Lauren Mills

IowaWatch.org

Iowa’s organic farms, vineyards, apiaries and other non-conventional farms surrounded by row crops treated with pesticides are at risk of being hit with drifting spray that can hurt their farms.

The drift comes from misuse on neighboring farms, mostly the result of someone not following the label instructions on a pesticide, including requirements that a product not be used if wind speeds are too high.

Gretchen Paluch, bureau chief of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship’s pesticide bureau, said the state averages a little more than 100 incidents of pesticides misuse a year, ranging from as low as 60 to as high as 140 incidents in a given year.

In the past, farmers wanting to know if neighbors’ pesticide drifted onto their crops had to wait four to six months for answers from the state’s pesticide investigation program. Independent testing with a faster turnaround time was an option but pricey.

Those farmers can get faster answers now, usually within just under 12 days on average, officials with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship say, after pressure from activists and hearings on a bill proposed during the past legislative session, .

Faster answers can make a big difference for farmers like Rob and Tammy Faux, who run Genuine Faux Farm near Tripoli.

A few years ago, the roar of an airplane spraying pesticides on a neighboring field shook the Faux farm and its owners. Chemicals landed on their organic crops and pastures, some of the turkeys and laying hens and on Rob Faux himself.

“It was scary. It was frustrating. We were angry. We were sad. We ran the whole gamut of emotions. But the worst thing was, we didn’t know what our next step would be at that time,” Rob Faux said.

The proposed legislation credited with pushing for faster test times urged the state to switch testing from the Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship’spesticide bureau to the University of Iowa State Hygienic Laboratory.

Activists and farming groups pushed for the legislation.

A Senate bill didn’t make it to the floor and, although some activists and legislators IowaWatch spoke with were hopeful the two state agencies were discussing future changes, talks outside of the Legislature stalled.

However, the agriculture department’s legislative liaison Matt Gronewald said the turnaround time at the department sped up after officials there looked at its lab’s testing process and prioritized complaints.

Sen. Kevin Kinney, D-Oxford, said he is waiting to see if the problem has been resolved through the agriculture department’s efforts before planning any future legislation.

“My biggest concern was that we weren’t going to have enough support to pass legislation and if we can work it out among our own agencies, it is better to have that solution than none at all,” Kinney said.

Faster turnaround seen as a victory

Linda Wells, the Midwest director of organizing for the Pesticide Action Network, said that she was glad to hear about the faster turnaround times and that, if the department is committed to consistently providing the faster returns, that’s a win.

“It will make a difference in people’s decision-making process if they get that critical information about what to do with their crops,” she said.

The organization has been reaching out to farmers who recently have reported incidents of drift to see how quickly they are getting feedback and will continue to monitoring turnaround times, she said.

Wells said she hoped the agriculture department incorporates other matters the legislation would have addressed, such as being able to file a report online.

Although Gronewald said incidents can be reported through email, telephone or by writing a letter, Wells said information about how to file a report isn’t always easy to find.

“We think incidents of drift are underreported and some of that is the barrier to figuring out how to do it,” she said.

The current efforts only provide help after the fact, rather than preventing over-spray in the first place or helping individuals recover after an accidental spraying, she said.

“This isn’t about prevention, this is about making it easier for farmers to respond when they do get drifted upon. So we will be working on helping farmers prevent drift and mitigate the damages in the future,” she said.

Experiencing over spray

When the Fauxes moved to Tripoli in 2004 for Tammy Faux’s job at Wartburg College, they put in a big garden. Tending to the garden was supposed to be a placeholder until Rob Faux could get a teaching job in the area.

But what started as a large garden and some sales at farmers markets soon evolved into a Community Supported Agriculture venture that has grown to over 100 shareholders. Produce on the farm was first certified organic in 2007.

In addition to farming about five acres of fruits and vegetables, the couple raises egg-laying hens and finishes chickens, turkeys and ducks.

Rob Faux, the only full-time worker on the farm, was out in the field on the evening of July 27, 2012, when a plane spraying pesticides on a neighboring field caught his attention.

“A plane flew over and they can be pretty darn loud when they’re in your area. It flew directly overhead and, right after it flew over my head, I felt droplets land on me.”

The plane flew over pastures holding their hens and turkeys. Faux grabbed the digital camera he kept with him in the field and started taking pictures.

“He (the pilot) was at least 35 to 40 feet in the air as he went over a few trees with the sprayer on. So pretty much the entire west portion of our farm was flown over and the spray application landed on our farm.”

What followed was weeks of uncertainty and many phone calls. The Fauxes called a doctor first, who advised him to take a half-hour-long shower to get the chemicals off his skin. Then they contacted the pesticide bureau in the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. They called the agriculture department’s organic certification program that certified their farm and tried to get a hold of their neighbors and the local farmers co-op.

They also had to tell their shareholders what happened.

“There was a lot of work going on at the farm and we lost a lot of things in just a few moments. And there was a lot of uncertainty for weeks to months afterwards. So I don’t wish this on anybody,” Faux said.

The pesticides made his skin more sensitive to the sun and triggered breathing troubles, he said.

“It’s a frustrating thing when you are an active person who has to do active things, to stop every so many feet and catch your breath. It’s also hard to sell fresh produce and tell people that it’s healthy while you’re hacking away,” he said.

The pesticide inspector came out the Monday following the spraying and gathered samples from the farm. Faux also had kept the clothes he was wearing in a plastic bag, so those could be tested as well. But then he learned that that he and Tammy couldn’t expect to see the results from that testing for four to six months.

Six months would have put Rob Faux past the growing season for most of his produce. He couldn’t wait that long and sent samples to a lab in Oregon at a cost of $1,600.

Those test results came back in about two weeks, he said, and showed that the spray had affected the turkey and hen flocks as well as a high-tunnel building, a type of unheated greenhouse used to extend the growing season, and a field in the southwest portion of the farm with peppers, eggplants, green beans and dry beans.

There was some good news in the results. Some areas of the farm were chemical-free. The produce still could be harvested and consumed and those areas could keep the organic certification. Also, Rob Faux said, he and Tammy could begin moving forward.

New testing site

Christopher Atchison, director of the State Hygienic Laboratory, said the lab has the capability to do the required testing now done at the Agriculture Department and does does similar testing under a contract with the states of Nebraska and Missouri. The turnaround time for those states typically is about 20 to 25 working days, although it could be up to 45 working days during peak season.

Atchison said the lab already collaborates with Iowa’s agriculture department for some testing, including a recent spraying incident in Marion where fungicides were sprayed on a residential area. The hygienic lab turned results around in under 24 hours, he said.

He said responding to complaints of pesticide over-spray or drift is similar to other types of testing the lab is trained to do, including responding to chemical terrorism.

“It’s very much as response-driven system rather than a regulatory function and that’s something we’re set up to do,” he said. “We’re the designated laboratory for chemical terrorism so our expertise is really trying to identify unknowns and that’s what you have in these kinds of situations. You can assume it’s a crop duster but it can be any number of things: herbicides, fungicides, etc.,” Atchison said.

He said that there hasn’t been much discussion about the matter between the two agencies since the legislative session ended and that it would be in the hands of the agriculture department to expand collaborations with the hygienic lab into a routine working relationship.

However, Kinney said, the agriculture department has reconfigured the way they deal with those over-spray cases and has said the turnaround time will be faster. Matt Gronewald, the department’s legislative liaison, said the turnaround time for a complaint case during mid-summer was less than 12 days.

Assessing a remedy

If an investigation finds that a state or federal pesticide law has been broken, the agriculture department can take action. Possible enforcement actions include sending a notice of violation, imposing a civil penalty, and revoking or suspending a pesticide license or certification.

The agriculture department only can impose civil penalties on commercial applicators, and those penalties are capped at $500 per violation. It cannot require the applicator or individual responsible for overspraying to pay for losses or damages because there is no provision for that in the Iowa Code.

Cases also can be referred to the Environmental Protection Agency for review and enforcement actions.

Paluch, the pesticide bureau chief, said educating pesticide applicators and responding to incidents of misuse is a challenge because the products used change quickly, as do the management systems and application technologies. She added that one key to addressing pesticide misapplication is to have frequent communication between neighbors about pesticide use and areas of concern.

Faux’s case resulted in civil penalties of $1,200 for the commercial applicator for applying pesticides in a manner inconsistent with labeling and in a careless or negligent manner and $260 for the consultant to the commercial applicator.

Faux said he had some initial contact with the cooperative that consulted the aerial application company and neighboring farmer who had it do the spraying, but communications stopped. He said he wasn’t sure what to do then and looked for help, hiring a litigator to file a civil suit against the pilot, the aerial spraying company out of Texas, the farmers co-op that consulted the spraying company and the farmer.

“We kind of felt like we were backed against a wall. We had two choices. Choice number one was to say: ‘Well, let’s pretend like it didn’t happen.’ And if we did that, then we’re guilty as everybody else for letting the system get out of hand. So we ended up doing this as much to stand up and say that this isn’t right, we shouldn’t be allowing misapplication of chemicals to go without somebody standing up.”

Phone calls and emails from IowaWatch to the aerial spraying company, co-op and farmer were not returned.

The case was settled out of court in early 2015. Faux said that since the case settled, he has received calls from local farmers and coops letting him know beforehand about applications, including the chemicals that were going to be used.

“We’d never gotten calls like that before and, frankly, that’s really what I wanted,” Faux said.

Pesticide drift and organic certification

Midway through 2015, Genuine Faux Farms near Tripoli regained its full organic certification, which had been suspended for its fields hit with pesticides in 2012.

Maury Wills, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship’s Agricultural Diversification and Market Development Bureau chief and manager of the department’s organic certification program, verified that the farm, which was originally certified in 2007, underwent a partial suspension in 2012. That partial suspension ended in July 2015.

Wills said the certification program works to help producers identify the area of drift and will only suspend certification on areas of land impacted.

“We try to keep as much of their farm certified as possible. We might take out a portion of a field or one field,” he said.

That certification is automatically reinstated after three years without additional chemical impacts. The three-year window is the same as the requirement that land, upon initial organic certification, must go through a three-year period in which no non-organic products are applied.

Tests are rarely conducted as part of an organic certification. Certifiers are required to test 5 percent of the operations certified annually, Wills said. Some tests are determined randomly while some might be based on a cause to believe that non-organic chemicals might be found.

“If there was drift and you find that small amount, it is extremely unlikely, if not impossible, three years later to find something from that drift event,” he said.

Of the approximately 380 farm operations certified through the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship’s Organic Certification Program, only about one or two report a drift incident each year, said Maury Wills, the department’s Agricultural Diversification and Market Development Bureau chief in the agriculture department and the manager of the organic program.

Wills said he couldn’t speak to the roughly 400 other organic farm operations because those don’t go through the state’s program.

This story was produced by the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism-IowaWatch.org, a non-profit, online news Website that collaborates with Iowa news organizations to produce explanatory and investigative reporting.