The Chittenden Solid Waste District has begun deploying a posse of field technicians to respond to the crisis at Green Mountain Compost, all of whose products were found to be contaminated with trace amounts of the persistent herbicides Clopyralid and Picloram after contorted leaves were noticed on some broadleaf garden plants in late June.
The technicians, trained by Ann Hazelrigg, head of the Plant Diagnostic Clinic at UVM, will visit every customer who has registered possible damage from the herbicides. That number is around 400.
Armed with Netbooks, the first five set out Thursday to record the situation on the ground and hear directly from gardeners. This will help determine the level of assistance the CSWD will provide.
GMC is recalling all bagged material and late last month stopped selling any compost or compost-based products. They continue to make compost, however, since Chittenden County mandates keeping yard waste–and soon food scraps–out of county landfills.
In the three weeks since evidence of what turned out to be herbicide contamination cropped up, CSWD has sent in two groups of samples to be analyzed and they are expecting a third batch of results soon.
The latest results came in July 10 and confirmed that the heaviest contamination was in horse manure and bedding, one of the four main feedstocks for compost. (The others are yard waste, food scraps and wood chips.) Clopyralid turned up in all five horse manure/bedding samples and Picloram, a Restricted Use herbicide that has not been used, at least legally, in Vermont since 2009, according to state agriculture department records, in four of five. These feedstocks have higher levels of the herbicides than the finished compost and compost products. CSWD has notified all the horse farms sampled that they will no longer take their manure/bedding.
Two garden vegetable samples, one of spinach and one of lettuce, showed no contamination. The field technicians will probably find that some problems thought to be caused by the herbicides are due to other causes. When damage from persistent herbicides does appear it is only in specific broad leaf garden plants, such as tomatoes, lettuce, beans and potatoes. The two persistent herbicides produce a specific and distinctive contortion of plant leaves and sometime stems, which shows up as the plant leafs out not at germination.
A special meeting of the CSWD Board of Commissioners was called on July 18. After a period for public comment, the commissioners focused on the herbicide exposure, debating how and what kind of help to provide to customers who have been affected. Commissioners have to deal with a moving target of a problem. Reports of herbicide damage may turn out not to be as widespread as first thought or may be very widespread.
Even the damage may be either heavy or not as serious as at first thought. Two commissioners who found damage in their own tomato plants reported on Wednesday that after the recent heavy rains, the plants revived and fruit looks healthy, said Doug Taff, an alternate commissioner from Hinesburg.
Some commissioners believe that trace contamination is likely everywhere on farms, coming from animals who are fed alfalfa hay, which generally must come from out of state, as Vermont does not grow enough to feed dairy cows, for example. The question on everyone’s mind is why the problem has manifested itself in plants now, when the signs are that trace contamination existed even at Intervale Compost. Samples from bags brought to GMC from the Intervale, which would be a year old, contained persistent herbicides.
The meeting, which began at 6 p.m. and ended near midnight, endorsed the technician investigation, which is limited to two weeks, but put off until sometime next week the decision on what package of assistance to offer customers.
Meghan Giroux of Vermont Edible Landscapes, some of whose clinets’ gardens have been affected, came to the public comment period hoping for some answers on where the contamination came from, how she will be recoup her investment in GMC compost and when she can safely use their products again. She said she has faith in the composting enterprise, but some gardens she has designed and planted for clients have suffered from the herbicide contamination.
The commission spent most of the evening debating a series of topics that ranged from how to conclusively identify the sources of the contamination, how to regain the confidence of the public in this organic gold and how to come up with a fact-based and “fiscally responsible” solution to any losses the public has sustained, as well as those facing the CSWD and GMC. As Clare Innes put it, the CSWD is well aware that they are a “steward of public funds,” not a for-profit, independent entity.
In terms of mitigating their own losses, CSWD hopes that Vermont League of Cities and Towns’ business insurance will be available to them. But that’s still an open question. CSWD will also be exploring selling compost for use on lawns, where it is safe as a soil amendment so long as the grass clippings do not go into compost.
For now there are a number of avenues open to gardeners. Some of these are given on the Green Mountain Compost Factsheet that was updated on July 6: http://www.greenmountaincompost.com/all-about-compost/compost-persistent-herbicides-fact-sheet/.
