The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recent approval of five-year registrations for several dicamba products (GM Oct. 30, p. 1) has prompted a lawsuit from two crop associations who allege that the new use restrictions included in the registrations are overly burdensome for farmers.
EPA on Oct. 27 approved new registrations for two “over-the-top” (OTT) dicamba products – Bayer’s XtendiMax with VaporGrip Technology and BASF’s Engenia Herbicide – and extended the registration for Syngenta’s Tavium Plus VaporGrip Technology. EPA stressed that the registrations are only for use on dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybeans.
The new registrations include several measures to manage off-site drift, such as requiring the use of an approved pH-buffering agent, also known as a Volatility Reduction Agent, in tank mixtures with dicamba products prior to all applications to control volatility; requiring a downwind buffer of 240 feet and 310 feet in areas where listed species are located; and prohibiting OTT application of dicamba on soybeans after June 30 and cotton after July 30.
On Nov. 4, however, the American Soybean Association (ASA) and Plains Cotton Growers filed a lawsuit against EPA claiming that “some aspects of the registration decision are problematic” for growers. The lawsuit alleges that “several registration conditions impose growing restrictions and disrupt growing seasons, which will diminish crop yields, cut productivity, and drive up operational costs.” The lawsuit also charges that some of these conditions are “significantly more stringent” than those found in past dicamba registrations.
“Label conditions must include protections to ensure safe, responsible use of products like dicamba, but they also cannot be so burdensome that they won’t work for the farmers who need them,” said ASA President Bill Gordon in a statement. “As this re-registration stands, the buffer length and application cutoff date will preclude many growers from using dicamba effectively during weather conditions that cause planting delays and on significant swaths of land that they rely on for cost-effective production.”
The lawsuit contains multiple counts related to the application restrictions and spatial application buffers, describing those conditions as “arbitrary and capricious and beyond the agency’s authority” under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the Endangered Species Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act.