Iowans doused by agricultural chemicals worry about health effects
Jul. 28, 2024 5:30 am, Updated: Jul. 29, 2024 9:10 am agricultural wheel sprayer
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BURLINGTON — The sunflowers were the first victims, dying within days of herbicide application on a neighboring alfalfa field.
Other casualties include a cherry tree, a pear tree and a 30-year-old pine on the north side of Jace Skalinski’s home near Burlington.
When Skalinski, 38, saw the sprayer arrive next door on April 24, 2021 — a Saturday afternoon when he was having a family gathering — he told his family to go outside so the applicator would see them and not spray on a day with wind gusts of over 25 mph.
“I had all the kids jump up on the trampoline and I’m telling them ‘Make sure this guy sees us’,” Skalinski said. “I thought maybe with everybody out there, they would care. They didn’t. They just dropped the load and friggin’ sprayed everybody and my trees.”
Skalinski’s family — including five little girls on the trampoline — all felt a mist of chemicals. When Skalinski filed a complaint with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, he submitted his cousin’s baseball cap for testing.
Lab tests confirmed the weedkiller dicamba had drifted to Skalinski’s property, dousing people and plants. The state fined Nutrien Ag Solutions, of Mediapolis, $1,000 — a rare penalty when most complaints about pesticide drift end with just a warning.
Nutrien declined to comment for this article.
Agricultural chemicals are essential to modern agriculture — helping farmers produce more crops on the same amount of land. But chemicals that kill farm pests also can harm people, animals, trees and gardens.
State and federal governments have shortened the window of when farmers are allowed to spray dicamba and tightened other pesticide rules. Some commercial applicators are changing their practices to avoid complaints from neighbors.
Still, agricultural chemicals are drifting — more than 200 Iowans filed complaints last year about it — and increasingly volatile weather in late spring and early summer makes it hard for applicators to find time to safely spray.
Dicamba has been used on Iowa farms for decades to control broad-leaved weeds, including waterhemp. The weedkiller is applied at the ground level, but when there is a temperature inversion — warm air trapping a cool layer near the ground — the chemical can drift a mile or more.
Dicamba causes plant leaves to cup and curl, reducing their ability to absorb sunlight and perform photosynthesis. This is what you want for weeds — but not crops, trees or vegetables.
The state agriculture department, which investigates complaints about drifting weedkillers, insecticides and fungicides, received about 200 complaints about dicamba alone in 2020, 2021 and 2022. In nearly 70 percent of those cases, lab tests confirmed dicamba or glyphosate — the active ingredient in Roundup — was on the damaged plants, a Gazette review showed.
Dicamba usually doesn’t hurt corn when it’s applied early in the growing season, and many farmers now buy special — and more expensive — seed for soybeans that tolerate dicamba. Still, 90% of the dicamba complaints from 2020 through 2022 were about damage to non-resistant soybeans.
The vast majority of dicamba complaints arose from applications in the month of June — a critical period for post-emergent herbicide application.
“We’re trying to get it on before that crop canopies,” said Rebecca Vittetoe, an Iowa State University Extension & Outreach field agronomist who covers Eastern Iowa. “When you look out early on, you can see that bare ground. Later, you can’t see that bare ground. We want that herbicides to get to the weeds or touch the soil.”
But June has the highest average rainfall of the year in Iowa, and its warmer temperatures mean more extreme weather. This makes it hard to find windows of time when it’s not too windy or too hot or rain isn’t expected.
Andrew Thostenson, pesticide program specialist with North Dakota State University Extension, said there’s a joke in the pesticide regulator world that June 30 is the longest day of the year — “it lasts for weeks.” The implication is applicators might fudge their paperwork to show they applied herbicides before the June 30 cutoff.
“You can’t spray in the rain or if it’s too muddy and you can’t get on the land with the equipment,” Thostenson said. “I just wish somehow that there would be an acknowledgment that just because it’s on the pesticide label, doesn’t mean it will be done just as the label describes.”
Drifting pesticides also cause collateral damage to trees, gardens and flowers.
Since the 1980s, foresters have noticed oak trees with leaves that are frayed or stripped of tissue around the veins. The tree will produce a second set of leaves in the spring to try to catch up, which saps the tree’s strength.
Oak tatters were reported in 12 Iowa counties — including Linn and Johnson — last year, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources Forest Health Monitor.
Researchers at ISU and the University of Illinois have tested pre-emergent herbicides, including acetochlor, on oak seedlings and replicated the effects of oak tatters, leading some researchers to believe these early-season weedkillers also are harming oaks.
“We see the aboveground damage and we think the sky is falling, but it’s just the canary in the coal mine. It pales in comparison to what is going on to those trees below ground,” Jesse Randall, a former ISU researcher who now leads the U.P. Forestry Innovation Center for Michigan State University, said in a 2022 webinar.
“When you think about that family of chemicals, they are designed to stop root growth and that’s exactly what they are doing to our seedlings,” he said.
There are some questions about why oak tatters turned up in the 1980s, when use of acetochlor and related herbicides started in the 1960s. It’s also not clear whether whatever is causing oak tatters also is weakening oaks so they become more vulnerable to oak wilt.
Craig Kooyman, 64, was working with a road crew on Highway 5 near Moravia on July 12, 2021, when he noticed a crop-dusting plane getting closer.
“I was very uneasy about that,” Kooyman told The Gazette. “He (the pilot) knew we were there. My thought was ‘Is he really going to do this?’ It was 50 feet from where we were to the crop he was spraying.”
The Stardust Agriculture Aviation plane released pesticide and fungicide on the cornfield — and all over Kooyman and his crew, according to state records.
“He said after they sprayed he could taste a funny taste in his mouth and got his crew into the trucks,” according to an incident report on file with the state ag department. Inspectors who took samples from Kooyman’s truck as well as nearby vegetation and soil confirmed residues of the two farm chemicals Stardust was spraying that day.
Two messages left at the number for Stardust on file with the Iowa Agricultural Aviation Association were not returned.
Exposure to agricultural chemicals has been linked to some types of cancer.
The Agricultural Health Study, a 30-year study of 89,000 pesticide applicators — mostly farmers — and their spouses in Iowa and North Carolina has provided data showing farmers have a higher rate of prostate cancer.
Applicators who used dicamba had elevated risk of liver cancer and intrahepatic bile duct cancer, a 2020 analysis showed. Among farmers in the Agricultural Health Study, a greater use of the herbicide atrazine increased risk of lung and prostate cancer, a 2024 study showed.
Beyond cancer, drifting pesticides also have been linked to an increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, according to a 2017 study of rural residents in the Netherlands. A California study published in 2023 shows environmental exposure to pesticides may cause a faster decline from the disease.
Skalinski, the Burlington-area man whose extended family was doused with dicamba, said he wonders if the exposure may have contributed to some nerve issues his children have.
“I talked with lawyers and they said ‘All you can do it wait till somebody gets sick.’ If someone were to get cancer from that in the future, at least you’d have a point where they were exposed,” he said.
Iowans filed 208 pesticide misuse complaints in the 2023 crop year, down nearly 50 percent from the high of 396 in 2022. Many factors influence the number of complaints, said state ag department spokesman Don McDowell. But the three years with the highest complaints correspond with the four-year drought that ended earlier this year.
Of the 200 Iowa dicamba investigations in 2020, 2021 and 2022, only 12 ended with fines and the highest fine was $1,300, The Gazette found.
The agency can fine $500 per offense, with some investigations including more than one offense. Fine amounts are determined by these factors:
“The fines need to be stiffer,” Kooyman said.“It’s really not a deterrent. It’s more of ‘OK, that’s the cost of doing business’.”
Some commercial applicators had multiple fines. Nutrien Ag Solutions, of Dunlap, had four fines, totaling $3,700. Bettin Ag Service, of Early, and Bunkers Feed & Supply, of Granville, each had two fines from complaints filed in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
Curt Bunkers, vice president of Bunkers Feed & Supply, said his company has stopped using dicamba as a post-emergent spray because of the potential for drifting with warmer temperatures in June.
“We’ve gone more to using dicamba products as a pre-emergent, sprayed prior to the beans getting out the ground,” he said. “You don’t have the drift issue that way.”
The company holds training sessions once a month — more often in the spring — about how and when to spray chemicals.
“We try to do stuff right,” Bunkers said. “I don’t like to have complaints filed.”
State and federal regulators have been tweaking pesticide rules to try to reduce drift.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2020 prohibited dicamba spraying after June 30. The rules also increased the downwind buffer between sprayed fields and other plant species and required applicators to mix in a buffering agent to reduce volatility. Iowa cut off dicamba spraying this year by June 12.
Some universities are looking for tech solutions.
University of Missouri researchers last summer started studying whether fences treated with activated charcoal could keep dicamba from drifting to sensitive crops nearby. The National Science Foundation last year gave CelluDot, a University of Arkansas startup, a $1 million grant to commercialize technology that dispenses sawdust with herbicides to make the chemicals sink to the ground rather than drifting.
Rantizo, an Iowa City-based agricultural drone company, recently got approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to “swarm” up to three drones weighing over 55 pounds and to operate at night. These waivers could help reduce drift, said Jeff Dickens, a Rantizo drone operator.
On a day with prime weather, a pesticide applicator using multiple drones could spray a larger area in the same amount of time, he said. Cooler temperatures in the night often mean less wind.
“Nobody likes drift, whether you are an operator or farmer,” Dickens said. “If I can spray at 10 p.m. at night and I don’t have to talk with the plant board or talk with a pissed-off neighbor, I’m going to spray at night.”
Comments: (319) 339-3157; erin.jordan@thegazette.com
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