Editor's Note: Each year, DTN publishes our choices for the Top 10 ag news stories of the year as selected by DTN analysts, editors and reporters. This year, we're counting them down from Dec. 18 to Dec. 31. On Jan. 1, 2025, we will look at some of the runners-up for the year. Today, we continue the countdown with No. 7: EPA moves forward with plans to protect endangered species from pesticides -- plans likely to increase costs for many farmers.
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JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (DTN) -- What will be the added cost of protecting threatened and endangered species from agricultural pesticides in the future? The answer that farmers received from EPA this past year was "It depends."
In 2024, the federal agency published the final versions of two plans and the draft of a third that are intended to guide actions to protect listed species and areas deemed as "critical habitat." The overall goal for EPA is to ensure that when it registers and reregisters pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, it also meets its obligations under the Endangered Species Act -- something the agency has admittedly overlooked for decades and has been sued over incessantly.
PROTECTING ENDANGERED PLANTS
Chief among these plans is the long-awaited Final Herbicide Strategy, which was released in August, some 13 months after a draft strategy was made public. The strategy calls for identifying protections for species earlier in the pesticide review process, implementing spray drift buffers and "mitigation measures" intended to reduce herbicide exposure through runoff or soil erosion.
Under the strategy, the level of mitigation required will be determined by the potential of a herbicide to negatively affect listed species at the population level. The higher the potential, the more mitigation required. The more mitigation required, the higher the cost to farmers to comply.
EPA assigned point values to an entire menu of these measures, which include vegetative filter strips, grassed waterways, field borders, cover crops and more. Farmers will choose from the menu to accumulate the total number of points required to apply an individual herbicide. EPA has determined that products not likely to affect a listed species require zero mitigation points. Those herbicides with low, medium and high potential to affect listed species require three, six or nine points of mitigation, respectively.
Those who farm in counties deemed to have low runoff vulnerability receive mitigation points just for farming in those regions; whereas those who farm in counties with high runoff vulnerability receive no points. EPA allots one mitigation point to farmers for simply "tracking" their mitigation efforts.
News of the strategy's release left farmers worried about the feasibility of the plan and its overall effects on farming. Josh Gackle, a soybean farmer from North Dakota and then-president of the American Soybean Association, acknowledged that while the final strategy was an improvement over the draft, concerns remained over the strategy's complexity, its affordability and whether these mitigation requirements were supported by the best available science, as required by law.