NAAA’s director of safety & education, Dr. Scott Bretthauer, presented at a virtual Environmental Modeling Public Meeting (EMPM) on June 23. The focus of the EMPM was mitigation strategies for protecting endangered species from pesticides and was held to engage stakeholders on the EPA’s recent endangered species work plan. The EPA accepted presentations dealing with practical measures to reduce the impact of pesticides, labeled mitigations to reduce drift, and how to model these mitigation options to demonstrate their impact on protecting endangered species. Other presenters included pesticide registrants, environmental activist groups, environmental modeling firms and government agencies.
Dr. Bretthauer focused his presentation on NAAA’s 2020 proposal to the EPA recommending that the agency update the AgDRIFT model used to estimate the risk of drift from aerial applications. The EPA currently uses the simplified Tier 1 model, which uses outdated assumptions about how aerial applications are made. NAAA recommends the EPA use the Tier 3 model in AgDRIFT with more realistic and label-enforceable assumptions. This fit the focus of the environmental modeling meeting perfectly, as NAAA’s proposal contains both label-enforceable mitigation strategies and suggestions on how to include them in the modeling the EPA uses for endangered species and other risk assessments.
NAAA’s comments also brought up another important subject that will protect endangered species from pesticide drift and allow every acre of farmland to be fully utilized—wind directional buffers. NAAA has been actively promoting to the EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that because drift can’t move upwind and aerial applicators can monitor wind speed and direction throughout an application, buffer zones to protect endangered species should be based on wind direction instead of being mandatory no matter which direction the wind is blowing. A copy of NAAA’s EMPM presentation can be seen here.