Farm Bureau defends atrazine, members send nearly 900 comments to EPA

County Farm Bureau members and supporters defended the safe and effective use of crop protection tools by sending nearly 900 comments to the Environmental Protection Agency in defense of atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides in the United States.

View response rates by county or Michigan Farm Bureau district.

EPA ended the public comment period Oct. 7 after the agency — in an unprecedented move — reopened the finalized registration for atrazine and proposed new major restrictions.

In a process likely to last several months, EPA will next consider all public comments received before issuing a final registration — how the product may or may not be used going forward.

The agency also has the option to conduct more discussions with the Science Advisory Panel or with the registrant — the company developing and selling the herbicide — before issuing its final product registration. The final registration will include responses to public comments, why EPA did or did not follow the requests made by those comments, and any changes to the product label from the updated registration.

In addition to the 892 comments submitted by members and supporters, Michigan Farm Bureau put forward seven pages worth of logical and science-based reasoning why EPA shouldn’t implement the potentially devastating changes to atrazine use.

Laura Campbell, MFB’s senior conservation and regulatory relations specialist, authored the comments explaining to EPA how the proposed changes will hamper farmers’ ability to implement practices that reduce erosion, nutrient loss, carbon loss, and water runoff from farm fields.

The remarks also draw attention to previous EPA memorandums assessing the benefits of atrazine and related mitigation impacts.

“EPA acknowledged atrazine is highly valuable to the farmers who use it, bringing an additional $52 per acre in sweet corn, $30 per acre in field corn, and $16 per acre for sorghum, and its loss would reduce farmer operating revenue by more than 60% for field corn and 67% in sorghum. Sweet corn could suffer complete losses,” Campbell wrote.

“In Michigan alone, this means access to atrazine can increase production revenue by up to $75 million, and its loss could severely hamper or even eliminate more than 3.5 million acres of production of Christmas trees, field corn, sod, sorghum, sweet corn, and wheat.”

Campbell adds that the EPA memorandum admits that lower application rates would control and complicate herbicide resistance, making atrazine and other herbicides less effective. 

“Many of the proposed mitigation practices proposed in EPA’s pick list would also impact atrazine’s effectiveness, from preventing application and increasing weed infiltration due to rainfall restrictions, increasing costs from the inability to apply pre-emergence, increasing costs from tillage and damaging soil integrity from requiring incorporation, losing weed control from requiring reduced tillage where it is used particularly for sweet corn, raising production costs from requiring cover crops and irrigation water management, and decrease production area from requiring vegetative filter strips,” Campbell said.

Under the EPA proposal, restrictions for all atrazine uses will include:

• No application on saturated fields.
• No application when it is raining or when rain is likely to occur in the next 48 hours.
• No aerial application.
• Reduced corn and sorghum application rate to 2 pounds per acre, per year.

Atrazine has been on the market for more than 60 years, and no herbicide has been studied more or has a longer safety record, according to the Triazine Network — which represents a broad coalition of growers across the nation who rely on atrazine and other triazine herbicides.

“Placing severe limits on atrazine will have broad implications considering that atrazine is a key component in over 90 herbicide mixtures farmers rely upon,” the Triazine Network wrote in a statement.

The EPA estimates replacing atrazine would cost farmers more than $40 per acre, and that figure doesn’t account for reduced yields its loss could cause. 

Follow Michigan Farm News for more atrazine updates.