Drifting dicamba weedkiller puts prized trees, orchards at risk

State politicians are ignoring the problem because they're scared of Monsanto

The two stories below highlight the appalling damage to trees and commercial orchards from drifting and volatilising dicamba herbicide, which is used on GM dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton.

1. A drifting weedkiller puts prized trees at risk

2. Orchard sees smaller crop volume because of dicamba

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1. A drifting weedkiller puts prized trees at risk

Dan Charles

NPR, September 27, 2018

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/27/651262491/a-drifting-weedkiller-puts-prized-trees-at-risk

Mike Hayes and I are sitting on the patio of Blue Bank Resort, the business he owns on Reelfoot Lake, in Tennessee. The sun is going down. It's beautiful.

What really catches your eye here is the cypress trees. They line the lake, and thousands of them are standing right in the water. Hayes tells me that they are more than 200 years old.

They were here in 1812, when the lake was formed: A cataclysmic earthquake shook this area, the land dropped, and water from the Mississippi River rushed in and covered 15,000 acres of cypress forest. Yet these trees survived and became a home for fish and birds.

"The fishing's around the tree; the eagles nest in the tree, the egrets. So much wildlife all out in the trees," he says. "The trees define Reelfoot Lake."

Last year, though, Hayes noticed that the trees didn't look right. Their needles were turning brown. Some were curling. "Something was going on that never happened before," he says.

Neighbors were talking about it. Everybody had a theory: disease, drought, insects. "They thought of other things, but when it came down to it, it was a drifting chemical," Hayes says.

The chemical is called dicamba. It's a weedkiller, and it blew in from nearby soybean and cotton fields.

Similar things have happened across the Midwest and Mid-South over the past two years. From Mississippi to Illinois, people have noticed trees or other kinds of wild vegetation that show signs of damage from dicamba. The Environmental Protection Agency now has to decide whether farmers should be allowed to keep using this chemical in quite the same way. The agency's previous approval expires at the end of the year.

Many farmers have come to rely on dicamba. In the area around Reelfoot Lake, the vast majority of farmers use the chemical, says Jason Hamlin, a consultant who works with farmers in west Tennessee and southeastern Missouri.

Farmers have turned to dicamba because it still works; many other herbicides don't anymore, because weeds have become resistant to them. Dicamba is a new option for farmers growing soybeans and cotton because the big seed company Monsanto, which is now owned by Bayer, created new genetically modified versions of these crops that can tolerate dicamba. This means that farmers can spray this chemical and the weeds die, but the crops are fine. Farmers got permission to spray dicamba on their new, tolerant crops two years ago.

"Nobody wants it to get on their neighbor's crop, the tree line, the lake, the state park, whatever; nobody wants that. But they have to have a tool to control their weeds or they can't farm, you know?" says Hamlin.

Dicamba has long been known as a chemical that's hard to control. It can evaporate from the soil or plants where it was sprayed, and that vapor can drift for miles. But both Monsanto and the chemical company BASF developed new "low volatility" formulations to solve this problem.

The problem resurfaced, though. In each of the past two years, drifting dicamba has been blamed for damaging more than 1 million acres of neighboring crops, mostly soybeans. It has provoked fights between farmers and set off a huge controversy.

Receiving less attention, so far, is the damage to wild plants. Few people were watching them quite so closely.

"I've never really paid attention to trees," says Tom Burnham, a farmer in Mississippi County, Ark. "But in the last two or three years I've actually started looking at trees in people's yards and everything, and you know it's amazing, once you start looking, what you see."

So I started looking. Greg Allen, an agricultural extension agent with the University of Tennessee, took me on a little drive down a country road a few miles from Reelfoot Lake. We passed a big field of soybeans on our right. On our left was woodland.

I didn't really know what to look for. I asked Allen what caught his eye. He rolled down his window and gestured toward a nearby tree. "Well, one thing that would've caught my eye is that sycamore, and them itty-bitty leaves," he says.

Normal sycamore leave are big and flat; these are curved into the shape of small cups, a sign of exposure to dicamba. "And you can see it goes all the way to the top," he says. "That's a 30- or 40-foot tree."

I realize that the leaves of almost every sycamore tree nearby show similar symptoms. Other trees, though, do not. Dicamba affects various plant species very differently. Based on what scientists have observed this past year, the tree species that seem most sensitive to dicamba include sycamore, cypress, Bradford pear, and white oak.

The amount of damage also changes from place to place. In Iowa, forestry experts haven't seen many signs of exposure to dicamba. In Arkansas, though, a scientist that state officials hired to conduct a survey saw dicamba-damaged trees in every town that he visited across the northeastern part of the state.

It's now up to the EPA to decide just how much protection these trees need, balancing that against the desire of many farmers to keep using dicamba.

There are billions of dollars at stake. Monsanto is arguing that the government can't take this tool away from farmers. If used properly, the company says, dicamba doesn't hurt anything but weeds.

Back at Reelfoot Lake, Hayes says his prematurely brown cypress trees are evidence that this isn't true. He thinks state politicians are ignoring the problem — in part because they're scared of Monsanto.

"The problem with dicamba is, there's so much money behind it," he says with a deep sigh. "I've never seen so many people run from a problem so bad in my life. It really hurts to lose what we're about to lose."

Dicamba hasn't killed the trees in the lake, but Hayes is convinced that the chemical has weakened them. And new cypress trees can't sprout and grow in the water. The trees that make Reelfoot Lake what it is — if they die, they're gone forever, he says.

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2. Orchard sees smaller crop volume because of dicamba

WSILTV, Sept 28, 2018

http://www.wsiltv.com/story/39189561/orchard-sees-smaller-crop-volume-because-of-dicamba

An herbicide aimed at improving crop yields is having the opposite affect at at least one orchard in Union County.

News 3 has been looking into the effects of the weed killer Dicamba for the past year. The chemical has previously been blamed for damaging row crops, and now it is hurting production at Flamm Orchards.

While Dicamba is great at killing weeds, it also kills other broadleaf plants and trees.

But despite new formulations and strict guidelines, it's still notorious for its volatility. Meaning it can easily move and drift away from the fields where it's being sprayed.

Jeff Flamm says in his 40 years he's never seen so many curled up, brown leaves. He says it's likely that hundreds of peach trees have been damaged.

"In the overall scheme of things, it's a relatively small percentage, but just by driving around, I think that number is going to go up," Jeff said.

The first signs of damage to peach trees started showing up in early July and then in apple trees later in the season.

All signs point to one thing: Dicamba.

"We've had several different agronomists and different experts come in and everybody seems to agree that that's what's probably going on.," Mike Flamm said.

Both Jeff and Mike are a bit surprised at the damage since heir orchard sits in the hills and there's not an abundance of row crops around.

"I didn't think that this was an issue we'd ever have to deal with. Not in our location," Mike Flamm said.

"We're not pointing fingers at anyone. We're not accusing anybody of using anything off label or in an negligent manner," said Jeff Flamm.

But it's more than brown leaves and potentially dead trees. What looked like a great apple crop has left the Flamm's disappointed with apples that are smaller than expected.

"You can figure, if you lose a quarter of inch in diameter, it probably relates to about a 20 to 25 percent loss in volume," Jeff said.

Luckily, the safety and quality of the fruit is not impacted at all, but smaller apples are less valuable and less desirable.

"I wouldn't say at this point that it's devastating, but it could be in the future," Mike said,

"It's a little scary. We don't know where we're going to end up a year from now or five years from now," Jeff said.

Right now, they can only wait and reach out to lawmakers hoping to persuade them to help out. The EPA is expected to make a decision any day now on what changes, if any, will be made to how Dicamba can be used going forward.

States also have the ability to step in and add restrictions and regulations.