Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism (https://www.iowawatch.org/tag/farming/)
Even after record flooding in the Midwest, people with ties to the land — whose livelihoods depend on living close to waterways — don’t want to move.
Farmers have been using the weed killer glyphosate – a key ingredient of the product Roundup – at soaring levels even as glyphosate has become increasingly less effective and as health concerns and lawsuits mount.
Glyphosate is the most used pesticide on U.S. agricultural crops, with the nation using an estimated 287 million pounds in 2016, according to an analysis by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. And sales continue to grow, with market researchers predicting the glyphosate market to grow to $8.5 billion to $10 billion annually by 2021 up from $5 billion now. READ ALSO: Controversial Pesticide Use Increases Dramatically Across The Midwest
Of 400 pesticides used on agriculture crops across the U.S, glyphosate is used at least three times more than all others, according to an analysis of data estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey. The second-most used weed killer in the U.S. is atrazine – with 75.4 million pounds used on U.S. agriculture crops in 2016. In 2016, the Midwest used 65 percent of the nation’s total agriculture glyphosate use on crops.
Normally, Story County soybean farmer Kevin Larson said, he would resolve a dispute with a neighbor privately. Instead, he went to the Iowa Pesticide Bureau in 2017, just like a lot of other Iowans did.
A volatile weed killer linked to cancer and endocrine issues will likely be sprayed on millions more acres of soybeans and cotton across the Midwest and South starting this year. In January, China approved imports of a new genetically modified soybean variety – Enlist E3 soybeans jointly made by Corteva Agriscience, a division of DowDupont and seed company MS Technologies– that can withstand the herbicide 2,4-D. “This is great news for U.S. soybean growers,” said Joseph Merschman, president of MS Technologies in a February press release. “This announcement clears the way for even more soybean growers to experience the high-yielding elite genetics and exceptional weed control offered by the Enlist E3™ soybean system.”
DowAgrosciences declined to comment for this story. The herbicide – 2,4-D – was one of the active ingredients in Agent Orange and has been shown to drift miles away from where it’s applied.
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Workloads for eight state investigators who determine whether herbicides are applied properly in Iowa have more than doubled the past two years, with no plans in sight for adding staffers. The workload increase — from 110 misuse reports in the 2016 crop year to 249 in the 2018 crop year — coincides with the introduction by agrochemical companies of dicamba-based herbicides to kill weeds in farm fields. In spite of this, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship Pesticide Bureau has not added staff investigators and completing cases is taking longer, spilling over into the next crop year. Cases taken on in the 2018 crop year, which ran from Oct. 1, 2017, to Sept.
A bill has been introduced in the Iowa Legislature that would increase the fee for a three-year public or private pesticide application certification from $15 to $30 and designate money raised from those fees to the state’s pesticide and administration fund. The fee for commercial applicators would remain at $75. The bill was introduced Feb. 25 and passed its first subcommittee hurdle two days later. It came a month after an IowaWatch story about how recommendations for investigating Iowa’s pesticide application, made by the Iowa State Auditor’s office in a 2012 audit and subsequent reports, had not been addressed.
The effects of the government shutdown are starting to be felt in rural parts of the country. For example, implementing the new farm bill is on hold, Anna Johnson, Midwest policy manager for the Center for Rural Affairs and based in Iowa, said in a weekend IowaWatch Connection radio report now available in a podcast.
After 20 years, Mississippi chicken farmer Kevin Kemp is getting out of the chicken business. He raised millions of pounds of chicken since 1996, alongside his father and brother. But Kemp said even though he’s done well as a poultry grower, raising chickens is “not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“The chicken industry has been good to a lot of people around here,” Kemp said. “It just got to the point where I didn’t enjoy raising chickens, because you had to put up with too much crap from the integrator.”
By “integrator,” Kemp means the big poultry companies, which deliver chickens to farmers as chicks, and pick them up six to eight weeks later as full-grown birds, ready to be slaughtered and sent to restaurants and grocery stores. Kemp has experienced the immense control poultry companies put on growers – how they care for the birds, the way payments are determined, even dictating when growers replace equipment.
Urban expansion, at least in the few areas where Iowa cities are growing, is eating up some of the state’s best farmland. The urban growth is part of a national trend in which good farmland is lost to new residential neighborhoods.