Farmers say that the EPA’s draft insecticide strategy is lacking detail. It is intended to work alongside the Endangered Species Act.
An entomologist at Iowa State University Extension says it has its problems.
According to Dr. Erin Hodgson, “It’s super vague right now, and even when the bulletins come out, so the areas that they’re going to identify for critical habitat, all the labels are going to change. So, every insecticide label is going to have some sort of verbiage, and of course, we have lots of products out there. And so, those labels are going to slowly change over the next year, maybe even a couple years.”
For that reason, Hodgson suggests farmers become well acquainted with the labels of products they use.
She also has several recommendations for farmers looking to make progress both financially and environmentally.
“I’m a big advocate of using treatment thresholds. So density or injury-based threshold. So, it’s a response to high level of insect pressure, and so for a lot of areas of row crops in Iowa we can tend to back off on some of those treatments because they’re not economically feasible and they are high risk or high exposure to non-target,” she explains.
The draft insecticide strategy’s comment period is set to end on September 22nd.
