South Dakota has prohibited the application of dicamba after June 30.
But don’t think that the state is going to take action to protect you if your neighbor misapplies dicamba and damages your crops. Kelda Pharris documents two cases where farmers proved dicamba had drifted to their fields and damaged their crops but got nothing but a too-bad letter from the state:
[Austin] Schuelke’s soybeans weren’t dicamba tolerant. He saw the leaves changing in his 240 acres of soybeans near Verdon in southeastern Brown County.
…Samples confirmed dicamba poisoning. Schuelke filed a claim with the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Agricultural Services. It’s up to the division to follow up on claims of crop damage with adjacent farmers and applicators since it’s the branch that facilitates applicator certifications for dicamba and other herbicides or pesticides.
In May 2018, Schuelke got a letter back from the Agricultural Services Division. Boiled down, it noted that Schuelke’s crop had been damaged by off-label use of the herbicide dicamba.
The kick in the Carhartts was that no further action would be taken, according to the letter, and Schuelke’s case had been closed. The letter is dated May 7, 2018, but he keeps it handy.
“It’s sitting on my desk. Every time I think about it, it angers me,” Schuelke said.
…Craig Schaunaman of rural Aberdeen has also seen his crops damaged by vapor drift.
“We had alfalfa that got drifted on. In the alfalfa, we weren’t sure what was going on. We did testing. That was in 2017. In 2018 we did have some on beans drifted on. The beans that weren’t drifted on, there was a six-bushel-an-acre difference. Our proven yield is about 44 bushels,” he said.
Schaunaman filed a complaint with the state for the fields affected by drift. He included his own test results and the names of adjoining neighbors. The state ran its own test, confirming the drift, he said, but no further action has been taken to his knowledge [Kelda JL Pharris, “South Dakota Farmers’ Crops Being Damaged by Dicamba,” Rapid City Journal, 2019.06.09].
The right to property is one of the most fundamental reasons for having a government. When farmers like Schuelke and Schaunaman can prove that neighbors have damaged their property, and the state won’t take any action to address that damage, what good is our state government?
This is a problem. You are correct, people have property rights that include the right NOT to be sprayed with chemicals.
They might be able to take civil action.
There is probably no statute that specifically addresses this
particular issue. And perhaps at the moment there is also
no administrative rule. It’s going to be complicated.
The wind blows and the birds fly. There are all kinds of ways
for unwanted seeds to get to places we don’t want them.
Talking about resistant water hemp and palmer amaranth here.
people have property rights that include the right NOT to be sprayed with chemicals. Or bullets, but digress.
What exactly does the State Ag Dept do besides not much? The worthless lege knew this was going to happen, why didn’t/haven’t they addressed this by statute already?
I’d be willing to bet iowa’s AG would have been writing letters to makers of dicamba seeking all relative information about drift and damage in preparation for a lawsuit.
Edwin, I was thinking about lawsuits too. Since there is no relief from the state, it looks like the courts are their next option.
If you have to sue, you’ll end up fighting an insurance company, so hit ’em fast and hard and show no mercy.
One of the problems here is that you can prove there was
drift, but it may be well nigh impossible to prove where it
came from. In a civil action you generally also have to
prove negligence. If the farmer who sprayed followed the
label his attorney would argue that the farmer was not negligent.
Then you could bring action against the chemical company.
It’s true that juries have awarded some huge settlements
against chemical companies lately but they will probably be
appealed and could drag on for several years.
I’m not arguing for or against here, just speculating on
the likely realities.
I’m guessing vapor drift damage will show up in a certain time frame and one could extrapolate a date and check records for wind direction and speed on that date to determine where the drift came from.
As for negligence, I have seen many occasions around NW iowa where ag companies spray fields with tremendously strong blowing winds and you can actually see the spray floating away.
Seriously, I am believing negligence is and drift is overrated when Monsanto can sue and win cases where their patented seeds drift over in neighboring organic fields, commit the rape of the Sabine women on virgin crops and impregnate them all and then they belong to the rapists.
The New Yorker has an article about automation in farming, this one centers on strawberries.
“When Wishnatzki started out in the business, in the mid-seventies, a box of strawberries selling in a supermarket in the Northeast in February cost four times as much as it does now. For the average consumer, ‘berries in winter were a luxury item back then,’ Wishnatzki said. ‘And that’s where we’re headed again, unless we can solve our labor problems.’ He added, ‘I testified before Congress before last year’s Farm Bill, and I told them, ‘If we don’t solve this with automation, we’re in huge trouble.’ ”
“Migrants coming more recently from Central America, many of them also looking for better jobs and opportunities for their families, and often fleeing violence in their home countries, haven’t traditionally entered the crop-farm workforce in enough numbers to compensate for the loss of those Mexican workers—they’ve instead found jobs at meatpacking plants and in the service industries.”
“ishnatzki’s is only one of a number of startups that are trying to build a strawberry-picking robot. Among them are a machine that has been developed at Utsunomiya University, in Japan, another by Dogtooth, in the U.K., and a third by Octinion, in Belgium. The Spanish company Agrobot is also testing one. There are prototypes of high-tech orange, grape, and apple harvesters in development as well. A Silicon Valley startup called Blue River Technology created a robotic lettuce-thinner that has been getting a lot of attention from California specialty-crop farmers. (John Deere bought the company in 2017.)”
Each tomato plant in a field has it’s own GPS coordinates. “Because the robot knows exactly where the tomato plants are and has the machine vision and intelligence to know the difference between a tomato plant and a weed, it can navigate around the tomatoes and kill the weeds either with a miniature hoe or with a micro-jet of herbicide.”
These types of robots are referred to as “digital agriculture.”
A difference in machine harvesting produce is that a separate machine must be built for each crop, unlike a combine, for example. 5 crops have been identified that would be financially feasible– Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes.
“Berry 5.1 was sitting outside the farm office. It was unexpectedly huge. I had imagined that a smart harvester wouldn’t need bulk: this was a twenty-five-thousand-pound, thirty-foot-long robotic berry-picking behemoth. To match the pace of a crew of thirty workers, who can pick about eight acres in a day, Berry 5.1 has a swarm of sixteen robots on the harvester.”
http://flip.it/kb2ZUc
Even if we can’t prove the exact source of the dicamba drift, the Department of Agriculture could take the some-bad-apples-ruin-the-batch approach and protect farmers from future damage by banning dicamba. If a total ban is too much, the Legislature could impose a tax on dicamba to create a drift compensation fund. Then all dicamba users could pay for the externalities their product causes.