Vermont’s overall pesticide use in 2018 was the lowest it’s been this decade.
But long-awaited state reports on pesticides show use of some common corn herbicides, including one banned in Europe, has not been going down.
The state tracks pesticide use through annual reports from applicators and information on sales from pesticide dealers, and must, by law, make that information public.
Reports on the use of pesticides in Vermont released earlier this month show use of atrazine — a weedkiller with serious health and environmental risks — has been going up slightly because of the herbicide’s low cost.
“People don’t want to pay a good price for the food they eat,” said Jeff Carter, agronomy specialist with UVM Extension, adding: “We have a system where almost every agricultural industry is not doing well — I don’t care if it’s beef or sheep or cows or goats or whatever.”
A malfunction with a state database and limited Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets staff delayed the release of pesticide reports for five years. Earlier this year, the agriculture agency put the pesticide reports from 2014-2018 online.
The data came with the caveat that only the 2018 data has been “100% reviewed,” meaning that multiple agency staff members have verified the data, according to Cary Giguere, director of public health and agricultural resource management for the agriculture agency.
Advocates say the absence of reliable data has hindered efforts to curb pesticide use in the state.
Overall farm pesticide use not going down
Corn accounts for about three-quarters of outdoor pesticide application in Vermont, according to the agriculture agency. Pesticide use on corn and hay went up from 184,365 pounds in 2013 to 270,812 pounds in 2016. Use in that sector declined sharply in 2017 before increasing again to 232,265 pounds in 2018 — the third highest amount sprayed this decade.
The reports show the most-used pesticide on Vermont farms since 2012 has been atrazine. Farmers sprayed almost 80,000 pounds of atrazine on fields in 2018, with just over half going on fields in Franklin and Addison counties.
The herbicide, banned in the European Union, is widely used in the U.S. to control grassy weeds. It is classified as a “restricted use” pesticide, meaning only certified applicators can apply it. The product cannot be applied within 200 feet of lakes and reservoirs, 66 feet of streams or 50 feet of drinking water wells.
Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Portland, Oregon Center for Biological Diversity, said after reviewing the pesticide use summary report that atrazine was the “most concerning” pesticide being used. He noted seeing little use in Vermont of some particularly toxic agricultural pesticides, like fumigants and paraquat, that are more “widespread” in the agricultural behemoths of the Midwest and California’s Central Valley.
Atrazine dissolves easily in water, where it takes a long time to break down. “Whenever it rains, whenever you get a storm event, atrazine is going to run off the plants, run off the fields and it’s going to make its way into the nearest stream or lake or river,” explained Donley, who authored a peer-reviewed study on pesticides still used in the U.S. that other countries have banned.
Exposure to atrazine, a known endocrine system disruptor, has been linked to reproductive system impacts for humans, such as irregular menstrual cycles for women and low sperm counts for men, and certain kinds of cancer, said Donley, a former cancer researcher for the state of Oregon.
In 2016, the federal Environmental Protection Agency found that heavy use of the herbicide endangers aquatic plants and poses a “potential chronic risk” to fish and amphibians.
“It’s really bad — among the worst pesticides still in use,” Donley said of atrazine.
Vermont farmers on average use less atrazine on their fields than counterparts in the Midwest, according to 2016 agricultural pesticide use estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey. But with much of the atrazine application concentrated in corn-growing areas, the potential exists for the herbicide to concentrate in the “same watershed,” said Donley.
Atrazine is one of the chemicals monitored for in the Vermont agriculture agency’s pesticide and groundwater monitoring program, which has been around since the 1980s. In 2018, seven out of 170 monitoring wells sampled near farms contained atrazine, all between 0.5-0.9 parts per billion. (The federal drinking water standard for the herbicide is 3ppb.) Agency-led sampling found that 13.8% of 282 farm surface water samples taken from 2007-2016 had atrazine levels above 0.1 ppb.
Carter, from UVM Extension, said that atrazine use by farmers has likely not gone down, despite promotion of less toxic alternatives, because of its low cost.
“The dairy and the farm economy is so horrible that they’re going to constantly go back to the less expensive product,” he said.
Glyphosate use on farms almost doubles
Vermont farmers’ use of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, almost doubled last decade, going from 15,193 pounds used in 2010 to 28,969 pounds in 2018. (Despite the uptick, farmers still use significantly less glyphosate than atrazine and the weedkiller metolachlor.)
Why has glyphosate use gone up so much? It’s because of some of the same conservation practices farmers are doing to improve water quality.
“The way to control phosphorus in Lake Champlain is to control soil erosion and control nutrients from leaving the field,” explained Carter, from UVM Extension. For corn farmers, that means not tilling the soil and planting cover crops, like winter rye, so fields aren’t left bare over the winter.
Addison County, where Carter is based, has gone from having almost no cover crops to 30-40% of fields planted over the winter, he said.
But farmers who use cover crops need to kill them before they can plant corn in the spring.
They have three options: tilling the plants into the soil, using a roller-crimper to essentially push them down or spraying Roundup. (Organic farmers cannot use glyphosate.)
No-till conventional farmers cannot use the first method and there’s a problem with the roller-crimper method: it “mostly doesn’t work,” according to Carter.
“The tradeoff is…a conservation practice to save more soil, in this case, increases the use of one specific herbicide,” said Carter.
“Now that one specific herbicide happens to be contentious,” he added.
Giguere, of the agriculture agency, said the uptick in glyphosate use in Vermont corresponds with less use of “persistent” corn herbicides, which are more toxic and applied overall in much smaller amounts.
Carter said that the “anti-Monsanto” publicity around glyphosate has pushed some farmers in the Midwest to switch back to older, more toxic herbicides like paraquat.
“I’m concerned about the farmer and his personal safety when he’s using these products,” he added. “The general public doesn’t seem to consider that at all.”
Use of glyphosate in forestry sharply increased in 2018 -— though total use in that sector remains less than 10% of what is used on farms — due to an increase in federal funding for invasive species management, said Giguere. He added that in general, changes in pesticide use in Vermont during this period can be “traced back to practices that the state or federal government is encouraging or paying for.”
While Donley, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said glyphosate is less toxic than atrazine (on the “moderate end of the toxicity spectrum”), “the best available science” points to it being a likely carcinogen for humans.
“When you’re talking about people that are exposed to high levels of glyphosate, like farm workers and pesticide applicators, that can be a major risk factor in developing disease,” he said.
Regeneration Vermont, an advocacy group that opposes industrial dairy farming, has been pushing the agriculture agency for years to publish the pesticide reports. Michael Colby, the organization’s president, said that the “promise” of genetically modified corn was that farmers would be able to use fewer pesticides.
And “when they introduced glyphosate, they said it was going to lead to the reduction of other pesticides like atrazine,” he said. “That’s not the case.”
Rutland County pesticide use makes it an outlier
Almost 10 times as many pesticides were applied in Rutland County in 2018 as the next highest county, Windsor. That is because of one business: Omya.
The global chemical company has a quarry in Middlebury that grinds marble and produces calcium carbonate. Omya sprays biocides on its calcium carbonate slurry to prevent bacteria and mold from growing, said Giguere.
He added that while that pesticide application is not done within a completely contained system, it also does not have the same potential for environmental impact as land application.
Vermonters for a Clean Environment, headed by Danby resident Annette Smith, has criticized the agriculture agency’s decision almost two decades ago to allow Omya to keep the amount and type of biocides used confidential as a “trade secret.”
Lack of quality data frustrates advocates and pesticide council
Colby said that while Regeneration Vermont was happy to see the data released, the organization was frustrated by its “unreliability” and how long it took for the public, especially lawmakers and the Vermont Pesticide Advisory Council, to see the reports.
“These are entities…that are supposed to be relying on this data to meet the state…goal, which is a reduction of pesticides,” he said. “The fact that we’ve had to fly blind and these agencies that had to fly blind for over five years is concerning and frustrating.”
The absence of up-to-date, reliable data has challenged the council, which asked the agriculture agency multiple times in years past to put the data in a publically accessible, “user friendly interface.”
By law, VPAC is supposed to “recommend targets with respect to the State goal of achieving an overall reduction in the use of pesticides consistent with sound pest or vegetative management practices.” Until last legislative session, VPAC was also supposed to provide an annual report describing the state’s progress in meeting those targets.
The agriculture agency successfully pushed to remove the requirement that VPAC file that report. Giguere said in an interview last summer the report, which had not been filed since 2003, had mainly summarized VPAC’s activities — information now available online.
Due to its current makeup, the state pesticide advisory council has functioned in recent years as more of a “technical review” panel that looks at specific issues, like whether required setbacks from streams are protecting aquatic ecosystems, over policy, said Giguere.
“The council is very adept and focused on that type of activity but if you look, there’s nobody that sits around the table that’s really policy-oriented at this point,” he added.
Giguere also said in an interview last year that the council incorporates the goal of pesticide reduction into its review of permits, especially for golf courses, and in “any work the council does.”
Neonicotinoids: a ‘blindspot’ in the data
While the reports show new information about pesticide use, they have limited information about a controversial insecticide lawmakers have started cracking down on.
Last year, the Legislature passed a bill restricting use of neonicotinoids, a relatively new class of insecticides related to nicotine that are considered to be toxic to bees. Originally developed in the 1980s, neonicotinoids are now the most widely used class of insecticides in the world, largely because of their use to treat agricultural seeds.
Neonicotinoid use in Vermont declined over the past two years — although the 1,051 pounds used in 2018 almost double how much was used at the start of the decade. (Most of the Vermont neonicotinoid use is for golf courses, according to the pesticide reports.)
Starting this year, only certified pesticide applicators can buy and use neonicotinoids in Vermont. Some environmental advocates and bee researchers are dismayed the new restrictions exempt treated seeds.
A 2015 report from the state Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets estimated that treated seeds introduce 8,270 pounds of neonicotinoids a year to the environment. But farmers do not have to report use of treated seeds under the pesticide reporting requirements, which Colby referred to as a “blindspot” as the state implements new restrictions on neonicotinoid use.
The neonicotinoids law passed last year also created two new positions within the Agency of Agriculture: a pollinator protection specialist and a field agent to work with hardware stores and other so-called “Class B” pesticide dealers to remove neonicotinoids. Giguere said the state’s recently hired pollinator protection specialist, Brooke Decker, had already started doing some outreach to pesticide applicators about pollinators.
