In the world of agriculture, the use of the word "progressive" takes on a different meaning than in politics. It's not a left-right thing, but mostly part of a discourse on using resources and technology for a greater financial return. It's a piece of the language of production agriculture, and Progressive Farmer's history isn't one of populist hippies. YMMV.
We say that to ward off attacks on the following article based on ignorance of the source and its history.
Who's making money from massive use of insecticides in production agriculture?
Late last week, Emily Unglesbee reported for Progressive Farmer in Treated Seed Troubles Seed Treatment Overload: The Unintended Consequences of a Popular Practice:
For the first time in nearly a decade, Dan Hesterberg poured a few bags of untreated corn seed into his planter this spring.
"It was kind of weird opening up the seed and dumping it -- I thought, 'Wow! It's just plain old yellow corn -- no purple, no green!" the Vermilion County, Illinois, farmer recalled.
The seed had no insecticides, fungicides or other chemicals on it, a rare practice known as "planting naked." While that modern moniker conjures up images of vulnerability, it was how most seed arrived on his farm until about 15 years ago, Hesterberg points out.
Since then, seed companies have been coating a growing number of compounds on nearly every corn seed planted in the country; use in other row crops, such as soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice, is rising steadily as well. Yet details about their use, efficacy and fate in the environment are murky.
The seed treatment industry operates with minimal federal oversight, due to a loophole in EPA's governing law, leaving questions about the amount of pesticides applied via this route and how unused treated seed is discarded each year. In the meantime, a growing number of federal and academic studies are casting doubt on its necessity, particularly in soybean fields. Another body of research is finding most of the pesticides coated on the seeds aren't staying put, with alarming consequences for water quality and wildlife.
Most recently, new questions are arising over what happens to large amounts of pesticide-coated seeds that must be discarded at the end of each season. No federal laws govern the disposal of bulk amounts of treated seed, and there is little follow through or monitoring of the few facilities that accept it. This fact became painfully clear in Mead, Nebraska, this spring. There, an ethanol plant mismanaged the millions of bushels of treated corn seed it accepted from seed companies each year. The result -- hazardous seed waste piled on the facility and pesticides surfacing in ponds and surface water miles away from the facility, sometimes poisoning wildlife -- has served as a wake-up call to many in the industry.
"When we get comfortable with something, we get cavalier," said Cary Giguere, a pesticide regulator in Vermont, which recently became the first state to fully regulate treated seeds as pesticides. "We got comfortable with pink-coated corn seed. So the industry got cavalier with it. It should never have happened."
The concept of treated seed is appealing. The seed takes up the systemic insecticides -- usually neonicotinoids -- into plant tissue to protect it from hard-to-scout soil pests. Fungicides shield the seed from the many soil-dwelling diseases lurking around it, all with less work and pesticide exposure for the farmer. As the practice grew, it didn't occur to many farmers to opt out, Hesterberg noted. "I just kind of went along with what the seed company said," he said. "They started always offering treated seed and they told us it would pay off."
The agricultural industry isn't the only user of pesticides found in seed treatments. Neonicotinoids, the most common insecticides found on today's treated seeds, are also sold in an array of consumer products such as pet collars and lawn and garden insect treatments. That adds to the difficulty of judging just how much of a particular pesticide is going out into the environment annually.
For years, scientists and environmentalists have been sounding the alarm that these insecticides are surfacing well beyond their targeted fields and lawns.
Academic and government studies have found neonicotinoids present in many American waterways, from rivers and wetlands to municipal drinking water. Their presence in soils and water have been linked to detrimental effects on birds, mammals, pollinators such as bees, beneficial insects and aquatic invertebrates. CDC researchers have also found the chemicals in the urine of roughly half Americans sampled, raising questions about their effect on humans, as well. . . .
ormally, EPA monitors the use of registered pesticides and its federal partner, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), collects data from a broad array of sources, both private and public, to create maps of pesticide use each year.
Seed treatments fall through a bureaucratic crack. The "treated article" exemption to EPA's governing law, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), means pesticide-treated items, such as railroad ties or paint, don't fall under normal registration and monitoring requirements. Once pesticides are coated on the seed, the agency stops tracking or counting them.
As a result, most estimates of seed treatment pesticide use rely on approximations compiled by surveys and "conservative usage assumptions" made by EPA, based on acreage and industry's self-reporting to the agency. In a testament to the precarious nature of this accounting, USGS completely abandoned its attempts to measure and map how many neonicotinoid insecticides are used in seed treatments in 2014, citing a lack of reliable data. . . .
In the same year USGS gave up on tracking insecticides used via seed treatments, EPA set off a firestorm in the industry by releasing an economic benefits analysis concluding that seed treatments on soybeans offered no real economic benefit to farmers, with the exception of the southern U.S. where pest populations are more intense. Over the next few years, many academic entomologists in the Midwest and Southeast have come to agree with those conclusions. Most recently, some entomologists are starting to question the value of widespread, prophylactic seed treatment use in Midwestern corn fields as well. See more here: https://www.epa.gov/… and here: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/….
Seed and agrichemical companies have strongly objected to these conclusions and, in 2015, they commissioned their own study from a group called AgInformatics, which analyzed published studies, industry field trials and insecticide screening tests and asked farmers to self-report the monetary value of seed treatments to them. The studies concluded they were very valuable, on all crops. See it here: http://aginfomatics.com/….
Academic scientists' conclusions are based more on independent field studies and the biology of the soil-dwelling pests targeted by seed insecticides, such as seedcorn maggot, wireworms, grubs and bean leaf beetle. All can be very damaging insects, but they tend to be sporadic pests in much of the corn and soybean-growing parts of the country, noted Christian Krupke, a Purdue University entomologist who has led many studies scrutinizing neonicotinoid benefits. Other insects targeted by seed treatments, such as soybean aphid, typically reach economically damaging levels later in the summer, beyond the timeframe that neonicotinoids are present in crop tissue in significant concentrations. The result is farmers treating more corn and soybean acres with insecticides than ever before, as insurance against sporadic pests whose populations have not increased in the same timeframe, Krupke and fellow Penn State entomologist John Tooker concluded in a recent report. See more here: https://www.frontiersin.org/….
It took a lot of data to sway some scientists to this conclusion. University of Wisconsin soybean agronomist Shawn Conley recommended seed treatments for many years, especially for farmers trying to push soybean planting earlier each year.
"I'm the poster boy of someone who has 'flip-flopped' on this," Conley noted. "Of course, what really happened is that the data generation increased. We started off with a few data points, just in Wisconsin. But when I started looking at it from a national perspective, it changed." Two years ago, Conley and a team of 22 entomologists, plant pathologists and statisticians released a meta-study of 194 field studies across 14 states concluding that no part of the soybean seed treatment package -- insecticide or fungicide -- paid off for farmers in the Midwest, mid-Atlantic or Southeast states comprising 85% of U.S. soybean acreage.
"We found that, yes, there are certain situations, such as high manure or in cover crop systems, where the higher risk of insects means the insecticide has a chance of actually controlling an insect," Conley explained. "But overall, for the broad prophylactic treatment of every acre, the return on investment was basically zero. If anyone makes money, it's not the farmer. At most they might break even." (See more on that study here: https://www.dtnpf.com/… and here: https://www.nature.com/…) . . .
There's more at Progressive Farmer. Check it out.
Photo: Minnesota's state bee, the rusty-patched bumblebee. Via United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
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