EPA Pesticide Use Strategy Update
By Drs. Donnie Miller, Shelly Kerns, Dawson Kerns, Dnaiel Stephenson, James Villegas, Connor Webster, Prashant, Jha, and Matt Foster
LSU AgCenter
As many of you are aware, in 2022 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an Endangered Species Act (ESA) Workplan to address compliance with ESA through development of use strategies for herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides to reduce potential environmental impacts from their use on listed and endangered species and their designated critical habitats. Background information and the EPA workplan can be found in the link below:
The end result and major impact to producers and applicators will be individual label restrictions and required mitigation measures to prevent or reduce spray drift (i.e. specified spray equipment, buffer zones, rate reductions) and runoff/erosion (use of cover crops, vegetative filter strips, reduced tillage) for newly registered and re-registered pesticides. Under certain situations (i.e. runoff vulnerability), an assessed point value will be assigned to each mitigation measure. Users will have to accumulate a required total value for each individual pesticide label in order to legally apply it (i.e. utilize multiple mitigation measures to achieve required point value). The proposed Herbicide Strategy was released in July of 2023 and can be found in the link below:
https://www.regulations.gov/document/EPA-HQ-OPP-2023-0365-0009
Subsequent updates in April 2024 to the herbicide strategy, as a result of public comments, included categories for runoff vulnerability and mitigation point values for conservation practices already employed by producers in their production systems. An executive summary as well as a discussion on mitigation measures for runoff/erosion can be accessed at the following links:
https://www.epa.gov/pesticides/epa-publishes-update-herbicide-strategy-progress
https://www.epa.gov/pesticides/mitigation-menu
The final Herbicide Strategy was released on August 20, 2024. As you can see, 59 of the 64 parishes in Louisiana fall within the High Runoff Vulnerability category, and the remaining 5 fall within the Medium category. The docket and EPA press release are linked below:
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/EPA-HQ-OPP-2023-0365/document
As regulations are incorporated into individual new or re-registered pesticide labels by EPA, producers can find specific details on the agency’s website Bulletins Live!Two which can be found at the link below:
https://www.epa.gov/endangered-species/bulletins-live-two-view-bulletins
Finally, on July 25, 2024, the EPA released the proposed Insecticide Strategy. This strategy, along with details about the upcoming overview webinar, can be accessed through the following links below. Additionally, the EPA has opened a comment period for public feedback on the proposed Insecticide Strategy which is due on September 23, 2024.:
https://www.regulations.gov/document/EPA-HQ-OPP-2024-0299-0005