want to move away from neonics is that they would also likely have to switch to non-genetically modified seed, said Rademacher. “I’m not aware of any seed company that that offers untreated seed in a GMO variety,” he said.
If it was available, he would likely know. Not only does Rademacher have a degree in crop science with a focus on pest management, he also has an off-farm job as a conservation agronomist for The Nature Conservancy. In his own fields, he began implementing all kinds of conservation practices and, to ditch neonic coatings on his corn, was able to navigate the accompanying switch to planting non-GMO seed. But even a neonic-skeptical farmer would likely balk at giving up the protection against other pests that genetic modification enables. For example, if corn seed is not genetically modified to withstand glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, farmers would have to stop spraying the widely used weedkiller to avoid killing their corn.
“You’re asking people to make not just one big shift but potentially two or more big shifts,” he said. “It’s all or nothing.”
One compelling reason to make the switch is cost savings. In Quebec, a group of farmers convened by the University of Vermont last spring all said their seed costs $10–$20 less per bag now that they’re not paying for the neonicotinoid coating. In Iowa, the farmer who paid to have her soybeans coated said she was charged $2/acre—or $1,000 extra for a 500-acre field. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, seed treatment “may account for around 15 percent of the seed price.”
That got Dengler’s attention. With a degree in finance, he was particularly interested in opportunities to cut costs on the farm, and he was intrigued by a PFI farmer who conducted his own field trials on neonics. The results showed that the treatment applied to his soybean seeds might not be necessary: The farmer planted beans without the coating, the plants stayed healthy, and crop yields didn’t drop.
“When you tie in the environmental impact of the seed treatment on the soybeans, I was like, ‘I’ll even take a bushel or two less, just because I believe that I’m doing the right thing,’” he said. While he couldn’t see how to do it with corn, he started opting out of neonic treatments on his soybean seeds.
After harvest ended, he reported that all but one of his soybean fields yielded better than last year. But a clear takeaway on whether his choice to forgo neonics had an impact would be tough, he said. For one, growing conditions were better this season. Both years were dry, and wet conditions are often what precipitate early-season insect issues. So far, based on the lack of a clear difference, he said adding the neonic treatments “doesn’t seem worth the pay or environmental impacts.”
Meanwhile, Rademacher is a few years in. Since planting seeds without neonic coatings, he said his yields might vary a few bushels here or there, but it’s nothing significant.
However, he didn’t just change his seeds and continue farming the same way. Instead, he’s investing in an entirely different method of pest control. “As counterintuitive as it seems, our system is to promote insects. We have no tillage, so we don’t destroy their houses every year, and we provide year-round habitat via cover crops,” he said. Each small change adds up, and now, he and his dad are seeing significant numbers of beneficial insects returning, which keeps the bad guys in check.
“Today, as we speak in 2024 in Quebec, over half of the corn and soy acreage doesn’t carry any insecticide, and we’re going to have a fantastic year in terms of yield.”
In fact, the research that first spurred Douglas’ interest in neonics was on this very topic: In the lab, she accidently discovered that neonics were killing the beneficial beetles that prey on the slugs destroying Pennsylvania farmers’ yields—but not the slugs themselves. The discovery led her to a research trial that ultimately found that in their specific region, neonic treatments could actually reduce yields.
Further north, Quebeçois farmers have the biggest head start. During the University of Vermont panel, one said he had learned a simple trick since ditching neonic seed treatments: He waits to see when his neighbor—an organic farmer—is ready to plant, and he follows his lead. That simple adjustment allows him to sidestep early season pest risks.
For agronomist Louis Robert, the success of the Quebec government’s decision to move away from neonics on corn and soy seeds is apparent not in what’s being said, but in the silence. After five years, farmers aren’t talking about crop failure at their local meeting places, he said, and he hasn’t seen any media coverage of the neonic ban. Farmers can apply to use neonic-treated seed if they document a need, but almost no one’s doing so, he added.
“The most reliable proof is that it’s not even a matter of discussion anymore,” Robert said. “Today, as we speak in 2024 in Quebec, over half of the corn and soy acreage doesn’t carry any insecticide, and we’re going to have a fantastic year in terms of yield. So, the demonstration is right there in front of you.”
This article was updated to include the fact that the Vermont state legislature overrode a veto to allow its ban on neonic-coated seeds to become law.
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]]>The post A New Book Dives Deep Into the Climate and Health Impacts of Gas Stoves appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Each year, 100,000 Americans die from coal and car pollution. And each year, 20 percent of deaths worldwide are attributable to fossil fuel use. Rob Jackson, Stanford climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project, keeps a long list of statistics like these—on the devastating health impacts of fossil fuels—ready to share.
“That’s 10 million senseless deaths [due to fossil fuels] when we have cleaner fuels available,” Jackson explained to Civil Eats as he prepped for the launch of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere. “One reason I push the intersection between health and climate is because it reaches people who won’t otherwise pay attention to climate.”
That intersection hits home in about 40 percent of U.S. kitchens, where Americans still cook over flames powered by natural gas. The week of Jackson’s book launch, many of those cooks were probably drenched in sweat, too: July 22 was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth.
In the book, Jackson tells stories of measuring both the staggering greenhouse gas emissions gas stoves produce and the dangerous levels of air pollutants home cooks breathe in as they sauté and roast (even long after the burners are off).
Last year, some of those measurements, published in research studies, contributed to public awareness that quickly spiraled into what multiple media outlets branded “gas stove culture wars.” (Just last week, Senator JD Vance told his supporters Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to take away your gas stoves,” which is entirely false.) But Into the Clear Blue Sky is a solutions book written by a scientist, and Jackson approaches the phaseout of gas-powered home appliances with the same steady, measured urgency he applies to exploring decarbonizing steel and electrifying vehicles—two other important solutions in his book. Also, early on, he establishes a throughline: that the impacts of the climate crisis are unequally felt, and solutions need to be accessible and applicable to all.
Jackson spoke to Civil Eats about his groundbreaking research, the pushback against policies that could speed electrification, and how writing about climate solutions—gas stove phaseouts and otherwise—has left him angry and afraid, but also hopeful.
You set out to write about climate solutions, and you allotted two chapters to the food system—one on gas stoves, one on beef. Considering all the ways that climate change intersects with the food system, why those two?
For a couple of reasons. In the book, I highlight the opportunities for reducing methane concentrations in the atmosphere as probably our best short-term goal for climate action. And the two largest sources of methane in the world are food: primarily cows and rice paddies, and gas appliances in our homes and buildings.
We did the first studies looking at emissions from water heaters and have spent the last five years studying gas stoves—initially, purely for their greenhouse gas emissions, to see how much methane leaks into the air. We found that the leaks from gas stoves alone in the U.S. were responsible for pollution equivalent to half a million U.S. cars.
But as we were going into hundreds of homes measuring methane, we started measuring indoor air pollutants like NOx [nitrogen oxide] gasses, which triggers asthma, and benzene, which is carcinogenic. That opened a whole new field of study for me, because I realized every time I turned on a burner on a gas stove or started the oven, pollution levels shot up above health benchmarks, even when I had the ventilation hood on in my house.
You wrote that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t include methane leakage from gas appliances in their greenhouse gas emissions estimates. Is that still true, or has your research changed things?
It’s still mostly true. They do now include some emissions from gas stoves, but they don’t include the full set of emissions, including leakage. I began measuring methane from appliances in homes and buildings because it was the least-studied part of the gas supply chain, and I wanted to fill a fill a research gap there. Our research has drawn a lot of attention to the issue of gas appliances in our homes.
The largest source of emissions indoors is the furnace, because it burns so much more gas. But the furnace and the water heater are required to vent directly outdoors through a chimney or a pipe. I focus a lot on gas stoves because there’s no vent. Or there’s a hood that most people don’t use—and that surveys show often isn’t effective.
The levels of air pollutants you’ve measured in people’s homes are unbelievably high. In the book, you talk about how the industry knew about the health concerns more than 100 years ago, to the extent that their own experts said gas shouldn’t be used in homes without requiring hoods that vented to the outside, which didn’t happen. How much of this evidence on indoor air pollutants and the health implications is just emerging now and how much is new?
It’s a fascinating question. For example, there’s 50 years of measurements on NOx pollution indoors. There were meta-analyses done in the 1990s showing that stoves increased indoor NOx levels and that the likelihood of asthma and wheezing and different health outcomes increased if you lived in a home with a gas stove. So, that knowledge was well known 30 years before I ever thought about measuring gas stoves.
I think our instruments are better now, and we have a finer-scale resolution. And until we did it, no one had measured benzene emissions indoors from gas stoves. So, we’re still learning about the full set of pollutants that are generated indoors.
And I think we’re learning more now about not just the emission rates but the concentrations that people actually breathe. That’s the tricky part, because what you need to know for predicting health outcomes is how high the levels are—not just in the kitchen but in the bedrooms down the hall where people spend their time and sleep.
That was the biggest surprise of our studies for me—the fact that concentrations of pollutants rose so quickly in bedrooms down the hall and stayed above health benchmarks for hours after the stove was off. When you think about cooking meal after meal, day after day, month after month and these concentrations just recurring all the time in our homes . . . sometimes I think we would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, but we willingly stand over a gas stove and breathe the same pollutants.
Have you done any of this research in restaurants?
We are doing that right now, literally. I have a part of my lab up in Pittsburgh doing measurements. We’ve done some in the Bay Area. We’re doing some in the Midwest, and we’re going to go to Washington, D.C. this summer and do some more.
Generally, [commercial] kitchens have industrial hoods, which are much better. However, they also have many more burners. And they have pilot lights, which are the most inefficient way that we burn. So, I worry about exposures where the concentration is building up at night after the restaurant closes and the hoods are off and these pilot lights are burning. I worry more about small kitchens . . . somewhere where maybe the ventilation is not so good.
We’re really trying to understand the risks in kitchens and, frankly, to do it more positively. We’re trying to work with chefs to promote the benefits of electrification. There’s an increasing number of chefs willing to speak out and say, “Yes, I can cook with electricity and there’s no reason not to switch now.”
In terms of electrification, you talk a lot in the book about how climate solutions need to be accessible to everyone. Switching to induction from gas can be really costly. How do you see the transition becoming possible for people at all income levels?
I do think the cost will come down over time. But I think of climate solutions [as having] two flavors: One is to use less of whatever it is that emits fossil fuels. The other is to decarbonize whatever infrastructure is left. And we can’t really cook less, so that’s not a realistic solution set for our homes.
So, I think we need to favor reach codes that require future construction to be all electric.
Governor [Kathy] Hochul and the Assembly and Senate in New York passed the country’s first state-level bill requiring new homes and buildings be all-electric by 2026. Those bills make sense to me, because every time we plumb a new house or new building with gas infrastructure or fossil fuel infrastructure, we lock in greenhouse gases for decades to come.
I don’t suggest that we need to go into every home and rip people’s stoves off the walls. We need an orderly transition, and the place to do that is when our stoves reach the end of their lifetime, to switch them out. Since I am fortunate and relatively wealthy, I chose to replace my gas stove with an induction stove before the end of its lifetime because I could. But the hundreds of homeowners we sample in Bakersfield and lower-income neighborhoods, they don’t have that option, and even if they can afford it, they rent. So, I worry the most about people in lower-income communities.
There’s also been a lot of pushback. Are you optimistic about these electrification laws moving forward?
The industry is powerful. The reach codes that Berkeley passed have been overturned. There were 100 cities and counties in California that had passed similar reach codes, and most of those are now moot. States like New York have taken a different approach, and I’m optimistic that states that want to act will find a way to incentivize the transition to electric appliances. But there have now been a couple of dozen states that have passed preemption laws to make such codes illegal. Though there’s tremendous pushback, I think induction stoves will win eventually, because they’re a better product. They’re more efficient. A child can’t burn their hand. But [with climate], winning slowly is the same as losing, as Bill McKibben likes to say.
On that note, my editor suggested I ask you about what gives you hope, and I felt myself having an emotional reaction. Like, “I don’t care about hope! I care about what’s possible. Brass tacks. What can be done—or not—to move the needle?” But you use the word hope a lot in the book, so I thought I should ask: Why?
I would say that hope and optimism are muscles that we need to exercise. My first homework assignment in any class is for students to go home and research things in the environment that are better today than they were 50 years ago. That list is long. It’s lifespan and childhood mortality. It’s water and air quality. It’s a decline in global poverty, despite the injustices that remain. Then there’s a long list of targeted regulations that have saved us money and made us healthier.
The phaseout of leaded gasoline has literally made us smarter and made lead levels in our kids’ blood drop 95 percent. There’s the Montreal Protocol that saved billions of cases of skin cancers and cataracts. And there’s my favorite example—the Clean Air Act—that saves 100,000 American lives a year, a bipartisan bill at a 30-fold return on investment.
So, I think by acknowledging past successes we make future successes in climate more likely, because we can see a path to a better future. And I guess I believe strongly that it’s very easy in my world to sink only into the latest statistics of drought and disasters—but it doesn’t seem to motivate people.
So, it’s a sort of hope grounded in facts and history.
Yes, but the undercurrent is there, which is, you know, I’m afraid and angry, because we’ve wasted decades. We’ve sprinted right to 1.5°C—something that people thought was unfathomable 20 years ago—and we seem to be sprinting towards 2°C. So yes, I’m hopeful, but I’m also angry and afraid for all of us.
Given the urgency, do you think that this upcoming election could partially determine whether catastrophic outcomes are locked in?
I’m an environmental scientist, and at this point in my life, there’s only one party that seems to take climate and the environment seriously. It wasn’t always that way. My biggest regret is how politicized and polarized the environment has become. Republican administrations created the EPA and signed the Montreal Protocol. Even Margaret Thatcher, she once said something like, “We have treated the atmosphere like a dust bin.” She of course backtracked later in her career, but she was a chemist and scientist, and she understood.
I regret the fact that we are in a place where a Republican who mentions climate gets defeated in a primary by someone farther to the right. I don’t want to pick parties, but I’m deeply concerned about this election. We can’t afford another administration undoing climate rules. It isn’t just for the climate. It’s killing millions of people around the world and hundreds of thousands of Americans. Let’s be frank about it.
Read More:
The IPCC’s Latest Climate Report Is a Final Alarm for Food Systems, Too
Methane From Agriculture Is a Big Problem. We Explain Why.
Are Dairy Digesters the Renewable Energy Answer or a ‘False Solution’ to Climate Change?
$2 Billion for Farmer Discrimination. On July 31, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had successfully distributed more than $2 billion to 43,000 farmers who had experienced discrimination while attempting to secure USDA loans.
The announcement marked a historic moment in a long saga. Farmers have alleged discrimination in the agency’s loan programs for decades, and multiple lawsuits have been filed over the years by women, Indigenous, and Black farmers who said they were treated differently when applying for loans, driving many out of business.
In 2020, lawmakers set aside $4 billion specifically to compensate Black farmers for race-based discrimination, but the program was thrown out in the wake of lawsuits, many of which were filed by Republican officials who alleged discrimination against white farmers. So when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, they authorized a new, race-neutral fund that would compensate any farmer who alleged discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors.
During a press call announcing the news, Vilsack said the agency received 58,000 applications and ultimately approved 43,000. While the agency could not compensate farmers for losses or pain endured, he said, “I think it represents USDA acknowledging and responding to reported discrimination.”
Vilsack could not provide statistics on how many of the individuals who received funding were Black farmers, but said that analysis may become available in the future. He also pointed out that the states with the most farmers awarded funding were Mississippi and Alabama.
In addition to the payments, he said the agency has been working to root out and prevent future discrimination and break down barriers to access within its loan programs with, for example, “new processes that reduce the need for human discretion in loan decision-making.”
Many Democrats in Congress and advocacy organizations released statements applauding the USDA’s progress on the issue. “Today marks an important milestone for USDA and for our collective efforts to hold the Department accountable in addressing a history of acts of discrimination against perpetually marginalized agricultural producers and their communities,” said Michelle Hughes, Co-Executive Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, in a press release. The coalition was one of the cooperating organizations, along with others like the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, that helped the USDA get the word out to farmers about the application process.
Read More:
How the Long Shadow of Racism at USDA Impacts Black Farmers in Arkansas—and Beyond
Black Farmers in Arkansas Still Seek Justice a Century After the Elaine Massacre
Black Farmers Await Debt Relief as Lawmakers Resolve Racist Lawsuits
Dangerous Drift. According to a report published last week by the Midwestern Prairie Rivers Network (PRN), herbicides sprayed primarily on row crops in Illinois are drifting far from targeted fields, damaging trees and other plant life. Researchers at PRN monitored symptoms of pesticide drift—such as curled leaves—and collected tissue samples from plants over six years. They found symptoms of drift during 677 out of 679 total visits to nearly 300 sites. Of 127 tissue samples taken from trees and other plants, 90 percent contained herbicide residues. Herbicides detected included 2,4-D, atrazine, dicamba, glyphosate, and seven others.
Many of the sites where researchers documented incidents of drift were more than 500 feet from the likely source of exposure, suggesting the chemicals are drifting significant distances. “Our monitoring and tissue sampling program indicates that current legal safeguards/protections and regulatory efforts are inadequate at protecting people and the environment from herbicide drift,” the researchers wrote.
At a press conference for the release of the report, co-author Kim Erndt-Pitcher said the results pointed to the fact that herbicides are playing a significant role in the decline of tree health across the state, and residents and farmers expressed concerns about potential risks to animals and their families’ health.
Patsy Hopper, an organic farmer and landowner south of Urbana, Illinois, said her land long produced a bounty of fruits and vegetables. At one point in time, she remembered harvesting 50 gallons of cherries in a season. “In the past few years, we’ve hardly had a harvest because of pesticide drift. The trees are dying,” she said. “This year, we had enough cherries for one pie.”
Read More:
Beyond Damaging Crops, Dicamba Is Dividing Communities
EPA Weakens Safeguards for Weed Killer Atrazine, Linked to Birth Defects
Farm-State Veep. On August 6, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, catapulting agriculture and other food issues into the 2024 presidential election in a new way.
As a member of the House of Representatives, Walz served on the Agriculture Committee. There, he played a role in three farm bill cycles, sponsoring various proposals focused on expanding on-farm conservation efforts and supporting beginning farmers and ranchers.
As Governor of Minnesota, Walz has advocated for biofuels, a key priority of commodity ag groups, and local advocates for small farms say he fought consolidation to keep more farmers on the land. He also championed and ultimately signed into law a universal school meals program in the state.
Read more:
States Are Fighting to Bring Back Free School Meals
This Farm Bill Really Matters. We Explain Why.
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]]>The post Study Finds ‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Increasingly Common in Pesticides appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>More and more pesticides approved for use on U.S. farm fields qualify as “forever chemicals,” new research shows, raising questions around their long-term environmental and public health consequences.
“Forever chemicals,” officially called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are incredibly persistent, widely used chemicals that are now present in soil, water, and human bodies. Some PFAS are now linked to cancers, reproductive issues, and developmental delays in children.
Concerns about those health risks are compounded by the fact that authorities have not identified all sources of PFAS contamination in the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other regulators have been trying to understand the scope and impacts of contamination from a wide range of sources, including firefighting foam, sewage sludge, and food packaging. Last year, the EPA proposed the first drinking water limits for four of the chemicals.
The new analysis, published today in Environmental Health Perspectives, represents the latest effort to understand how common PFAS are in pesticides, which are widely used around the country and directly affect food, water, and soil. The researchers, associated with environmental advocacy groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), and the Environmental Working Group, found that 66 active ingredients currently approved for use in pesticides qualify as PFAS, and eight approved “inert” ingredients—added to pesticides to help the chemical disperse, for example—also qualify as PFAS.
Most of the chemicals identified are referred to as “short chain” PFAS, which means they are likely less persistent and less toxic than the more common forever chemicals—like PFOA and PFOS—that the EPA has begun to regulate. But more research is needed on their impacts, the researchers say.
“What our research showed is that this issue is a lot bigger than many people have thought, and the trend is really worrisome.”
Plus, overall, they found that fluorination (a process that can create PFAS) is increasingly used by chemical companies in the manufacture of pesticides, to make them stick around for longer. While 14 percent of the overall active ingredients currently used in pesticides qualify as PFAS, 30 percent of the ingredients approved in the last decade qualify.
“What’s clear is that some of the most widely dispersed pollutants across the world are becoming increasingly fluorinated, which means that they’re becoming increasingly persistent, and we don’t really have a grasp yet on what the consequences are going to be,” said Nathan Donley, one of the paper’s authors and the environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “What our research showed is that this issue is a lot bigger than many people have thought, and the trend is really worrisome.”
Of course, fluorination is not unique to the pesticide industry, said A. Daniel Jones, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and the associate director of Michigan State University’s Center for PFAS Research. Common medicines like Prozac and Lipitor, for example, meet some definitions of PFAS. “We could get rid of lots of really important drugs if we got rid of all of the organic fluorine,” he said. “At the same time, we do want to start moving away from non-essential uses of persistent organic chemicals. Any chemical that outlives me is probably not good to have moving around the environment.”
The study contributes to the still-developing picture of how significant of an issue PFAS in pesticides might be. In 2022, testing done by environmental groups found the chemicals in common pesticide products, which has since been partially attributed to leaching from plastic containers. The EPA took steps to address that contamination. However, an independent researcher also found alarming levels of the most dangerous PFAS in multiple pesticides that wasn’t attributable to plastic containers. EPA then did its own tests and announced no pesticides were found, but the agency is now facing allegations of misconduct related to that testing.
The EPA did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
Short-Chain PFAS Are More Common in Pesticides
Complicating the issue is that thousands of PFAS exist, and there are multiple ways to define them. Some fluorinated chemicals are PFAS, some are not. The EPA uses a narrow definition, and therefore does not consider many of the chemicals the researchers identified in the new study as PFAS. However, they do qualify using a broad definition adopted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
One of the aspects at issue is the length of the carbon chain. All PFAS contain a chain of carbon atoms connected to fluorine atoms, and it’s widely understood that the longer the carbon chain, the more problematic the chemical, in terms of both environmental persistence and health impacts.
“We do want to start moving away from non-essential uses of persistent organic chemicals. Any chemical that outlives me is probably not good to have moving around the environment.”
Most of the active and inert ingredients now being used in pesticides are short chain and are not from the class of PFAS that have been the focus of regulatory efforts so far, so a looming question is: Are they of serious concern?
“From my perspective, ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether you think these are PFAS or not,” Donley said. “They are forever chemicals, and the fluorinated parts of these pesticides will be around for the birth of your grandchildren’s grandchildren.”
While these chemicals are “certainly persistent,” Jones agreed, their impact across the board is unknown.
In terms of health, one of the reasons PFOS and PFOA are so dangerous is that they can stay in the human body for up to a decade, wreaking havoc all the while. “The longer they’re in us, the more opportunity they have to do harm,” Jones said. “Generally, we do know that shorter chain compounds don’t stay in your body as long as the longer chain compounds. So the short-chain compounds are probably not nearly as bad for us as the long-chain compounds, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely innocuous either.”
In the environment, their persistence is complicated, since even those that do degrade in a reasonable amount of time can break down into other compounds that don’t, Donley said. Of course, that doesn’t mean those other compounds are necessarily toxic. For example, Jones has extensively studied one of the compounds identified in the paper, trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), as a substance into which PFAS can break down. He pointed to a recent assessment of toxicity in mammals that found TFA doesn’t pose significant health risks.
In addition, because these chemicals are so widespread in other products, it’s hard to pinpoint how significant pesticides may be as a source of contamination. For example, research shows refrigerants and other non-pesticide chemicals are a much more significant source of TFA pollution.
While most of the chemicals identified in the paper are not the most common pesticides used, some have been used in high volumes in the past, and others are seeing increased use.
In the 1990s, for example, farmers annually sprayed about 25 million pounds of an insecticide called trifluralin, which the researchers identified as PFAS. While its use has since plummeted, in 2018, farmers still used 5 million pounds on crops including cotton, alfalfa, and fruits and vegetables. Use of the herbicide fomesafen—also identified as PFAS in the new study—has gone in the other direction, increasing from just 1 million pounds in the 1990s to nearly 6 million pounds in 2018, primarily on soybeans.
And some of the 66 chemicals identified in the study are used as the active ingredient in a much larger number of products. For example, Bifenthrin, a major water contaminant in the U.S., was an ingredient in 247 different pesticide products registered in Maine in 2022.
Regulatory Implications for PFAS in Pesticides
Regardless of how the chemicals are categorized or how widely they’re used, one of Donley’s primary concerns is that the EPA’s process for evaluating pesticide safety may not be set up to properly examine what the impacts might be when short-chain PFAS break down in the environment.
“When you start getting into breakdown products, the system falls apart pretty quickly, and they’re not getting a whole lot of information on what these breakdown products are doing in the environment,” Donley said. “There are just a lot of question marks there.”
He also questions whether the EPA is effectively evaluating and regulating the additive ingredients called “inerts.” Due to the way the nation’s pesticide law was written, those chemicals are considered confidential business secrets, so companies don’t have to list them on pesticide labels.
So while the paper’s authors were able to identify eight approved inerts that qualify as PFAS, four of which are currently used in products in the U.S, there’s no way to know which products contain them. One such chemical, for instance, is approved for use on food crops and is present in 37 products, according to the EPA. Since the agency doesn’t share the names of those products, we don’t know if they are in wide use—or hardly used at all.
In regulatory recommendations at the end of the new paper, Donley and his co-authors say the U.S. should require all pesticide ingredients, including inerts, to be disclosed on labels. They also recommend the agency evaluate all PFAS pesticides and the compounds they break down into for environmental persistence, expand environmental and biomonitoring programs for PFAS pesticides, and assess the cumulative impacts of all the pesticides and the compounds they break down into based on the “total organic fluorine load in the environment and food.”
Michigan State’s Jones called the goals lofty and said they’d require an enormous amount of resources—which the agency currently does not have. “A more circumspect approach might begin by prioritizing items that present the greatest risk to human health, but should also evaluate the health effects of any proposed alternatives,” he said.
Even before the study, in the absence of more aggressive EPA action on the issue, states have been stepping in. Maine, Minnesota, Maryland, and Massachusetts have all passed laws that specifically tackle PFAS in pesticides in some way. Maine and Minnesota have already begun the process of identifying PFAS in pesticides, with a goal of understanding their impact and eventually ending their use.
“We’re only regulating the tip of the iceberg in terms of the federal EPA drinking water standard. The more we find out about PFAS, the more concerning they are.”
Pesticide companies now submit PFAS affidavits when they register their products in Maine. The Minnesota Department of Agriculture, which uses a broader definition of PFAS than even the OECD, issued an interim report earlier this year that identified 95 pesticides that qualified as PFAS. The agency also began looking at contamination in groundwater, rivers, and streams.
“There’s a lot coming out that’s going to make it easier to piece together, state by state, what’s happening,” said Sharon Anglin Treat, an environmental policy expert who has been working on PFAS contamination in Maine. “We’re only regulating the tip of the iceberg in terms of the federal EPA drinking water standard. The more we find out about PFAS, the more concerning they are.”
That’s why, Donley said, the overall trend of fluorinating pesticides to make them more persistent is something regulators should be paying attention to.
“In the ’70s, we were dealing with things like DDT and aldrin and chlordane, really persistent chemicals,” he said. “The EPA kicked that to the curb. Now, we’ve almost come full circle. Whereas the 1970s was the age of the organochlorine [like DDT], now we’re living in the age of the organofluorine, and the persistence is really nerve-wracking, because it wasn’t until decades later that we figured out the long-term consequences of using DDT. . . and we’re still dealing with the ramifications.”
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]]>The post Are Companies Using Carbon Markets to Sell More Pesticides? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>September 10, 2024 Update: Nori, one of the leading startup carbon market platforms for agriculture, shut its doors on September 9. On LinkedIn, co-founder Alexsandra Guerra said “the challenges of a stagnant Voluntary Carbon Market and tough funding environment proved too great.”
Last summer, two men shouted friendly greetings from golf carts as they zipped around a field-turned-parking lot, fetching farmers at pick-up trucks and dropping them in front of a barn. It was the annual field day at The Mill, a popular Mid-Atlantic retailer of agricultural products including seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides.
First, the farmers embarked on a wagon tour. One stop showed off a soybean yield trial. At another, a scientist presented research on a new class of nitrogen-fixing inputs. During a demo of a drone spraying a pesticide over rows of corn, the operators laughed as a gentle breeze blew the mist toward the onlookers. “Don’t worry, it’s just water!” they yelled.
Back at the barn, companies that sell their products at The Mill had set up folding tables to talk to farmers and hand out swag. Land O’Lakes, the company known to most Americans only as a longtime purveyor of butter wrapped in bright yellow packaging, had two adjoining tables showcasing two of its more specialized businesses: pesticides and carbon markets.
At those tables, farmers could grab an Advanced Acre Rx hat from WinField United, Land O’Lakes’ seed and chemical company, and a water bottle emblazoned with the logo for Truterra, its carbon market platform, in one fell swoop.
The display exemplified how, as Land O’Lakes’ annual report laid out earlier that year, the agricultural giant is marketing enrollment in a climate-smart farming initiative alongside its biggest profit driver: pesticides and seeds.
Land O’Lakes’ Truterra is unique in some ways, but it also fits the mold of what agricultural carbon markets have come to look like across the country over the last few years.
Carbon markets were first created decades ago as a means for companies to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by paying to reduce emissions somewhere else. Think: planting trees that hold carbon in South America to balance emissions from a factory in South Carolina.
And over the last several years, policymakers, environmental and farm groups, and private companies began hyping the idea that specific markets could be created to pay farmers for adopting practices that could reduce emissions and hold carbon in soil. Flashy startups including Nori and Indigo Ag jumped into the game, Democrats included the idea in their 2020 plan to address the climate crisis, and a bitterly divided Congress passed the Growing Climate Solutions Act on a bipartisan basis in an effort to jump-start the markets.
In this screenshot from Land O’Lakes’ 2022 Annual Report, the company describes how its “teams at Truterra and WinField United worked together to blaze a trail for farmers to improve their soil health and potentially become eligible for future market opportunities.”
As a result, a new era of paying farmers for carbon-holding practices became the talk of many farm conferences and climate panels, where the same points came up over and over. Spreading regenerative practices that build soil carbon across more cropland would produce so many other benefits, advocates said. Farmers would be able to hold water and nutrients in the soil, reduce pollution, and increase biodiversity. And over time, not only would they access a new source of revenue, regenerative practices would allow farmers to cut costs as they decreased the use of chemicals—including pesticides and fertilizer—producing yet another environmental win. In 2021, for example, The New York Times put that narrative in print by featuring a carbon-market farmer who had stopped tilling, diversified his crops, and planted cover crops, eventually building his soil health enough to completely eliminate the use of synthetic fertilizer.
While the highest-profile carbon markets are run by public entities like the state of California, many of the agricultural markets that have made more recent progress are run by powerful companies that are in the business of selling pesticides and fertilizers.
However, while the highest-profile carbon markets are run by public entities like the state of California or New England’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), many of the agricultural markets that have made more recent progress are run by powerful companies—including Bayer, Corteva Agriscience, and Land O’Lakes—that are in the business of selling those same pesticides and fertilizers.
In addition, even the independent platforms are now working closely with the same companies. Indigo launched a partnership with Corteva in 2021. (Last month, journalists at Bloomberg reported that the company and other startups that set out to disrupt bigger, traditional agriculture companies have struggled to connect with farmers on their own.) Meanwhile, close to half of the credits Nori has paid out to date have gone to Bayer’s enrolled farmers. Seventy-five percent of the credits Nori currently has available for buyers are linked to Bayer’s platform.
“Partnering with Bayer allowed Nori to scale and accelerate the impact we’re able to make, compared to what we could have accomplished by enrolling individual farmers one by one,” Radhika Moolgavkar, Nori’s VP of supply and methodology, said in an email. “We believe that to foster large-scale adoption of these practices, programs like Bayer Carbon are required to help with the monetary hurdles to transitioning to regenerative practices.”
However, others are concerned about the influence pesticide companies are exerting within the growing landscape of paying farmers for carbon, especially as taxpayer money floods in to boost their efforts and farmer field data becomes more and more valuable.
“From their perspective, these are future clients, or they may be existing clients,” said Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “They’re getting a tremendous amount of data from the farmer-participants. It puts them in a very strong position to help farmers manage whatever they’re dealing with on their farm, beyond climate-related stuff. It’s kind of a win-win: Get a farmer in the program, get the information, and get to sell them seeds or pest control.”
“It’s kind of a win-win: Get a farmer in the program, get the information, and get to sell them seeds or pest control.”
Bayer, for example, has linked its carbon program to other data platforms that drive product sales. And while many practices shown to hold the most carbon—like agroforestry and organic systems—can reduce or eliminate the need for pesticides over time, companies in the business of selling the chemicals are unlikely to recommend them, environmental groups say.
In fact, the two practices that dominate current markets—no-till and cover crops—require herbicides to succeed in the way they’re practiced on most commodity farms. Farmers use herbicides to kill weeds that they could otherwise till under and to kill cover crops before planting a cash crop. And most soil scientists agree that the jury is still out on whether those practices can hold carbon at a depth and for long enough to create meaningful climate outcomes.
New (Carbon) Markets for Products
When Land O’Lakes launched Truterra in 2016, the company set it up to leverage the power of its network of 60 agricultural retailers, which altogether have about 1,000 locations across the country, said Tom Ryan, Truterra’s former president, in an interview last year.
“Farmers place a great deal of trust in their seed dealers,” said Ryan. Those seed dealers, when they recommend products made by companies like Land O’Lakes WinField United, are uniquely suited to also convince farmers to sign on to programs that will pay them to adopt practices with environmental benefits, such as planting cover crops. And recommending the right products at the same time helps the farmers succeed at implementing those practices, he said.
The way Bayer engaged with the stores that sell its inputs was also what caught the attention of Jason Davidson, a food and agriculture campaigner at the environmental advocacy organization Friends of the Earth.
Davidson’s interest was piqued by a 2018 column published in a trade publication. In the article, journalist Paul Schrimpf wrote about a buzzy topic retailers were discussing at multiple industry events. Schrimpf explained that Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) had started including a data product called Climate FieldView in its rebate bundles, meaning retailers would have to also sell a certain number of FieldView subscriptions alongside seeds and pesticides to get company rebates they had long relied on. Many farmers, he wrote, still didn’t want to pay for the program, and he predicted retailers might consider eating the cost and enrolling them so they wouldn’t lose the rebate.
“That got us thinking, ‘Why, in this decade, are pesticide companies all of a sudden super interested in data?’” said Davidson, who later co-authored a report on the topic that was released last year. “I think it’s pretty safe to argue that Bayer and other pesticide manufacturers were interested in data because they saw it as a way to potentially increase sales.”
Bayer’s own documents seem to back that argument up. In its 2022 annual report, Bayer said Climate FieldView “enables us to use novel modeling to make custom product recommendations that are precisely tailored to each individual field. With these insights we can maximize the value of our seed and chemistry portfolio, help farmers expand participation in the carbon markets and food, feed, fiber, and fuel value chains, and lead Bayer toward digitally enabled business models and new opportunities for growth.”
In another presentation that year, the company reported that corn seed customers who used FieldView planted Bayer corn seeds at a higher seeding rate compared to the national average and those who opted for the premium FieldView Plus version generated 5 percent higher sales.
Today, farmers who want to enroll in Bayer’s carbon market have to first enroll in Climate FieldView. In an email, a Bayer spokesperson said its platform collects data that’s needed to calculate carbon sequestration and register carbon credits. “As with all Climate FieldView digital ag platform initiatives, the grower always owns their own data and controls who they choose to share that data with,” he said.
In addition to being the place where farmers input data that will allow them to get paid for carbon, the program recommends planting protocols and offers product discounts. In 2020, Reuters reported that Bayer offered farmers the option to get paid for their carbon in credits for more Bayer products. When asked if the company still offered that option, the spokesperson said Bayer pays growers in cash, “never in product credits.”
The spokesperson did not specifically answer whether farmers enrolled in its carbon program purchased more Bayer products but said, “While Bayer has a broad selection of industry-leading crop protection, seed and seed treatment products, growers are not required to purchase crop protection, seed, or seed treatment products to participate.”
Last year, the company outlined in a press release how it planned to “capitalize on opportunities presented by the shift to regenerative agriculture.” Carbon farming and digital platforms were on a list of market opportunities expected to generate more than $100 billion. “Importantly, by the middle of the next decade, Bayer envisions shaping regenerative agriculture on more than 400 million acres, built on the foundation of its leading agriculture input solutions,” it wrote.
A screenshot of an email sent to Bayer ForGround participants titled “Tips for Herbicide & Fungicide Applications” and with the sub-headline of “top tips and trends in reduced tillage, cover crops and carbon.”
That’s the rub, many environmental advocates and sustainable agriculture experts say: A market truly dedicated to helping farmers move the needle on climate would be grounded in helping farmers reduce fossil fuel-derived inputs over time, thereby reducing resource use, minimizing other environmental impacts, and saving them money.
“There’s a clear conflict of interest if you’re manufacturing a product and then making agronomic recommendations. We are really concerned about the idea that the companies that are manufacturing seeds and pesticides that are used together to make certain products—like neonicotinoid seed coatings—ubiquitous in industrial agriculture, that they are going to be collecting farm data and then using that data to make specific recommendations on how to farm,” Davidson said. “Even though the companies tout precision agriculture and data broadly as a way to reduce inputs, it’s really hard to imagine a world in which manufacturers of a product are going to tell their customers to buy and use less of their products.”
In response to a question about whether the platforms are used to sell farmers WinField United inputs, a Land O’Lakes spokesperson said that Truterra prohibits the use of farmer data for sales and marketing targeting. “Truterra’s programs focus on making practice changes that are best for the farmer and that means agronomically, economically, and environmentally,” they said.
Paying Only for Practices That Rely on Pesticides
Despite years of buzz about agricultural carbon markets, it’s hard to find farmers willing to talk about the experience of actually enrolling and participating.
“Part of it is just that your average farmer is not going to scream it from the rooftop,” said Aaron Shier, the government relations director at the National Farmers Union (NFU), and some of the markets likely come with confidentiality clauses. Still, Shier said that overall, not many NFU farmers are participating. The Iowa Farmers Union told Civil Eats the same. Both organizations, and other farmers we spoke to, said the main reason is the payments are still too low and unpredictable.
“It’s not worth my time,” said Josh Manske, who manages commodity grain fields in Iowa and Southern Minnesota. “Everybody’s getting a huge cut, and we’re left with the pennies.” And while Shier said he hadn’t heard any complaints around farmer data being used to lock in input purchasing or exert control over farmers, he said that “data privacy is very important to our members.”
The heavy lift involved in entering data was a big piece of conversations researchers at Hamilton College in upstate New York had with 17 row crop farmers—some conventional farmers participating in the markets and some certified organic farmers who weren’t eligible—in 2021.
In a paper published last fall, they shared major themes from those conversations, one of which centered on the farmers’ concerns around which practices are rewarded.
While the organic farmers were more worried that carbon markets would only support a small group of practices with climate benefits, both groups “raised concerns that carbon markets would inadequately support a full range of beneficial soil management practices,” the researchers wrote. “Some of these concerns focused on concerns that markets would incentivize activities that required heavy chemical inputs, which a farmer would have to purchase from a chemical company.”
Currently, Bayer, Corteva, and Truterra’s markets all pay farmers primarily to adopt no-till systems and to plant cover crops.
And there is a long history of companies using those specific practices to market pesticides linked to serious health risks. For example, as far back as the 1970s, Chevron Chemical promoted paraquat—an herbicide the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “highly poisonous” that is now linked to Parkinson’s disease risk and banned in dozens of countries—as a tool to convert to no-till farming. Farmers still use paraquat as an alternative to tilling for weed control in the U.S., and Syngenta’s website lists the chemical’s use in no-till systems as a key benefit.
For cover crops, standard practice is to kill the plants with a glyphosate-based herbicide before planting a cash crop like corn or soy. For example, on Corteva’s website, the company recommends its herbicide products that mix glyphosate with 2,4-D and lists “Don’t cut herbicide rates” as one key to cover crop success. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as a “probable carcinogen,” based especially on its potential link to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
CropLife America, the pesticide industry’s trade association, has dubbed no-till and cover crops “pesticide-enabled” farming practices. “Pesticides allow for sustainable conservation practices, such as no-till and cover crops, to successfully exist,” it says on its website.
Organic farmers who have long planted cover crops without chemical pesticides and some of whom practice no-till farming with a roller-crimper would disagree. But their practices, which have been shown to push carbon deeper into the soil, where it tends to stay put for longer, are typically not represented in these markets, which are designed to reward individual improvements to the standard row crop system.
CropLife America, the pesticide industry’s trade association, has dubbed no-till and cover crops “pesticide-enabled” farming practices.
And while cover crops and no-till practices both deliver multiple proven environmental benefits such as reducing soil erosion and nutrient runoff and holding water on farms, many soil scientists say their ability to meaningfully fix carbon in soil over time is not yet well-established due to questions around depth, permanence, and saturation.
Truterra is going beyond those two practices, and one of the new programs Tom Ryan, Truterra’s former president, was most excited to talk about last year was adding nitrogen management to the practices the platform would pay for. (Bayer also added nitrogen management to its program this year.)
In addition to harming health, rural economies, and wildlife due to water pollution, excess nitrogen applied to farm fields also creates emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that has 300 times more global warming impacts than carbon dioxide. As a result, unlike the as-yet-unknown climate potential of cover crops and no-till, reducing nitrogen fertilizer application has clear potential to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Still, Truterra’s nitrogen management program allows farmers to either reduce fertilizer or add a “stabilizer,” another product that helps prevent nitrogen leaching. Given the choice of which to recommend, it’s hard to imagine a retailer telling a farmer to buy less fertilizer, because doing so could reduce their yields (although stabilizers can help reduce the amount of fertilizer needed). Land O’Lakes’ spokesperson did not share specific data on which path farmers are choosing, saying some “use one or the other or both to best meet the specific needs of their fields.” The spokesperson added that farmers can choose any stabilizer, not just one made by WinField United, to qualify.
Land O’Lakes is specifically marketing enrollment in Truterra in conjunction with WinField United’s Advanced Acre Rx, a product that involves using a farmer’s data to recommend specific seeds, nutrients, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides and includes “season-long support from your local ag input retailer.” When a farmer is setting out to implement climate-smart practices, Ryan said, “We have to help them build that plan, which includes products.” Advanced Acre Rx is a prescription system that is sold as a way to target inputs for greater efficiency. Bayer also pointed to its resources that help farmers optimize and target inputs.
Impacting the Bigger Picture
Outside of the carbon markets run by pesticide companies, there are other platforms working to reward a wider swath of practices that provide climate benefits while also reducing crop inputs. Nori has one organic farmer enrolled in its market, for example, while Carbon Harvest is setting up a market to pay small farms to implement agroforestry projects.
But the Hamilton College researchers said the farmers in their study expressed concerns that chemical companies “could be involved in setting national government standards for carbon markets, which would then skew all carbon markets toward a specific style of farming and ignore other beneficial practices for carbon sequestration.”
One set of standards is already in the works, and the process is happening partially as a result of lobbying by pesticide companies and the wider agricultural industry.
Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia) first introduced the Growing Climate Solutions Act to initiate U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversight of carbon markets in 2020. It became a top priority for the industry, and in April 2022, CropLife America’s president and CEO Chris Novak praised the reintroduction of the act.
“The Growing Climate Solutions Act offers meaningful progress toward enabling farmer and landowner participation in voluntary carbon markets,” he said in a statement. “Regenerative farming practices such as no-till farming, conservation tillage, and the use of cover crops are made possible through the use of pesticides.” Bayer, Corteva, and Land O’Lakes all supported the bill, which Congress ultimately passed as part of a spending package at the end of 2022.
Now, the USDA is working to fulfill the requirements of the law. In October, it published a broad assessment of agriculture and carbon markets, followed by a February report explaining the next steps, including that it will evaluate the current carbon market protocols, determine which technical assistance providers are qualified to be listed by the agency, and create resources for farmers to navigate the landscape. At the end of May, the agency solicited public comment on those next steps as part of a larger Biden administration announcement around its policies and principles on voluntary carbon markets (which go beyond but include agriculture).
In an interview, Robert Bonnie, the Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation at the USDA, said the process for getting companies to share their specific protocols is still being worked out and public comments will help shape it. “Yes, we’re going to need information, we’re going to need to understand what’s behind them,” he said. “The critical part of all of this is that the public, consumers, investors, everybody has confidence that there’s going to be real gains to the climate as we undertake these practices and that the value in the marketplace is real.”
As to the various criticisms around companies that manufacture inputs running carbon markets, Bonnie said private sector investment is crucial to achieving climate progress on farms. “It’s really, really beneficial to have companies out there that are looking for ways to develop technologies and innovations that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and maintain agricultural productivity. That’s a good thing. We want that,” he said. “I think it puts a very high priority on making sure that the work we do around protocols is transparent and that we do this in a way that maintains public confidence.”
Bonnie said that the agency’s work on carbon markets fits into the larger picture at the USDA, where the agency is using many different tools to support climate-smart practices. “We’re trying to create value for farmers, ranchers, and forest owners that undertake climate-smart practices,” he said.
The crown jewel of that picture is Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program. When the agency solicited input on how to structure that program, CropLife America submitted a letter once again emphasizing the connection between climate-smart farming and pesticides.
“Reduced or no-till soil management and the use of cover crops are two critically important . . . practices that are enabled by pesticide tools,” it read. “There have been significant climate and soil quality benefits from these . . . practices (enabled by pesticide tools) to date, but there is great opportunity for increasing the scale and impact of these practices.”
One company already working to realize that opportunity is Truterra, which the USDA awarded $90 million in Climate-Smart Commodities funds. In September 2022, when Vilsack attended a Truterra kick-off event, it was held at the WinField United Innovation Center. In its agreement with the USDA, Truterra emphasized the impact its connection to the company would have, noting that it is “the largest U.S. distributor of crop inputs” and that its crop input services reach roughly half of harvested cropland acres in the country.
In response to the question of whether, at the core, one goal of carbon markets should be to reduce farm inputs including fossil fuel-derived pesticides and fertilizers, Bonnie said in some cases it may make sense but that in others, beneficial new products could be a better answer.
“We want to keep our eye on the prize here, and it may be that there that there are systems where reducing inputs or changing the mix of inputs or using inputs that enhance efficiency . . . allow us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining productivity. In many places, that’s part of the mix. But we’re not here trying to limit inputs per se, we’re trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
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]]>The post Op-ed: Neonicotinoid Pesticides Keep Killing Pollinators. Here’s How We Can Help. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>For years at our farm in central North Carolina, we fed ourselves from our gardens and orchard. We had plenty of food to share, courtesy of the native bees here. Our apple, blueberry, and squash plants all relied upon insect pollination to make fruit. Then, in 2017, our harvests were interrupted because the bees disappeared.
As a bee veterinarian, I looked for answers. Where had the animals that had helped feed us so reliably gone? I learned that a wetland near our farm had been contaminated by insecticides, which kill pest insects, but they can also kill bees. I also learned that agriculture had been transformed in the last 20 years. Instead of insecticides being applied when needed, the chemicals were being used most of the time on many row crops—and they were a newer, more persistent type called neonicotinoids, or neonics.
Neonics are the most commonly used insecticides in the world. They dissolve in water and can spread over the land, far from the treated fields. Although the poisoned wetland waters never touched our food plants, the pollinators that supported our farm were decimated. Our orchard was barren for years.
“Neonics are so potent that one treated corn seed contains enough insecticide to kill more than 80,000 honeybees.”
During my investigation, I followed the work of insect scientists and beekeepers who, for over 15 years, had raised the alarm that overuse of neonics was a major cause of insect deaths around the world. This startling decline in populations of pollinators and other insects led to the term “insect apocalypse.” Scientists’ work pointed the way to what had happened at our farm: An analysis of water samples from the wetland revealed a particularly persistent neonic.
Neonics are so potent that a single treated corn seed contains enough insecticide to kill more than 80,000 honeybees. If a bee doesn’t die right away, its ability to reproduce, gather food, and fight off disease can be damaged. Among bees, neonic exposure is cumulative: If a meal of contaminated nectar sickens a bee, additional feedings may kill it. Neonics infuse all parts of exposed plants and persist in the soil. They can poison native bee adults and their young as well, disrupting or eliminating whole family lines.
In 2022, a multi-year New York state study of native bee populations found that 24 percent of bee species were at risk of loss, and another 11 percent may have disappeared completely. New York officials took action. Last winter, New York became the first state to restrict the planting of neonic-coated crop seeds; the law will take effect in 2027.
Although 12 other states have restrictions of some kind on neonics, they haven’t controlled their largest use: as a coating on crop seeds. By restricting planting neonic-coated crop seed, New York’s law promises to reduce insecticides in New York’s waterways in future years. But cropland outside New York may remain a risky place to be a bee.
Critical Pollinators Under Threat
In the U.S. and Canada, honeybees kept for honey and crop pollination are all variants of one imported European species: Apis mellifera. But the same region hosts more than 3,600 species of wild bees that pollinate flowering plants and crops alike. Native bees are diverse in numbers, size, and function. Some are specifically adapted to a single species of flowering plant. And among these pairs, the loss of a bee species can mean the loss of the plant dependent upon it.
Because native bees are disappearing, I see every one as precious; each animal can contribute its unique genetic makeup to the greater population. We know from studies of other animal populations that size matters: A large population increases the odds for the genetic diversity required for animals to adapt to today’s environmental challenges. A small, inbred bee population is frequently a population in decline.
We’re already experiencing the consequences of bee loss. A recent global study published in Environmental Health Perspectives showed how inadequate insect pollination can reduce economic and food security through the loss of valuable foods such as fruits and insect-pollinated nuts and vegetables. Matthew Smith and colleagues estimated that worldwide, almost half a million excess deaths from chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers could be attributed to the loss of these nutritious foods.
With fewer bees to do the work, multiple countries now rely upon hand pollination for major crops. In the U.S., gardeners are advised to try hand pollination to grow squashes and pumpkins if they have poor yields.
People aren’t the only ones dependent upon bees. Entire ecosystems depend on them. For instance, at our farm, I witnessed the impact of the loss of small, native bees. Native, fruiting viburnum shrubs we’d planted for wildlife weren’t pollinated for years. Eastern carpenter bees, the first bees to return to the farm in 2020 after the barren years, couldn’t pollinate the tiny viburnum flowers because the bees are too big, and our distant neighbor’s honeybees weren’t interested in the musky-scented blooms. The smallest insect pollinators have yet to return, and the loss of wild viburnum fruits has led to fewer local birds.
Beside insecticide contamination, bees face other challenges, too.
High temperatures threaten native bee families in subsoil nests; sprawling development erases bee homes; and bees starve as the forests, meadows, and shrubland flowers that provide essential nectar and pollen are lost to other land uses.
“We know how to support healthy populations of native bees—and we need to act now.”
Varroa mites are parasites that attach to honeybees and transmit lethal viruses to their bee hosts. Mites are a major reason that approximately 40 percent of U.S. honeybee colonies have been lost each winter over the last decade. Mite-infested honeybees can spread viruses to native bees, sickening or killing them.
We have the information we need to slow bee decline. We know how to support healthy populations of native bees—and we need to act now.
How We Can Slow the Decline of Bees
If we grow food, have a yard or garden, and we must control pests, pesticides should be the last option―not the first.
We can choose organic food options to reduce bee exposures to neonic-treated crops. Organically grown foods don’t use neonics.
We can create or leave healthy spaces for bees to live, such as dead wood, bare soil for ground nesting bees, or clusters of undisturbed plants for bumble bees that like to nest in rodent tunnels beneath those plants. In warm years, these habitats may be particularly valuable if they’re located on a north-facing slope, as they provide bees a cooler place to raise their babies.
Even without a yard, we can plant more flowers to feed bees. Pots of flowers or herbs can support tiny families. Regardless of the size of a flower garden, choosing flowering plants free of harmful pesticides is crucial. Unfortunately, “pollinator-friendly” plants are not necessarily free of contamination. Plant consumers need to ask questions about how the plants are grown, as there are no rules or signs required to identify pollinator-safe plants. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation offers resources for those who want to better support bees and butterflies.
Finally, beekeepers can prioritize timely Varroa mite control to keep honeybee colonies strong through the winter while also protecting native bees that share local flowers.
Today, our farm is recovering. More native bees are active, and more fruit trees were pollinated this year. But I fear that we may never enjoy the diversity of animals that used to live here. Native bees have small territories. When populations disappear, new bees must rediscover the land and settle to raise their families.
Join me in working to support the native bees who do the work of providing an abundant food future for us and for all the other creatures that depend upon them.
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]]>The post Changing How We Farm Might Protect Wild Mammals—and Fight Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Tom Farquhar planted several large plots of beneficial flowers around his vegetable farm in Montgomery County, Maryland. Once a conventional corn and soybean farm, the idea was to control pests at the Certified Naturally Grown operation by increasing the number of beneficial predator insects and spiders. And the method worked: “We don’t have too many big insect problems,” he said.
But the crop-free plantings have had another effect, Farquhar explained. They have also increased the number of mammals on the farm. Strips of trees, bushes, grasses, or flowers around agricultural or pasture fields can house higher numbers of small mammals than cropland. Additionally, the diversity of Farquhar’s crops and the chemical-free nature of his farm also attracted and supported small mammals, he said.
“We see lots of rabbits, groundhogs, mice, and voles in our fields,” he wrote in an email to Civil Eats. “Also, raccoons, especially when sweet corn is ripening.”
Because small animals can damage crops, the farm fortunately also has predators such as foxes, hawks, and eagles helping keep them in check. “The coyote is now a resident in our area, and that was never true until recently,” said Farquhar. “Maybe in the last 10 years, [coyotes] began to come in, and they also will eat the small mammals. So, we got nature happening out there in a big way.”
While industrial farming feeds the multitudes, it is also a main driver of biodiversity loss across the country. More than 18 percent of North American mammals are decreasing in population, and nearly a quarter of the more than 400 mammal species in the U.S. are listed on the endangered species list.
In addition to every species’ inherent value, mammals are vital in the natural order. They play critical roles in their ecosystems, sustaining and keeping in check species higher and lower on the food chain. They disperse seeds, pollinate, and transfer nutrients across landscapes, supporting healthy plant populations, and they alter their environments in ways that enhance biodiversity. They even mitigate climate change.
“Maybe in the last 10 years, [coyotes] began to come in, and they also will eat the small mammals. So, we got nature happening out there in a big way.”
The burgeoning human population, however, means agricultural impacts are only set to increase. Agriculture already takes up over half of U.S. land, with cropland expanding by 1 million acres per year, fueling habitat loss for wildlife and mammals.
Yet these agricultural areas present a golden opportunity: What if farms could help other species, especially the charismatic, furred variety? While increasing the number of mammals on farms can create some challenges, losing the bulk of small and mid-sized mammals presents challenges that are even larger. And farming sustainably—with organic methods and techniques like agroforestry that encourage on-farm biodiversity—offers a ray of hope to slow the decline of our closest relatives.
The Impacts of Agriculture on Mammals
Though the changing climate, the spread of invasive species, and pollution all negatively affect wildlife, agriculture has had a massive impact on the world’s mammals.
First of all, farmland reduces mammals’ natural habitats and diminishes their ability to find shelter as well as food and prey, explained Koen Kuipers, a researcher at Radboud University in the Netherlands. For instance, agriculture can destroy forest habitats that certain bat species, like the endangered Indiana bat or northern long-eared bat, use for roosting and foraging.
Runoff from U.S. farms is also a main source of pollution for rivers, lakes, and wetlands. Excess nutrients from fields can wash into nearby waterways, one of the greatest threats for freshwater mammals including dolphins, otter, and terrestrial mammals that gather their food from waterways.
And that’s not the only bad news. Pesticides can harm or kill mammals and can also reduce prey and attract invasive species that compete with native mammals for resources, explained Gaurav Singh-Varma, a researcher at the University of British Columbia. For instance, mountain lions, deer, coyotes, foxes, and bobcats can die by ingesting bait meant for pests or by eating pesticide-contaminated prey.
“All the pesticides and fungicides or whatever type of management that big farmlands like to use can have a direct and indirect effect on the mammals in the area,” Singh-Varma said. “It affects the type of habitats that the animals can use.”
In addition, as the largest consumer of freshwater globally, agriculture pulls directly from freshwater habitats which, in turn, harms species such as beavers, rabbits, mink, otters, and water shrews.
How Mammals Help on Farms
Mammals are vital to the functioning of natural landscapes, including those devoted to agriculture.
For example, bats are voracious predators of insects that damage crops. By one estimate, these flying mammals save U.S. farmers $3.7 billion annually. Bats also pollinate plants such as bananas and guavas grown in Hawaii and Florida, agave in California, and coconuts in Puerto Rico.
Other mammals such as skunks, badgers, foxes, and coyotes also do their part to suppress insects, rodents, and other pests, as do wolves and deer.
Meanwhile, “beavers are natural hydrologists and so the dams they build allow water to pond in one place and you get more infiltration,” explained Daniel Rath, an agricultural scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “And the water that’s stored in the soil is then able to be used by growing plants. It helps with resilience to extreme weather conditions such as drought and floods.”
An endangered Delmarva fox squirrel. (Photo CC-licensed by Brian Gratwick)
Even negatively viewed mammals can be beneficial. Deer, for example, help cycle nutrients and fertilize soil. In addition, burrowing mammals like mice and moles increase organic matter and water infiltration in soil, explained Rath.
In addition, despite concerns that the sustainable practices that support mammals may reduce crop yields, some indications point to the opposite conclusion.
“By diversifying the system, you provide a lot more habitat for these natural pollinators to pollinate crops,” said Singh-Varma. “And there’s research to suggest that in these diversified systems, you can have smaller plot levels, or farmland, but still have an equivalent amount of output that you would get with conventional pesticide-heavy agricultural systems.”
He explained this boost may come from increased nutrient cycling and an abundance of species both above and below ground including native pollinators, birds, mammals, fungi, microbiota, and earthworms.
Supporting Mammals With Biodiversity
Though agriculture represents a top threat to mammals, when carried out with an eye toward biodiversity, it can also be a force for good.
“Diversification is an important step in acknowledging that agricultural systems are part of wider, complex natural ecosystems that are deeply interconnected and provide numerous benefits to society,” said Rath. “A diverse landscape that has a variety of plants, a variety of inputs, and a variety of land-use types can really help with that [wildlife] diversity.”
For instance, adding natural elements like hedgerows, or uncultivated strips about 15 feet in width, alongside agricultural fields can greatly benefit mammals, because they supply food and shelter to a variety of wildlife, including hedgehogs, bats, voles, and mice.
Agroforestry, or adding trees and shrubs to crops or pastures, is also advantageous—supporting a diversity of mammals including deer, black bears, squirrels, and bats, along with a variety of birds and invertebrates. The patches of shrubs in agroforestry provide protection and food for mammals, supporting these higher levels of diversity.
“A diverse landscape that has a variety of plants, a variety of inputs, and a variety of land-use types can really help with that [wildlife] diversity. The idea that agriculture and biodiversity preservation are sort of inherently at odds is kind of outdated.”
A recent study led by Kuipers looked at the benefits of diversifying agricultural landscapes in the U.S. and around the world for several mammals including bats, rodents, opossums, and hedgehogs. “We found that when these natural elements were included in croplands, and also for forest plantations, that species abundance and species richness can be similar . . . to natural reference conditions,” said Kuipers. Conversely, without the addition of hedgerows, trees, and other uncultivated areas, the abundance and diversity of lactating critters was reduced by up to a third.
Agriculture can play another important role for mammals: connectivity. Wildlife-friendly practices like planting grassland or forest strips and diversifying crops on farms can help animals move across the landscape. In turn, this allows gene flow between mammal populations, migration between summer and overwintering habitats, dispersal of individuals into new areas, and range shifts north spurred by global warming. But the context of the diversity matters, Kuipers found. Mammals were more likely to move through agricultural areas surrounded by natural vegetation than development.
Still, some mammals may benefit more than others from diverse farm fields. In his study, Kuipers found that the composition, or the particular set of mammalian species, varied between cropland and natural habitat.
“Even though the average abundance and richness of species is similar in cropland and natural habitats, we also found that the species that do occur there are slightly different,” he told Civil Eats. “So, there is an impact.”
This difference may come down to the type of mammal considered.
Specialist mammals, which occur in only a few specific habitats, were impacted more by the agricultural sites than species that inhabit a variety of habitats, explained Kuipers.
While diversified farm fields have proven to help wildlife, organic agriculture also supports habitat for many species, as it prevents the emission of hazardous chemicals that harm wildlife, along with their prey and habitat.
A good example is Christina Allen’s 10-acre farm in Maryland. With development sprawling across her neighborhood, the property she runs with organic practices with her husband appears to be something of a refuge for mammals.
“We have other critters like skunks, woodchucks, lots of possums, foxes, and even coyotes on occasion,” Allen wrote in an email to Civil Eats. “With development pressure, we notice the poor critters come here as they have to move somewhere . . . but I don’t consider them farm animals; they are wildlife. As long as they do what they do naturally, we coexist with them.”
Fishers, small mammals resembling a cross between a bear and a cat, are another notable appearance on Allen’s farm. Once extirpated from Maryland, they were reintroduced in the 1960s and made a strong comeback in the western part of the state. The fact that Allen’s farm is in eastern Maryland and beyond the lines of their known range shows even rare mammals call their farm home.
A North American fisher. (Photo CC-licensed by Bethany Week, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
This bounty of mammals may have to do with some of their practices. They avoid using pesticides and heavy equipment that could compact the soil, plant flowers in their gardens to attract beneficial insects, and maintain meadows with native plants.
When Mammals Cause Damage
Despite their benefits, mammals can also cause headaches for farmers by eating their crops and farm animals. Organic farmers tend to have a more positive view of wildlife than conventional farmers, who often see them as a problem that needs to be controlled.
“Mammals and humans want to occupy the same landscape,” said Rath. “Because of agricultural expansion that’s increasing conversion of natural ecosystems to ranch land or farmland, we encroach on these natural habitats, and so these organisms come into conflict with us. One of the main examples is the wolf population in the American West—and you have in Montana, Idaho, and California issues with predation of livestock by predators.”
Even Farquhar feels some frustration. “You want to see the mammals thrive, but we’re happy that nature has its own predators for the mammals that would eat our little vegetables,” he said.
In Maryland, Allen had to add extra measures to protect her chickens from predators. “I did have to put huge aviaries up to protect my poultry from coyotes and sometimes a persistent fox,” she wrote in an email to Civil Eats. “The poultry get locked in their big open-air aviaries every night so the wild things can do their thing . . . hopefully, eat mice and rabbits!”
Singh-Varma echoed these sentiments about human-wildlife conflict. “It can directly impact animals through farmers often killing mammals that start to encroach on their agricultural land, especially big predators,” he said. “That’s a common phenomenon and a common problem all around the
There are better ways to protect livestock from predators, however. These include keeping guard animals such as dogs, maintaining areas with food and prey away from the farm, putting up fencing, and providing housing for farm animals as Allen did.
Rath also explained that nonlethal removal and relocation are also options for minimizing conflict.
Supporting Mammals
The world’s need for food is predicted to increase by 60 percent by 2050—and likely won’t stop there, as human population levels are expected to climb until 2080.
As mammals face ever-increasing threats to their existence, diversified agriculture could become increasingly relevant to their survival.
Farmers interested in supporting mammals are in luck. Agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service promote sustainable agriculture practices benefitting both rural communities and wildlife.
A variety of nonprofit organizations, like the National Wildlife Federation and NRDC, also work with farmers to promote sustainable practices while maintaining and improving wildlife habitat.
“There are enormous benefits to the global environment associated with sustainable agriculture,” Farquhar said from his Maryland farm. “We love what we’re doing.”
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]]>The post Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>January 29, 2025 update: Iowa state legislators reintroduced the bill, now called Senate Study Bill 1051, that would shield Bayer and other pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits based on claims their products caused cancer and other illnesses.
April 1, 2024 update: Two days after Civil Eats reported on this matter, a group of senators signed a letter addressed to Senate leaders opposing “all efforts to preempt state and local authority to regulate pesticides.”
On TikTok, Iowa State Representative Megan Srinivas is angry.
“To me,” she says, pointing at herself with both hands, her eyebrows raised, “Iowa’s farmers matter more than corporate interests.”
Srinivas, a Democrat, posted the video on February 7 to draw attention to a bill that was just starting to make its way through the statehouse. If passed, the legislation could prevent individuals who use pesticides from suing manufacturers based on the argument that the manufacturer should have warned them the products could cause cancer or another illness.
Srinivas is a physician, and one specific concern added to her outrage. Less than a year earlier, the Iowa Cancer Registry released data showing Iowa now has the second highest cancer rate in the country, after Kentucky, and is the only state where rates significantly increased between 2015 and 2019. For the first time, researchers at the Iowa Cancer Consortium have a plan to evaluate whether the incredible volume of weed- and bug-killers used in the state is a contributing factor (although an annual report released at the end of February focused more on high rates of binge drinking).
However, while other states have seen a flurry of more than 100,000 lawsuits brought by individuals claiming Roundup—the most widely used commercial product that contains the weedkiller glyphosate—had caused their cancers, Iowa stands apart. Especially in agriculture, most people trust the safety of pesticides, locals say, and Roundup is the most common and coveted.
“There’s still that culture of, ‘It’s only Roundup,’” said Rob Faux, an Iowa farmer and the communications manager for the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). “They see it as low-risk . . . and there is a latent fear that glyphosate will be taken away. The standard response we get from legislators is, ‘Well, you know, those are frivolous lawsuits and glyphosate’s safe.’”
That’s a sentiment that Bayer Crop Science can use to its advantage.
Bayer purchased Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, in 2018. Ever since, the world’s now second-largest farm chemical company has been steadily executing a five-point plan to fight back against the aforementioned lawsuits.
Now, insiders say it’s using the outsized sway it holds among the public and elected officials in agricultural states to quietly execute a new strategy: Pass laws, state by state, that take away farmers’ and other individuals’ ability to sue if they get sick.
“I would argue that this is the sixth prong of their plan,” said Jonathan Oppenheimer, the government relations director at the Idaho Conservation League (ICL), where he’s been working with a coalition of groups to fight an identical bill that is also being pushed by Bayer. “It’s written in invisible ink.”
For example, when the Iowa bill was first put forward, “the only lobbyists who were paying attention were Bayer’s lobbyists,” Faux said, “so you can kind of put two and two together.”
The bills introduced in Iowa and Idaho include some identical text, as highlighted here.
Starting in the Iowa House subcommittee hearing that inspired Srinivas to take action, Bayer lobbyists Brad Epperly and Craig Mischo presented the bill to the subcommittee. There, Srinivas said their language on the kinds of studies that exist linking Roundup to potential cancer risk was misleading. “That subcommittee [meeting] had so much misinformation that people just believed,” she told Civil Eats. “To still have a bill [move forward] was very concerning.”
Insiders say Bayer is using the outsized sway it holds among the public and elected officials in agricultural states to quietly execute a new strategy: Pass laws, state by state, that take away farmers’ and other individuals’ ability to sue if they get sick.
In an email, Bayer Crop Science representative Brian Leake said the company maintains that “the overwhelming weight of science as well as the assessments of the EPA and leading health regulators and scientists worldwide” support the company’s position that the product is safe and non-carcinogenic.
While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as a “probable carcinogen,” pointing to many animal studies and epidemiological evidence that link it especially to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In court, judges and juries have repeatedly found the body of research presented to be convincing.
They have also been presented with reams of evidence documenting how Monsanto worked to influence scientific studies and discredit any research that found significant risks for years. “There is strong evidence . . . that Monsanto does not particularly care whether its product is in fact giving people cancer, focusing instead on manipulating public opinion and undermining anyone who raises genuine and legitimate concern about the issue,” U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria said during one 2019 trial.
Now, in addition to Iowa and Idaho, similar bills have been introduced in Missouri and Florida. At the same time, the pesticide industry’s trade association CropLife America is working hard to pass a federal law that would bar states from passing their own laws that restrict pesticide use based on risks.
The multi-pronged strategy is just one example of how multi-billion-dollar global companies use their influence to change laws and keep pesticides on the market—and the stakes in this case are high.
The bills don’t name specific chemicals, the companies that make them, or individual illnesses. If passed, then, they could seriously curtail citizens’ ability to seek compensation for any health harms caused by any pesticide. Last year, for example, farmers in multiple states brought lawsuits against Syngenta, the ChemChina-owned company that makes the herbicide paraquat. Paraquat is banned in dozens of countries based on its toxicity and has been linked to Parkinson’s disease.
“We have Iowa farmers who have brought lawsuits recently for Parkinson’s and paraquat,” Faux said. “To emphasize that it’s all pesticides [that are included] would be a very quick way for the bill to lose any support. That’s why the messaging is glyphosate.”
In addition to Iowa and Idaho, similar bills have been introduced in Missouri and Florida. At the same time, the pesticide industry’s trade association CropLife America is working hard to pass a federal law that would bar states from passing their own laws that restrict pesticide use based on risks.
Bayer’s Leake declined a request for an interview and sent a statement that reads, in part, “We support state legislation alongside dozens of other agricultural organizations because the future of American farming depends on reliable science-based regulation of important crop protection products that the EPA has determined safe for use.”
A Syngenta representative declined a request for an interview and the opportunity to provide comments. On its website, the company maintains that “scientific evidence does not support a causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease” and that the herbicide “is safe for its intended and labelled use.” In Iowa, Syngenta backed an early version of the bill, but its lobbyists have since registered against later versions.
Serving Constituents or Pesticide Companies?
On February 6, the day before Srinivas posted her video in Iowa, Idaho Senator Mark Harris, a Republican, began a presentation at a Senate committee meeting. His order of business was to present a bill that matched the Iowa legislation nearly word for word.
Harris represents Soda Springs, where Bayer operates a 540-acre processing plant to manufacture glyphosate. Rather than make his own case for giving pesticide companies’ immunity from claims of health harms, he turned his time over to James Curry, Bayer’s deputy director of state and local government affairs.
Curry led with Bayer’s history of mining phosphorus in Idaho to make glyphosate, which it had been doing since 1952. He argued that when used according to the label requirements, glyphosate was safe. Bayer’s legal costs were creating uncertainties, and according to the minutes, “he stated the industry needed help from the legislature to ensure its ability to mine.”
It was only a month into 2024, but the company had already reported spending more than $6,000 lobbying for the single bill in Idaho, compared to just $800 spent on any lobbying in the state the entire year prior.
Both nationally and in individual farm states, Bayer and other pesticide companies join and support overlapping associations and trade groups that involve industry peers and yield influence behind the scenes. In Idaho, for example, the Food Producers of Idaho have been involved in lobbying for the bill. Bayer is a voting member of the Food Producers of Idaho and one of the organization’s “platinum” sponsors for 2024. Other members include Idaho’s sugar beet growers, who have almost universally adopted planting beets genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate.
Individuals representing the industry testified in support of the bill at the hearing. In emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know, Monsanto employees (before the Bayer purchase) listed “inoculate key grower associations” as one of a few important steps in a strategy to keep Roundup on the market after IARC’s carcinogen designation.
“The more layers of the onion you peel back, the more you realize how the system is just tilted toward industry,” said ICL’s Oppenheimer, who attended the Idaho hearing.
Back in Iowa, groups including the Agribusiness Association of Iowa and the Iowa Biotechnology Association have lobbied for the immunity bill. The Agribusiness Association of Iowa counts Bayer and all of the other largest pesticide manufacturers among its members and lists a Bayer employee as an “at-large director.” Bayer is also a member of the Iowa Biotechnology Association and holds a board seat.
Last year, the Agribusiness Association of Iowa hosted a “2023 kickoff fundraising reception” for Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig and two members of the Iowa legislature, Representative Mike Sexton and Senator Dawn Driscoll, both Republicans. Sexton has received campaign donations from both Bayer and Syngenta during campaigns; Driscoll has received donations from Syngenta and the Agribusiness Association of Iowa’s PAC. Outside of the Senate, Driscoll works for an agribusiness consulting company that has worked with Syngenta as a client.
As chairs of the House and Senate agriculture committees, respectively, Sexton and Driscoll have helped move the bill forward in each chamber.
Neither Sexton nor Driscoll responded to requests for comment.
Secretary Naig’s communications director said the Secretary has not been involved with the pesticide immunity bills at all. But Austin Frerick, an Iowa-based agriculture policy expert and author of Barons, pointed to Naig’s resume as an example of how industry ties are commonplace and deeply rooted in Iowa’s state government.
Starting in 2000, Naig worked at CropLife America, the pesticide industry trade association, the Agribusiness Association of Iowa, and then the Iowa Biotechnology Association. From there, he went to work on government lobbying at Monsanto. In 2013, he was hired by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. When the top position became available in 2018, Governor Kim Reynolds, a Republican, appointed him.
That appointment “told me where real power is in the state,” Frerick said. “You’ve got to view Iowa as an extraction economy. The whole political class is in on it.”
When Naig had to run for re-election later, Monsanto handed him $10,000, his largest 2018 donation. In elections since, Bayer has donated thousands in most cycles, alongside the other biggest pesticide manufacturers, Syngenta and Corteva Agriscience.
The Fight to Stop the Bills
Still, the elected officials and coalition of public health and environmental advocacy organizations pushing back on the bills are succeeding in their efforts. The mounting lawsuits around paraquat and its foreign ownership are their weapon of choice.
In Srinivas’ TikTok video, her language is pointed, as she calls it out for being “Chinese-government owned.”
Her point? Since Syngenta is owned by ChemChina and makes paraquat, if any of the pesticide immunity bills pass, it would make it harder for American citizens to hold a Chinese company accountable for potential harms.
Plus, unlike Roundup and other products made with glyphosate, China, the European Union, and the United Kingdom consider paraquat dangerous enough to have banned it in agriculture. (A single sip can kill a human.) Despite decades of legal battles and dozens of new studies that link long-term exposure to Parkinson’s disease, the EPA recently reapproved its safety when used with proper precautions.
Whatever the pesticide, Bayer’s argument is that the warnings and precautions the EPA outlines on its labels are adequate. In his email, Bayer’s Leake argued that the bills would not prevent anyone from suing a pesticide manufacturer but rather would ensure the EPA’s labels are sufficient to satisfy health and safety warnings.
But those warning labels focus on acute risks, such as what will happen if you drink the chemical or breathe in the spray. And experts say that the agency’s process is not set up to assess long-term risks of lower-dose exposure.
“It will not warn you about frequent low-dose exposure leading to Parkinson’s,” said PANNA’s Faux, so if more studies are published in the coming years that offer further proof of the link, bills like these would prevent individuals from seeking recourse. Historically, there are countless examples where the risks of pesticides approved as safe came to light only years after they were in use; DDT and chlorpyrifos are good examples. “Iowa likes to say we value our farmers, that’s what we lean into,” he said. “Well, there are some farmers, some family farmers, who stood up and said, ‘We’re dealing with illness that we feel might have been caused by pesticides.’ You don’t abandon them.”
Federal Bills Also Threaten State Power to Label
While the state-level bills agrichemical companies are working to push through would make it harder for individuals to sue companies when they believe products have caused their illnesses, the companies are simultaneously working on federal legislation that would weaken states’ ability to warn residents of risks.
Last year, representatives Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and Jim Costa (D-California) introduced the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, which would prohibit states from putting their own warning labels on pesticides in addition to those required by the EPA.
For example, in California, Proposition 65 requires companies to put a warning label on all products that contain ingredients classified by IARC as “probable human carcinogens.” Since glyphosate fits the bill, Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides would have to carry the label (although a court ruling changed that in 2020). If the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act passed, it would make it illegal for California to put that label on those products.
Now, CropLife is using its political influence in D.C. to ramp up its campaign to get the language from the bill included in the upcoming farm bill. As the pesticide manufacturers’ membership association, CropLife pools funds from Bayer and other pesticide companies and donates to candidates through a PAC while also courting lawmakers.
For example, at its annual gathering last week, it hosted two receptions where company representatives could mingle with either Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) or Representative Adrian Smith (R-Nebraska) in exchange for a campaign contribution. The organization also lobbies on Capitol Hill and works on messaging campaigns.
In February, the group ran ads in Politico’s Morning Ag newsletter, influential among policymakers and other key players in D.C, which framed the bill as necessary to protect American farmers. “U.S. farmers’ access to pesticides, which are critical for growing crops in an affordable and sustainable way, is in jeopardy because of misguided state regulatory efforts. . . . Over 360 agricultural and other groups support the bipartisan Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act to help the U.S. correct course,” one ad read. To garner public support, the group has been running similar ads on Facebook.
What’s Next at the State Level?
At this point, Faux and Oppenheimer are working with a coalition of groups across state lines, and they’re optimistic that their messages are gaining traction.
In Iowa, after the bill failed to move in the House, it passed in the Senate Agriculture Committee but then stalled there. Then, last week, it was reintroduced in the Senate as an appropriations bill. This time, it included a new clause specifying that it would not apply to “any product made by a People’s Republic of China state-owned enterprise.” While the session is nearing its end, Faux said there is still time for it to move further, since the legislature often goes beyond its posted scheduled.
“We’re sacrificing our future for the present,” said Brian Lenney, a Republican. “And lastly, I don’t think giving lifetime immunity to multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies was on our constituents’ bingo card when they sent us here.”
But even if it fails, the groups are already looking to the next session in 2025. “If it looks like it’s going to go away quietly, we need to be ready for the next [session],” he said, because it could mean that “they decided to modify it based on the lessons learned and come back next year with it.”
In Idaho, the bill has already been modified three times. After the Senate committee narrowly voted it down, a new version of the bill was introduced in the House, with small tweaks meant to get some of the doubting lawmakers on board. However, it was scheduled to be presented in a House committee in early March, when, to everyone’s surprise, lawmakers deleted it from the agenda hours before the meeting started. Then, a slightly modified version was introduced in the Senate last week. Given the limited time remaining in the session, Oppenheimer believes it’s unlikely to pass.
But the bill’s future is still just as unclear as it was in the original Idaho hearing. There, on both sides of the aisle, lawmakers went out of their way to praise the agriculture industry. Some named Bayer specifically. But then, some who presented as supportive went on to say that they were still voting no, often citing family members who suffered through cancer diagnoses and discomfort with the idea that this would preemptively let powerful companies off the hook.
“We’re sacrificing our future for the present,” said Brian Lenney, a Republican. “And lastly, I don’t think giving lifetime immunity to multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies was on our constituents’ bingo card when they sent us here.”
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]]>From Washington to Pennsylvania, farmers diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease have filed lawsuits against the maker of a popular herbicide, based on research that shows a potential link between the chemical and the disease. In California, researchers have connected insecticide exposure that farmworkers’ children experienced in the womb to a higher risk of behavioral problems into adolescence.
In Mead, Nebraska, one company’s handling of discarded seeds coated with the most common insecticides in the country led to water, air, and soil contamination that killed bees and other animals. Researchers are currently studying how the levels of the chemicals found in area homes might impact residents’ long-term health. At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, officials found those same insecticides are likely to harm as many as three-quarters of the country’s endangered plants and animals.
For most Americans, the 400,000 tons of chemicals used to kill weeds, bugs, and fungi each year are invisible. But as Civil Eats’ reporting has shown over the past 15 years, the impacts of those pesticides are profound and span the entire food chain—from threatening important organisms in soil to causing illness due to acute exposure during use.
Over the past few decades, attention to those risks has grown in some ways, as evidenced by the annual popularity of Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen campaign, among others. However, as sales of organic food nearly doubled in the U.S., topping $60 billion in 2022, and attention to regenerative agriculture practices soared, pesticide use continued to increase.
In fact, in 2020, American farmers beat out every other country in the world in terms of the volume of pesticides applied, according to an analysis from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). And between 1990 and 2020, the amount of pesticides used per acre increased by 33 percent.
During that same time period, a series of mergers has made the top pesticide and seed manufacturers bigger and more powerful than ever. Four companies—ChemChina (which owns Syngenta), Bayer (which absorbed Monsanto), BASF, and Corteva Agriscience (formerly Dow and DuPont)—now control more than 62.3 percent of the world’s pesticide sales. In the U.S., that number is likely much higher.
And the strategies some of those companies have employed over the years to keep products linked to serious risks on the market are increasingly well-documented in court records.
There are countless questions to be asked, studied, and debated regarding when and where pesticides are necessary or appropriate, which Civil Eats’ regular reporting will continue to explore.
In this series, however, we will investigate whether consolidated corporate power may be contributing to the ubiquitous use of chemicals, making it difficult to sort facts from marketing or engage in rigorous cost-benefit analyses. We’ll report on how chemical companies use their influence to shape what we know about the toxicity of individual pesticides, how pesticides are used, and the federal and state policies that are intended to protect people from risks.
While the glyphosate taking up residence in Americans’ bodies and the neonicotinoids filling the country’s waterways may be invisible, the scale and urgency of the planet’s biodiversity crisis—and the ways in which research finds pesticide use contributes to it—are becoming more apparent.
Join us as we examine the potential role that pesticide companies play in all of this.
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]]>The post Can Taller Cover Crops Help Clean the Water in Farm Country? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Under pewter-colored skies, Alan Bedtka tramps through the snow and past a stand of sorghum-sudangrass, its chest-high stems rattling in the harsh wind. The tall forage stands out in southeastern Minnesota’s corn and soybean fields, which this time of year have been reduced to stubble poking through the snow.
Bedtka is in his mid-30s and working to raising a small cow-calf beef herd profitably. That requires cutting costs and labor, and he’d like to keep input-intensive corn and soy out of the picture if he can. Instead, he wants his cattle to harvest their own feed via managed rotational grazing, even in the winter.
“Any day you can graze is better,” says Bedka.
It turns out a system that relies less on row crops isn’t just good for a time- and resource-strapped young farmer. A snowball’s toss away, a trout stream called Crow Spring snakes through the white landscape. Yet the bucolic scene belies an environmental problem roiling beneath the surface: The groundwater in this part of Minnesota is so contaminated with nitrates running off farm fields that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently called on three state agencies to take action to protect the health of rural residents.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says 70 percent of the state’s nitrate pollution is coming from cropland.
That’s where the sorghum-sudangrass comes in. It works as both a cover crop and forage for the cattle, and it’s helping Bedtka build up organic matter in his soil. He was paid to plant it by the Olmsted County Groundwater Protection and Soil Health Program, a local effort that seeks to reduce overall fertilizer use by building soil—therefore cutting down on the nutrients that enter waterways—while helping farmers save money.
In its inaugural season, the program has already helped keep tens of thousands of pounds of nitrates out of area water. The initiative goes beyond pushing the establishment of an isolated practice to take a holistic, integrative approach. And its early success has conservationists and lawmakers hoping it can become a model for local, state, and federal farm conservation programs, and in the process serve as a way of disrupting the corn-bean-feedlot machine that dominates Midwestern agriculture.
Nipping Nitrates at the Source
In 2022, Olmsted County commissioners Mark Thein and Gregg Wright approached staffers in the local soil and water conservation district office and asked a seemingly straightforward question: How can we keep nitrates out of the groundwater? Thein, whose family runs a well drilling business, is troubled by the increase in contamination he’s seen over the past few decades in the aquifers he taps throughout southeastern Minnesota.
“It’s not in society’s best interest to look the other way,” he says. “I don’t think it’s fair to the next generation.”
Southeastern Minnesota is a hollow land—its geology is characterized by porous limestone that allows contaminants to easily make their way into underground aquifers. Nitrates are a particularly troublesome pollutant, given their ability to escape the surface and seep deeper into the Earth, often in a mysterious and unpredictable manner. High nitrate levels can cause a sometimes-fatal condition called “blue baby syndrome” and has been linked to colorectal cancer, thyroid disease, and neural tube defects.
The EPA has set the drinking water standard for nitrate at 10 milligrams per liter, or 10 parts per million. Recently, research has hinted at serious health problems associated with nitrate levels lower than that. Minnesota Department of Agriculture testing has shown that over 12 percent of the private wells tested in the eight-county karst region of southeastern Minnesota exceeded the EPA’s drinking water standard. More than 9,000 residents in the region have been or still are at risk of consuming water at or above the EPA standard, according to a letter the agency released in November 2023.
A winter view of Alan Bedtka’s sorghum-sudangrass cover crops during a soil health field day led by Olmsted SWCD staff. (Photo courtesy of Alan Bedtka)
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says 70 percent of the state’s nitrate pollution is coming from cropland. Corn requires lots of nitrogen, and it’s by far the most commonly used fertilizer in the United States. Iowa farmers, for example, apply it on 87 percent of their fields at a rate of 149 pounds per acre. Annual crops take up only about half of the nitrogen applied, and the rest often ends up polluting groundwater in the form of nitrate.
This doesn’t just create problems in local drinking water wells. Nitrogen and phosphorus escaping Midwestern farm fields are the major cause of the hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, which is about the size of Yellowstone National Park. The EPA’s latest National Rivers and Streams Assessment found close to half of the country’s waterways were in “poor condition,” and nutrients such as nitrogen are a leading culprit.
Southeastern Minnesota’s Olmsted County is a microcosm of agriculture’s dependence on nitrogen fertilizer. Since the 1940s, oats, wheat, hay, and pasture have been replaced by a duoculture of corn and soybeans. In addition, large concentrated animal feeding operations, which have become more prevalent there in recent years, add to the problem by disposing millions of gallons of nitrogen-rich liquid manure.
Olmsted County officials acknowledge that water in certain areas of the county will continue to see increasing nitrate levels as the contaminant moves deeper into aquifers. And when nitrates are present, it’s inevitable that other contaminants, such as pesticides, are also polluting the water. “We’re allowing this to happen,” says Caitlin Meyer, the water resources coordinator for the Olmsted SWCD. “But what can we do to prevent this in the first place?”
Dialing up Diversity
One standard approach to cleaning the water that runs off farms is planting cover crops. Indeed, studies have shown that when cover crops grow between the corn and soy seasons, they provide the kind of soil environment that builds natural fertility and cuts nitrate leaching by anywhere from 40 to over 70 percent.
Cover cropping has also gained a reputation as a tool for sequestering carbon and thus mitigating climate change. Since 2016, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has made available more than $100 million in funds to help farmers establish cover crops.
Despite the resources devoted to advancing the practice, however, only around 5 percent of U.S. farmland is regularly cover cropped. The cost can be prohibitive, and it can be tricky to fit them into a conventional row-cropping system. A 2022 Stanford University satellite study reported that although cover cropping reduces erosion and improves water quality, it also causes significant yield hits for corn and soybeans. And some scientists are concerned that cover cropping’s role in climate change mitigation has been overplayed.
For a time, the Olmsted County SWCD administered a traditional cover-crop program funded by the USDA that helped farmers with establishment costs. Angela White, a soil conservation technician for the SWCD, says the program was valuable in getting cover crops established in the region and showing that it could work, but it had limitations as far as producing environmental benefits. Farmers would often plow the cover under early in the spring before it could provide optimal soil health benefits, and USDA restrictions didn’t allow much flexibility.
Ray Weil, a University of Maryland soil ecologist who has worked with farmers in numerous states, says when farmers are paid to implement an isolated practice such as cover cropping, they can become too focused on the minimum needed to qualify for payments, and they don’t consider the overall soil health picture.
But Weil and other experts also say cover cropping can be a “gateway practice” for implementing the five principles of soil health promoted by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service or NRCS: armor the soil, minimize disturbance (i.e., reduce tillage), increase plant diversity, keep roots in the soil as long as possible, and integrate livestock.
Plant diversity and covering the land has long been associated with more resilient soil. But experts say the integration of livestock via rotational grazing can also help reduce reliance on continuous plantings of fertilizer-intensive crops. And that’s where the Olmsted County Groundwater Protection and Soil Health Program enters the picture. The program pays farmers to plant cover crops, but it digs deeper to ensure that they get real results.
Research shows that allowing cover crops to grow to significant heights can dramatically reduce pollution. So, the program pays a farmer $55 an acre to grow their cover crops to at least 12 inches; at 24 inches, they receive an additional $20 per acre. Planting a cash crop within a living stand of cover crops, a technique called “planting green,” garners a farmer an additional $10 an acre. Farmers can also receive payments for growing so-called “alternative” crops such as oats and other small grains, and for converting crop acres to deep-rooted perennial systems like hay and pasture.
Each farm can qualify for a maximum of around $15,000 in payments per year. When Olmsted County SWCD staffers originally brainstormed with area farmers about setting up the soil health initiative, they considered a per-farm cap of $20,000 to $25,000. However, the farmers insisted on a lower cap so that more money could be spread around on more acres.
“I put $6,500 total expenses into seeding—the program paid back $3,500,” says farmer Logan Clark, who used the program to convert cropland to rotationally grazed pasture on his hilly, erosion-prone farm. “So, I’d at least be $3,500 more in the hole if I didn’t have the program.”
SWCD staffers say one advantage of the program is that because funding comes from the county—the commissioners agreed to set aside $5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for the program—rather than the USDA, they have more freedom to allow farmers to experiment and learn from their mistakes.
“I know farmers who have been cover cropping or strip tilling for decades … Now they are hungry for what’s next.”
Mark Stokes has been using no-till cropping for 26 years. Around five years ago, he noticed that even on his no-till acres he was seeing erosion, so he started growing cover crops utilizing traditional cost-share programs. He isn’t afraid to experiment—he’s grazed his beef cow herd on a mix of nine cover crops, and a few years ago, after seeing it being done on YouTube, mounted a seeder box on his combine so he can plant cover crops while he’s harvesting corn.
Stokes enrolled in the Olmsted SWCD program in 2023 to help cover the risk of yet another innovative practice. Through the contract, he agreed to plant his corn and soybeans into growing cereal rye green and terminate the rye after it hit 12 inches tall. It turns out the dry conditions made it a bad year to let a cover crop grow tall. On the other hand, the oats he raised in 2023 thrived.
When it came time to sign up for the 2024 round of the program, Stokes took advantage of its flexibility. “I signed up for more oats, so we don’t have to worry about the cereal rye so much, and if we have to, we can terminate it sooner.”
Not all participants in the program are going to check all five soil health principle boxes, but flexibility can serve as a seedbed for aspirational farming. Alan Bedtka wants to follow as many of the principles as possible. In 2023, he used the program’s funds to grow his cover crop to 12 inches. He also signed up to raise cover crops for seed production, which qualified him for the alternative crop portion of the initiative. Finally, his use of rotational grazing and the growing of forages on formerly row-cropped land qualified him for the haying and grazing payment.
“Protecting water quality is a perk, but the main reason I’m doing it is to try to be more profitable,” says Bedtka as he stands in a recently grazed cover-cropped field that he hasn’t had to add fertilizer to for two years. Nearby is an exposed limestone hillside, a reminder of the area’s vulnerable karst. Bedtka explains that his healthier soil absorbs and stores precipitation better. “So that means you’re growing more grass and more cows per acre. All the benefits are kind of tied up into one.”
Like Stokes, Bedtka is now able to take a more integrative, whole-systems approach with less financial risk.
“I know farmers who have been cover cropping or strip tilling for decades . . . Now they are hungry for what’s next,” says Kristi Pursell, who, when she headed up the watershed group Clean River Partners, supported farmers adopting practices to keep ag pollution out of southeastern Minnesota’s Cannon River. “The Olmsted SWCD program respects the knowledge that these farmers have of their land and their previous experience.”
Truckloads of Disruption
Soon after the Olmsted County program was launched as a pilot in 2022, 52 farmers signed up to grow tall cover crops—more than double what was expected. In total, they agreed to grow cover crops up to 12 inches high on over 5,300 acres and 24 inches on 2,700 acres. This year, over 70 farmers have signed up to raise cover crops under the program, representing almost 13,000 acres.
There are 240,000 acres of cropland in the county, so the majority of the area’s farmers aren’t participating in this initiative. But the program may be having an outsized impact on soil health. The SWCD estimates the environmental results of the program by combining the nitrate reduction directly observed on its own research farm with some of the wider research that’s been done. It estimates that in 2023, the program kept roughly 310,000 pounds of nitrates out of the county’s drinking water.
Surveys show that most farmers plant more cover-crop acres than they are getting paid for— something they can afford to do because the SWCD contracts pay so well, says Martin Larsen, a farmer and conservation technician for the district. When the SWCD includes those additional acres, the amount of nitrates being kept out of the water goes up to 560,000 pounds—or the equivalent of 23 semi-truckloads of urea fertilizer.
“The contracts are generating a nearly two-to-one payback in terms of soil health practices that are put in place on the farms,” says Larsen.
At the SWCD office, Caitlin Meyer, the water resources coordinator, points to a color-coded map that shows where farmers have signed up for the program so far; soil-friendly practices are being used in most areas of the county. “If we could get 30 percent in our subwatersheds put into cover crops, we’d be making real progress,” she says. One estimate is that some watersheds are approaching the 20-percent mark.
Larsen, who got his start using regenerative practices by planting cover crops a few years ago, then displays a chart showing what kind of acreage changes could occur if the program lives up to its potential over the next five years—9 percent less corn, 13 percent fewer soybeans, 417 percent more cover crops, 95 percent more oats, and 5 percent more pasture. If the effort succeeds, in other words, it could significantly disrupt the corn-soybean system in the region.
“For generations we’ve been telling farmers to do exactly what they’re doing. If we want them to change, we need to change.”
It might also serve as a model in other counties in Minnesota and beyond. Dagoberto Driggs, who coordinates the National Healthy Soils Policy Network, says the data from the Olmsted effort’s research farm helps determine an accurate estimate of the program’s benefits, ensuring public resources are being invested wisely. He adds that a program like this fits well with the current push on the part of regenerative agriculture groups across the country to create conservation incentives that are flexible enough to allow farmers to innovate and adapt. Driggs would like to see something like the Olmsted County program tried in other parts of the country.
“We really need a more holistic approach based on the soil health principles, which is what I find striking with this program,” says Driggs.
Mark Thein, the well-driller and county commissioner, hopes a cost-benefit analysis could show that such a proactive program saves taxpayer money by reducing the need for new drinking water infrastructure to deal with pollutants. It would be ideal, he adds, if the state would create a large-scale version of the program, taking pressure off local governments.
The timing could work in his favor. An analysis by the Star Tribune newspaper found that despite the fact that Minnesota has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce nitrate pollution over the past few decades, the problem has not gone away.
When the 2024 session of the Minnesota Legislature convened in February, lawmakers began drafting legislation that would create a pilot nitrate-reduction program modeled after the Olmsted County initiative. Pursell, who is now a state representative, is working on the legislation. She’s frustrated with the lack of progress made to reduce ag pollution and blames federal policy such as the farm bill, which encourages farmers to grow little other than corn and soybeans.
If a local pilot is successful, Pursell says it could help farmers transition out of the corn-soybean duoculture in a financially viable manner—and give taxpayers a return on their investment in the form of clean water, a crucial public good.
“I want to make sure that when we are spending money, it’s for an outcome, and it’s not just to tick a box,” she says. “For generations we’ve been telling farmers to do exactly what they’re doing. If we want them to change, we need to change.”
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]]>The post WIC Shortfall Could Leave 2 Million Women And Children Hungry appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Since 1997, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has received consistent federal funding from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Even during periods of gridlock, members of Congress have always been able to put aside their differences when it comes to funding nutritional benefits for low-income women and children. As a result, millions of women and children struggling with food insecurity have received healthy food, referrals to other social programs, and breastfeeding support at pivotal times in their lives.
Yet Congress recently broke with this precedent in a move—or rather a delay in action—that could jeopardize those nutritional benefits for the most vulnerable families, following a year of record-high food prices and deepening hunger across the U.S.
“Our country has always had a promise when it comes to WIC that it will be there to serve all eligible participants,” Georgia Machell, the interim president of the National WIC Association, told Civil Eats. “If you’re eligible for the program, you should be able to access it. If that promise is broken, it really puts families at risk.”
“We wouldn’t start to see waitlists until a few months down the road, but I think something that’s important to keep in mind is that it’s going to be different for every state.”
Last week, Congress passed a resolution—for the third time—that would keep the government open and fund WIC at its pre-existing level, or $1 billion less than what’s needed to fully fund the program. At least 2 million women and children are at risk of being turned away by September if WIC is not funded to its full capacity, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. If that happens, women and children will likely be put on waiting lists for the first time in over 25 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
In 2022, a staggering 39 percent of all infants within the U.S. relied on WIC support. In total, the program served nearly 6.3 million pregnant and postpartum women and children under 5 in 2022, providing a consistent source of nutrition to many vulnerable families. Research has found that WIC improves birth outcomes, lowers infant mortality, reduces Medicaid expenses, improves cognitive development, and increases childhood immunization.
This shortfall comes at what would have otherwise been a celebratory time in WIC’s history. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the first WIC clinic in Pineville, Kentucky, in 1974. Yesterday, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear gathered with national and local WIC staff and advocates and other program pioneers at Pineville’s original clinic to honor its legacy and fight for its future.
“Right now, we have a major responsibility to ensure that this program continues,” said Beshear, who is a Democrat, in a speech given at the gathering. “All that I ask is that Congress and our state legislature start not with what party they’re in, or what color they wear on their ties, but with the basic empathy that we are taught to have for one another. We’re taught the golden rule, that we love our neighbor as ourself.”
Since its launch, the WIC program has grown dramatically. It operates in every state and is administered through local health departments, across 10,000 clinics, nearly 2,000 local agencies, and 33 tribal organizations.
If there is a shortfall, it isn’t expected to hit all at once because WIC is so widely administered and depends on individual state policies. “We wouldn’t start to see waitlists until a few months down the road, but I think something that’s important to keep in mind is that it’s going to be different for every state,” said Machell.
According to WIC’s regulations, participants who are most medically at risk are prioritized in a budget shortfall. The waiting lists would first include postpartum women who are not breastfeeding, followed by children between ages 1 and 5, without high-risk medical issues, according to the USDA. However, the agency anticipates that waiting lists could extend even to the most vulnerable groups, including infants.
“Given the size of the funding shortfall, it is likely that waiting lists would stretch across all participant categories, affecting both new applicants and mothers, babies, and young children enrolled in the program who are up for renewal of benefits,” a USDA spokesperson said in an e-mail to Civil Eats.
As a last resort, “if other measures aren’t enough to close the shortfall, some states could be forced to suspend benefits for current participants,” added the spokesperson.
Beyond these drastic measures, budget cuts will probably affect the nearly 7 million participants and lower the quality of service across WIC’s offices. “States are also likely going to pull back in other ways. They’ll limit outreach. They won’t pursue cross enrollment efforts with other programs like SNAP and Medicaid. They’ll reduce their clinic hours,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She notes that this shortfall would also likely deter eligible people from applying to WIC.
Bergh also said that the estimate of “around 2 million” that could be turned away for WIC benefits, if not fully funded, is an underestimate. It will likely be higher now in light of the recent resolution, which gives Congress until March to fund WIC in an appropriations bill and leaves states with less time to plan for a shortfall.
For months, the Biden administration has urged Congress to fund WIC, while seeking the support of community advocates. In December, the USDA warned that “a federal funding shortfall of this magnitude presents states with difficult, untenable decisions about how to manage the program.” And last week, the USDA and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent a letter to faith and community leaders to ask for their help in advocating for WIC’s necessity.
“We firmly believe that no child should go hungry in America and we ask that you amplify the importance of WIC among your faith-based community partners and congregations,” reads the letter.
“It would be a huge hit to our budget. We really appreciate that supplemental income on a monthly basis.”
The increased need for funding is partially the result of more eligible people signing up for the program, according to the USDA. This is in some ways a good thing, noted Bergh, as it indicates that WIC has become more accessible. The program used to require in-person appointments to enroll and receive benefits, but that stopped during the early COVID-19 pandemic when it began offering remote services.
The expansion in people signing up for WIC is also likely an indicator of just how desperately people need its services as food insecurity deepens. “We’re seeing the impacts of higher food costs. Families’ budgets have been stretched,” said Bergh. “In many cases, families who were receiving additional aid from other programs during the pandemic have now seen those pandemic measures expire.”
The ongoing uncertainty surrounding WIC’s future has left many of its participants worried and unable to fully plan for their families’ futures.
“On average, we’re talking about $80 to $100 a month as far as what that does for our food budget,” said Emily Church, a current WIC participant living in Ohio who also serves on the National WIC Association’s participant advisory council. She is raising a toddler and teenage son, while working and attending school. “It would be a huge hit to our budget. We really appreciate that supplemental income on a monthly basis.”
“I am fearful of how this is all going to shake out,” said Church, before pausing to check on her 3-year-old daughter. It’s her health and well-being, in her formative years of growth as a toddler, that concerns Church the most.
“I feel frustration and anger over the fact that this is even a question,” said Church, getting back on the call, as her daughter could still be heard in the background.
Meanwhile, lawmakers struck a deal to bring back the child tax credit, a pandemic-era support that provided relief for low-income families and ended in 2021. If the tax breaks are resurrected, it could go part of the way toward helping some families feed their children.
Read more:
Changes to WIC Benefits Would Cut Food Access for Millions of Parents
Do Regulations Designed to Promote Nutrition Make WIC Food Lists Too Restrictive?
Farmworker Women’s Rights: The next farm bill may shape the rights of women farmworkers. The sweeping, trillion-dollar legislative package, reauthorized every five years, has been extended for another year as Congress continues to debate the next version of the legislation. Historically, farmworker and labor rights have been excluded from the bill, but there has been a recent concerted effort among advocates to change that.
In mid-January, a group of women with Alianza Nacional de Campesinas traveled to Washington, D.C., to push for the inclusion of their rights within the large bill. They met with members of Congress to discuss their proposals. Those include: stronger heat protections, more resources dedicated to farmworker housing, guaranteed funding of SNAP benefits regardless of immigration or visa status, more research into pesticides, the development of a fully staffed farmworker office within USDA, and resources to assist farmworkers with transitioning to farm ownership.
“Our journey to Washington, D.C., underscores the urgency of necessary resources and acknowledgement of farmworker needs, particularly women and girls, in the upcoming farm bill,” said Alianza’s Executive Director Mily Trevino-Sauceda in a statement.
Read more:
The End of Roe vs. Wade Makes Reproductive Health Even Tougher for Farmworkers
Threatened by Climate Change, Food Chain Workers Demand Labor Protections
This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More Than 2 Decades
Fertilizer Consolidation: The multinational giant Koch Industries recently acquired Iowa Fertilizer Co. for $3.8 billion, sparking outcry from advocates concerned about the increasing trend of consolidation within U.S. agriculture. Fertilizer prices have spiked in recent years due to inflation and rising gas prices, and the industry’s consolidation—furthered by this recent acquisition, advocates say—clamps down on competition that could drive down prices.
A recent letter, signed by 18 agriculture and environmental advocacy groups, called for a federal investigation into the acquisition. The letter notes that the fertilizer plant was first proposed in 2012 with the intent of lowering fertilizer costs and challenging the “Koch Industries dominance in the fertilizer markets,” while relying on substantial federal, state, and local funding to build the plant. “The unrestricted federal funds left the door open for Koch Industries to purchase the company just six years after the plant opened,” states the letter, delivered to the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission.
Read more:
Health Concerns Grow as Oklahoma Farmers Fertilize Cropland with Treated Sewage
Excess Fertilizer Causes a New Challenge: Low Crop Yields During Drought
Why Seed Consolidation Matters
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]]>The post Congress Could Roll Back Pesticide Protections in the Farm Bill appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>More than 4,000 elementary schools are located within 200 feet of farm fields. And while many states have acted to restrict farms’ ability to spray pesticides near those schools, Congressional lawmakers are considering multiple proposals that could block them from doing so in the future.
Because children’s nervous, immune, and other bodily systems are still developing, acute and long-term pesticide exposures are more dangerous than they are in adults and can lead to learning disabilities, organ damage, and some cancers. One long-term study in California has found that children regularly exposed to agricultural chemicals had higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and more difficulty learning.
In Hawaii, when pesticide drift incidents sent middle school students to the hospital, schools and parents responded, galvanizing a growing movement. In 2018, the state became the first to ban chlorpyrifos. In 2021, the EPA banned chlorpyrifos nationwide, but a federal appeals court last week overturned that ban, sending it back to the agency for further consideration.
“States know that pesticide spraying is a risk to students,” said Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), at a press conference announcing the results of new analysis on the topic from researchers at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). “Despite all of that . . . some members of Congress are proposing to preempt all of these laws, stripping states and localities from being able to do what’s necessary to protect their children.”
The proposal that would almost certainly curtail states’ ability to impose buffer zones and other restrictions around schools was first introduced in 2022 by former House Republican Randy Davis, who at the time said he was concerned that local communities were trying “to usurp some of the federal rules and regulations that we fought so hard to put in place.” The bill had strong support among groups that represent the agriculture, landscaping, and pesticide industries.
Now, according to Booker and policy staffers at EWG, lawmakers are planning to reintroduce the bill as part of the upcoming farm bill (or as part of a separate spending package). And it’s just one of three proposed bills that EWG and its allies are concerned would constrain state and local efforts to regulate pesticide use.
In June, in anticipation of farm bill negotiations, Representatives Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and Jim Costa (D-California) introduced the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, which would prevent states from putting their own warning labels on pesticides that differ from the ones the EPA has already approved.
For example, in California, Proposition 65 requires companies to provide warnings on products that are “known to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm,” which is beyond what the EPA requires. And a federal appeals court just blocked the state from applying to labels to glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup. “State labels . . . threaten public confidence in the agency’s authority and science-based regulation and undermine the critical role pesticides play in sustainably feeding a growing world,” Tom Haag, president of the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA), said in a press release. NCGA is one of 360 agriculture and pesticide trade and advocacy organizations that are backing the legislation.
Finally, while ranchers and meat industry groups have been battling over the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act, it could also impact state pesticide laws. The EATS Act was introduced as the next chapter in the long saga over California’s Proposition 12 animal welfare law.
When the Supreme Court declined to overturn Prop. 12, lawmakers created the EATS Act to prevent other states from regulating how animals are raised on farms. Now, they’re working to get it included in the farm bill. However, the bill could have much more far-reaching implications. An analysis out of Harvard Law School identified more than 1,000 state laws that could be overturned as a result of the broad language in the EATS Act and found that it “also could affect certain state and local regulations on pesticides and fertilizers.”
In September, a coalition of more than 180 public health, agriculture, and environmental organizations sent a letter to federal lawmakers urging them to oppose all three bills. “These efforts serve only to limit the ability of the EPA, states, and localities to protect their people and environment from the harms of pesticide use, while shielding companies from liability for their products’ harms,” they wrote.
EWG’s new analysis is in support of that larger push, and it included two maps—one of schools across the country that are situated near crop fields and another that shows the state and local pesticide laws that it sees as threatened.
“I will be one of these people taking every measure possible not to let this . . . happen,” Booker said, emphasizing that because federal rulemaking moves so slowly, other entities that can move faster should be able to step in on behalf of public health. “States and local communities being able to act is a vital tool in the toolbox in protecting Americans,” he said.
Read More:
Hawaii Shows States’ Power to Regulate Pesticides
California Takes a Step Toward Restricting Bee-Killing Pesticides
When Seeds Become Toxic Waste
A Flurry of Food-and-Climate Reports. As the chance to spotlight food and agriculture at the upcoming global COP28 climate conference approaches, organizations are rushing to release reports to inform the conversation.
The Global Alliance for the Future of Food took a look at fossil fuel use and estimated that the food system accounts for about 15 percent of use around the world, with the most use occurring during processing and packaging and retail consumption and waste.
Meanwhile, the German Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, (Forschungsinstitut für biologischen Landbau, or FiBL), evaluated nitrogen use in agriculture and found that 85 to 95 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer used is wasted—at which point it enters the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas or pollutes nearby waterways. FiBL concluded that there is plenty of room to reduce the overuse of nitrogen while maintaining food security.
Ceres, a group that targets investors to move the needle on climate and other issues, also published a report that outlines how food companies can drive agricultural innovation. And As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy group, released a scorecard grading how much progress the 100 largest U.S. companies have made on climate goals. According to the scorecard, while the majority of companies are now disclosing greenhouse gas emissions and many are setting clear targets to reduce them, very few have demonstrated real progress on reductions. In the food and agriculture sector, As You Sow gave Bs to grain giant Bunge and PepsiCo; Walmart, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s received Ds; and Costco got an F.
Read More:
Will a Food and Ag Focus at COP28 Distract from the Fossil Fuel Economy?
Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’
Roundup on Trial. Courts ruled against pharmaceutical and agrochemical giant Bayer in two separate cases last week that involved men who claimed Roundup use caused their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Juries awarded $332 million in damages in California and $175 million in Pennsylvania. Bayer acquired Monsanto, the maker of the country’s most widely used weedkiller in 2018, at a time when thousands of lawsuits were being filed based on the company’s failure to warn of the cancer risk associated with glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.
On a related note, a documentary following the story of the first successful case against Monsanto will be released on streaming services on December 8.
Read More:
Inside Monsanto’s Day in Court: Scientists Weigh in on Cancer Risks
Community-Led Efforts to Ban Glyphosate in Public Spaces Pick Up Speed
The Man Who Fought Monsanto Will Leave a Lasting Legacy
Biden Courts Farmers. President Biden traveled to a corn and hog farm in Minnesota on Halloween to announce more than $5 billion in new investments in agriculture and rural development. The money includes extra funding for oversubscribed conservation programs intended to help farmers implement environmentally-friendly practices. The administration injected extra funds earmarked for climate-friendly practices into those programs last year, but some lawmakers are attempting to use the farm bill to reallocate it to other farm programs that don’t focus on climate outcomes.
Read More:
Why Aren’t Conservation Programs Paying Farmers More to Improve Their Soil?
Climate Change Is Walloping U.S. Farms. Can This Farm Bill Create Solutions?
Goodbye to BVO. Less than a month after California banned five food additives from its food supply, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) proposed banning one of those—brominated vegetable oil, or BVO, often found in sports drinks and sodas—nationwide. FDA’s proposal is based on animal studies that show thyroid toxicity and other potential health risks, and it’s open for public comment through January 17, 2024.
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Michael Moss on How Big Food Gets Us Hooked
Rural Energy Boost. Climate Breakthrough awarded Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Alliance, $3 million to fund her efforts to increase clean energy development in rural America. Kleeb is known for her successful efforts to fight the Keystone XL pipeline by building alliances of farmers and ranchers, indigenous leaders, and climate activists.
Read More:
For Democrats to Win in 2020, Invest in Rural America, Says Jane Kleeb
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]]>The post The EPA Ignored the Endangered Species Act for 50 Years. That’s Changing, But Is Time Running Out? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>To mark the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, the federal government is sharing stories of golden paintbrush flowers once again blooming in Pacific Northwest fields and yellow-bellied songbirds returning to Midwest pine forests.
Yet despite the Act’s historical ties to pesticides—the discovery of DDT’s impacts on bald eagles was one factor that propelled lawmakers to begin protecting threatened species—officials in the pesticide office at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are only now starting to figure out how to comply with the law.
In fact, last year, the EPA acknowledged that over the past five decades, it has effectively ignored its responsibility to evaluate pesticides’ impacts on at-risk plants and animals in more than 95 percent of cases.
Now, due to new leadership and a string of court decisions forcing its hand, the agency says it will reverse course as it reviews new pesticides. At the same time, it has begun tackling a backlog of evaluations so long that it could take several more decades to catch up.
Last year, the EPA acknowledged that over the past five decades, it has effectively ignored its responsibility to evaluate pesticides’ impacts on at-risk plants and animals in more than 95 percent of cases.
“We’re finding out that pesticides are posing a major risk to endangered species, and they have been ever since they were approved,” says Nathan Donley, the Environmental Health Science Director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The problem is that the safeguards now being put in place . . . should have been put in place 50, 40, 30 years ago.”
Time is running out: In recent years, multiple reports have identified biodiversity loss as one of the biggest threats facing humanity, alongside—and in conjunction with—climate change. One study published in February determined that total ecosystem collapse is now “inevitable” unless current trends are reversed.
Intensive pesticide use is one of many intersecting factors contributing to the crisis (alongside habitat loss due to agriculture, development, and climate change). Herbicides kill plants and destroy habitats, insecticides kill beneficial insects and deplete and contaminate food sources for larger organisms like birds, and both kinds of chemicals leach into waterways, threatening aquatic organisms.
While the EPA evaluates the basic health and environmental risks of pesticides under the country’s primary pesticide law, it weighs those risks against benefits to farmers and the security of the food supply. Under the Endangered Species Act, the agency is subject to a much stricter mandate to ensure that approving a pesticide for use doesn’t jeopardize the survival of any species on the list. As a result, the evaluations are more thorough and often require the involvement of the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service.
And while the goal is to identify serious threats to specific endangered species, experts say when the evaluations do find risks, it’s safe to assume other plants and animals are also being negatively impacted. “It is a good indication there is overall harm,” Donley said. “EPA has been doing a good job of communicating that the mitigations now being put into place are not only going to protect endangered species, but they’ll have the indirect effect of protecting all species in those areas.”
As someone who spends a lot of time suing the agency, Donley is uncharacteristically optimistic about the EPA’s steps forward. However, he and other experts pointed to many factors that limit whether the agency’s plan will effectively protect biodiversity going forward.
The agency is hindered by inadequate funding, limited staff, and a complex evaluation process, and it must also rely on the partner agencies, which have their own limitations. As a result, it may be cutting corners to speed up progress.
Even when officials find pesticides that cause harm, removing them from use is almost never an option. In fact, one of the reasons officials are rushing to fix the process is because courts could walk back the approval of several pesticides if the EPA continues to ignore the law.
“Farmers don’t know if these pesticides will be suddenly taken off the market,” said Jake Li, deputy assistant administrator for pesticide programs for the office of chemical safety and pollution prevention at the EPA. “We could have a court decision any day that says, ‘Well, EPA, you’re in violation of the Endangered Species Act’ . . . and then we just have to start pulling pesticides off the shelf.”
That’s a scenario the EPA wants to avoid, Li said, because farmers need a “diversity of tools” to control weeds and pests. Instead, the EPA’s primary objective is identifying ways to minimize exposure to the chemicals, and many of their solutions rely on getting farmers, and others who apply pesticides, to closely adhere to complicated label instructions with very little—if any—enforcement. Finally, some experts say that even when the EPA does conduct evaluations, the data available is scant and the process can underestimate risks to species.
This web of bureaucratic barriers, paired with a foundational assumption that toxic pesticides are necessary and their risks can be managed with the right practices, means that the EPA’s remarkable push to finally follow the Endangered Species Act is charting a path toward an unremarkable outcome: The agency will mostly ensure the continued use of pesticides found to pose risks, albeit with new protections in place.
Playing Catch-Up on Pesticide Evaluations
“I say without exaggeration . . . we have done more in two years than every other administration has done—combined—on this issue. We are actually going full steam ahead,” said Li, who emphasized that the Endangered Species Act work is a top priority at the agency, all the way up to administrator Michael Regan. Still, he added, “We can’t fix 50 years of neglect in the two years that this administration has been here.”
Since it began tackling the problem, the EPA has completed 14 biological evaluations and drafted another handful. To get a grasp of how big the backlog is, said John Stark, a professor of entomology who runs the ecotoxicology program at Washington State University, one only has to look to a class of insecticides called organophosphates.
“We can’t fix 50 years of neglect in the two years that this administration has been here.”
Organophosphates are highly toxic pest killers that became widely used earlier in the 20th century. It wasn’t until 2017 that the EPA completed biological evaluations for malathion, first approved in 1956, and chlorpyrifos, approved in 1965. Use of malathion has plummeted since the 1990s, while EPA canceled its approval of chlorpyrifos last year based on its health risks.
“We’ve moved so far past a lot of [these pesticides], and they’re really hardly used anymore,” Stark said. “That tells you how far behind this process is.”
In laying out its plans to play catch-up, agency officials wrote that “Even if EPA completed this work for all of the pesticides that are currently subject to court decisions and/or ongoing litigation, that work would take until the 2040s, and even then, would represent only 5 percent of EPA’s ESA obligations.”
In the meantime, since most evaluations that need to be done are for pesticides already on the market, the agency is working on new, broader ways to reduce potential harms that don’t require waiting for each individual evaluation. In June, officials proposed restrictions and other practices that could be put in place to protect 27 of the most vulnerable species from exposure from groups of pesticides that might harm them.
Then, in July, the agency released its first Herbicide Strategy, which identifies common routes of exposure to weedkillers, like drift and runoff, and proposes broad changes to how those chemicals are used.
Li said the idea is to create frameworks that lead to label changes upfront, so that by the time an individual pesticide gets through its endangered species evaluation, the practices in place for using it—such as restrictions on when or where it can be applied—have hopefully already removed a lot of the potential risk.
“It’s much simpler, and it’s much faster,” he said. “That’s really the key.” Both new frameworks are currently in draft form and are open to public comment.
Is the EPA Cutting Corners?
Donley applauded the EPA’s effort to “think outside the box” to speed up the process. In some cases, however, the agency may be cutting corners.
Take Enlist One and Enlist Duo, two herbicides produced by Corteva Agriscience. Enlist One contains 2,4-D, while Enlist Duo combines both 2,4-D and glyphosate (the primary chemical in Roundup).
A Florida farmer sprays pesticides on a field. (Photo credit: USDA)
In January 2022, the EPA re-approved both products. Before doing so, it completed a biological evaluation, which found likely harm to hundreds of species. That’s a big deal, since in the past, the agency did not do that evaluation at all. But when the EPA finds “likely” harm, the law also requires it to go to the wildlife-focused agencies to have a more thorough evaluation completed before approval.
In this case, the EPA approved the herbicides first. Then, it started the process with the Fish and Wildlife Service. “They’re basically saying, ‘Well, now we did it, and we’re just going to keep moving because Fish & Wildlife isn’t keeping up,” said Kristina Sinclair, an attorney at Center for Food Safety, which is suing the EPA over the approval. As a result, the herbicides have been in use for another year and a half without a final opinion from FWS.
That’s significant because wildlife-focused agencies provide expertise the EPA doesn’t have, Stark said, and bring in additional information. “They take into account population processes and modeling,” he explained. The FWS has so far only completed one of the evaluations that the EPA has sent their way, on malathion. The National Marine Fisheries Service is further along but still far behind.
Reducing Exposure to the Most Toxic Pesticides
“The Services are not going to get this done in a timely manner,” Donley said, “And EPA is recognizing that and saying, ‘Okay, how do we proactively get on-the-ground conservation measures in place now?’”
In some cases, the measures being proposed involve restrictions based on the locations where pesticides are being used.
For example, when the agency conducted a preliminary assessment of atrazine, a widely used herbicide, it found many plants and animals would likely be put at risk by its reapproval. So, EPA officials approached Syngenta, the company that makes atrazine, and proposed restrictions on its use in forests and along roadsides—two places that provide critical habitat for many species—which the company agreed to. Atrazine use is also banned in the state of Hawaii, which is home to a high concentration of endangered species.
Experts are less convinced by other mitigation measures the EPA has proposed. For instance, if a pesticide poses a risk to aquatic insects due to runoff into rivers and streams, the agency says a farmer might be required to choose from a list of practices, such as planting cover crops or buffers along streams, to reduce the amount of pesticides that leave the fields and end up in the water.
Stark said there’s plenty of evidence that those practices work in terms of reducing exposure, but in some cases implementing them may mean difficult choices for a farmer, like taking a section of land out of production to plant a buffer strip of bushes and trees. Before that, the person applying the pesticide would have to read the label instructions, which Li said in some cases can be 50 to 100 pages long.
And even that label doesn’t provide enough space to communicate everything the user needs to know. The EPA is now using an online system called Bulletins Live! Two (fun fact: internally, agency officials call the system “BLT”) to communicate restrictions that involve endangered species in specific areas.
At this point, according to Li, most farmers likely don’t even know about the system. The EPA is working on outreach and trainings and is collaborating with the USDA to try to change that. But the EPA won’t have boots on the ground monitoring whether the mitigation measures are being put in place, since states are in charge of enforcing pesticide laws. Li said the agency is in “active discussion with state agencies” about enforcement, however.
In the end, it will likely be some time before anyone knows if the mitigation measures are having an impact, Donley said. “With this pick-list approach, I really hope EPA is following up and making sure that there is high compliance. And when there is compliance, making sure that it’s reducing levels of atrazine or glyphosate or whatever the pesticide in nearby streams, maybe doing some monitoring, and following up to make sure those mitigations are having the intended effect.”
Next Steps for Pesticide Registrations
Nowhere are the stakes of this process higher than in the current evaluations of a group of insecticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics. Over the past two decades, farmers have planted seeds coated with neonics on millions of acres, making them the most widely used insect-killers in the world, while evidence of their devastating effects on bees, birds, and entire ecosystems has been piling up.
Today, neonic-coated seeds are planted on close to 100 percent of commodity corn acres across the country, where chemical dust from the seeds drifts into the air, soil, and water, threatening pollinators and many other animals that haven’t made it onto the endangered species list.
Treated corn seeds. (Photo credit: JJ Gouin, Getty Images)
In June 2022, to meet a court deadline, EPA finally completed its first biological evaluations of the three most common neonics: clothianidin, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam. Its evaluations found that each of the insecticides was likely to harm two-thirds to three-quarters of endangered species, including the Karner blue butterfly, Chinook salmon, the whooping crane, and the California red-legged frog.
One year later, the American Bird Conservancy released a review of the past decade of research on neonicotinoids’ impacts on birds. In the report, scientist Pierre Mineau filled more than 100 pages with alarming evidence. And he specifically pointed to the EPA’s evaluation as having “greatly underestimated the extent of the risk, for birds and probably other species as well,” because he determined the EPA was not fully considering the extent of exposure caused by coated seeds.
Recent reports show that while some fruit and vegetable farmers depend on neonics to control pests, coated seeds on commodity corn fields—the largest use by far—often do not lead to higher yields for farmers.
Even with that underestimation, he emphasized that the agency has found that hundreds of threatened species are at risk and more than 30 critical habitats are in jeopardy.
“We are now at the point where the onus of proof should switch from having to demonstrate the link between neonicotinoid use and bird populations losses, to showing why the continued profligate use of neonics is essential to human welfare in light of such environmental impacts,” Mineau said in a press release.
And it’s not clear that they are essential: Recent reports show that while some fruit and vegetable farmers depend on neonics to control pests, coated seeds on commodity corn fields—the largest use by far—often do not lead to higher yields for farmers.
No matter how much the process is improved, the EPA’s process of evaluating the risks of pesticides on species that may soon cease to exist will always be limited. Assessments prioritize acute risks, like poisoning, over long-term harms and are filled with categories of plants and animals on which no studies have been done, so “surrogate species” are used to estimate risk. Perhaps most importantly, researchers evaluate each chemical’s risks independently. At this point, it’s unknown what exposure to the growing mix means for any species.
“I like to call our waterways ‘pollutant soup,’ because it’s never one chemical,” Stark said. “I’m talking everything from every pharmaceutical you’ve ever heard of to industrial pollutants, et cetera. They’re in low concentrations, but we don’t know how those chemicals synergize with each other.”
But larger conversations about preserving biodiversity don’t often influence the bureaucratic process. Now that the EPA completed its biological evaluations of the three neonics, it is consulting with the wildlife agencies to identify practices it can put in place to reduce risks. Li said those proposed mitigation measures should be released later this year. At the same time, the wildlife agencies will continue to work on their biological opinions, which could take years.
If the mitigation is successful by the EPA’s measures, the number of endangered plants and animals exposed to neonics will be somewhat reduced. Given the larger impacts neonics are having across the landscape, is that a better outcome than if a court stopped their use entirely until the agency completed the full review process?
Donley worries that the process could legitimize the continued use of chemicals everyone would be better off without, but—given the options—he believes that risk is worth taking.
“It’s certainly not perfect, and some of their biological evaluations and mitigation plans are not even coming close to what’s needed,” Donley said. “But we’ve got to figure out what we can reasonably achieve here.”
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