Dicamba Complaints Just Now Starting to Appear for 2018
In the coming weeks we should know more about the effectiveness of dicamba stewardship training efforts over the winter. HAT caught up with Dr. Bob Waltz, Indiana State Chemist and Seed Commissioner, at the Agribusiness Council of Indiana regional meeting in Delphi on Thursday where he said issues with 2018 dicamba applications are just now starting to appear.
“So, as you have gone through the season and we’ve seen a lot of the burn down early on and things like that that goes on, most of the complaints we’ve had have been consistent pretty much with what we’d seen last year. Probably in the next six weeks is when we’ll see the dicamba complaints build, if they’re going to build, just based on our last season’s experience.”
Waltz is hopeful that dicamba complaints will not build like last year because of all the training provided by his office and Purdue Extension.
“We trained almost 8000 people from January 1 to the present time on the use of just dicamba, so there’s a lot of effort there.”
Waltz said his office received upwards of 240 complaints last year with half of those relating to dicamba. He says that number is double what they typically receive.
“We had a number that we could clearly identify with drift, and someone hadn’t cleaned out a tank properly, and some of those kinds of things. But we also had issues where many of those could not be attributed to a specific cause. In other words, when I say many of those I’m talking about the damages that were seen that could not be attributed to a specific cause, and so those are ones are certainly of interest to us and to other states who have similar experiences all over the country.”
Waltz’s office, like other state offices throughout the country, is submitting data to the EPA for review. He said that EPA will review these datasets in November of this year to determine if changes to regulations need to be made.