By Lynn Byczynski

For many vegetable and flower farmers, spring and summer bring a constant threat of pesticide drift from neighboring farms, lawn services and county road crews.
Organic farmers in particular have to worry about drift because any kind of pesticide contamination can invalidate their organic status for the year. But non-organic farmers have to worry about drift, too, as many vegetable and flower crops are highly sensitive to the herbicides used on row crops. And now, even some conventional farmers – those producing seed crops – have to contend with contamination from pollen drifting onto their fields from nearby genetically modified crops.
Pesticide drift problems have been exacerbated in recent years by the skyrocketing increase in crops that have been genetically modified to tolerate herbicides. Roundup Ready soybeans constituted 54% of last year’s total U.S. soybean acreage, and Roundup Ready cotton constituted 61% of all cotton acres, according to an Associated Press report . Roundup is Monsanto’s trade name for glyphosate, an herbicide that kills broadleaf plants and is in the category most dangerous to off-target species. (See the chart of herbicides’ relative risk on page 4.) Monsanto claims that Roundup is now the biggest selling herbicide in the world, thanks to its GMO crops and to an advertising blitz that leads home gardeners to believe it is safe.
The increasing popularity of no-till farming has also contributed to increased drift problems, as farmers who in the past incorporated herbicides into the soil before planting now rely on post-emergent herbicides that are sprayed on fields after crops are up.
Obviously, the potential for drift damage is increasing for market farmers both organic and non-organic. The question is: What can you do about it?

The law
The most important thing to understand about pesticide drift is that it is illegal. Federal law requires pesticides to be applied in a manner and under conditions that will not cause drift. States are required to enforce the pesticide application laws. If you are the victim of drift, you have the weight of the law on your side, in theory. In reality, victims of drift often have a hard time proving damages and fighting the pesticide applicator’s insurance company.
“You have nothing on your side,” said Dave Marx, who lost his greenhouse business in an herbicide drift case. “There’s nothing you can do to fight it. Unless you’ve got $50,000 cash, you can’t fight an insurance company.”
Dave was working in his retail greenhouse in Elkader, Iowa, on April 28, 1999, when the local farmers cooperative sprayed a neighbor’s field with 2,4-D and Roundup. Dave said it was a windy day and the herbicide was sucked into the greenhouse through the vents. As damage from the herbicide began to show up over the next few weeks, he took inventory of the plants he had lost and calculated their replacement value at $600,000.
The pesticide applicator’s insurance company offered him a settlement of $3,000. So Dave hired a lawyer and filed suit. “I spent $20,000 just in expert fees, not including attorney fees,” he said. “I had to cash in all my retirement savings to fight this.”
After a two-week trial, the jury awarded him $6,000 for seed and $6,000 in lost profits, and fined the applicator $50,000 – money that goes to the state. The applicator’s insurance company has appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court.
David felt he was at a disadvantage because he was new in the greenhouse business, and didn’t have prior sales records to prove the extent of his loss. The fact that he had been sprayed with herbicide was never in question.
David Marx says the court case bankrupted him. He lost the greenhouse business, and is now working for a computer company.

Organic farmers
Iowa may be the epicenter of pesticide drift problems, because of its huge acreage of row crops and rapidly increasing acreage of organic farms and market gardens. The magazine Iowa Farmer Today reported that in 1992, before the introduction of Roundup Ready crops, incidents of pesticide drift reported to the state numbered 50 a year. By 1998, the number of reported incidents had more than doubled. (One state official told a newspaper he thinks about 1 percent of the actual drift cases get reported to the state; the rest go unreported or damages are resolved privately.)
During that time, the number of organic acres has skyrocketed. In 1997, there were 60,000 organic acres in Iowa; the next year, 120,000 acres. With many neighboring farms working at cross purposes, more drift problems are inevitable.
Ericka Dana is a certified-organic market gardener and catnip grower who sells in the Iowa City farmers’ market. She moved to Iowa originally to try to recover from chronic illnesses she got after being sprayed by pesticides in her garden in New York City. Ironically, she has twice been the victim of drift in her new state.
Last August, crop dusters sprayed a neighbor’s field and Ericka suspected drift, so she immediately contacted the state department of agriculture, plus she took plant samples to send to a laboratory herself. The samples proved positive for the insecticides Furudan and Sevin. Ericka immediately stopped selling her products and sat out the rest of the season. She assumes she will lose her certification, and is waiting to see how long she’ll have to wait to get re-certified.
Organic growers who think their crops have been contaminated by pesticide drift have to tell their certification agency and have residue testing done. Under the new federal organic law, the contamination cannot be more than 5% of the established EPA tolerance for the given pesticide. If the contamination occurred through no fault of the grower – by drift or by an emergency order of a state or federal agency – the grower will not lose certification, but the crop cannot be sold as organic.
Ericka’s earlier experiences with pesticide drift led her to look for signs she could post around her land warning neighbors that she was growing sensitive crops. She couldn’t find any, so she had her own made and now sells them to farmers throughout the country. Her signs are metal, yellow with black writing, like highway signs. See the box on page 7 for prices and descriptions.

How to recognize drift damage
Sometimes, pesticide drift is easy to detect. You see the tractor with a boom sprayer rolling across an adjacent field, and smell the acrid odor of pesticides. You don’t need a PhD in plant physiology to know you might be the victim of drift. But often you don’t get such obvious warning signs. Consider drift a possible culprit if your plants start to exhibit curling, twisting or other distortions of leaves and shoots. Shoots may elongate and turn yellow. Plants often get ferny leaves, rather than the normal shape foliage. Several species of plants may be affected, which helps you differentiate herbicide damage from diseases or nutrient deficiencies. Drift from contact herbicides can appear as dead spots on the plant tissue, unevenly distributed, but with the spots about the same size. Sometimes the damage takes a week or more to show up.
Some fruits and vegetables are up to 1 million times more sensitive to phenoxy herbicides than the corn or soybeans to which they are applied. Phenoxy herbicides include 2,4-D and dicamba, and are also the active ingredient in many “weed and feed” products used on lawns. Plants that are extremely sensitive to these herbicides include tomatoes, grapes, roses, redbud trees and elms. With grapes, herbicide exposure during flowering can greatly reduce fruit set and severe injury can prevent maturation of the fruit that can last for one to three years.

Wind not needed
Spraying in windy conditions is the usual cause of pesticide drift, for obvious reasons, and most pesticide labels advise against spraying when wind speed is above 5 to 10 m.p.h. But drift can be a problem on calm days, when there is a temperature inversion whereby the air near the soil surface is cooler or the same temperature as higher air and therefore doesn’t rise as warm air normally does. Climatologists call it vertically stable air. It often occurs near sunrise on a clear, calm day and can be identified by watching dust on an unpaved road. If the dust hangs in the air, rather than rising, the air is vertically stable. Under those conditions, small spray droplets can be suspended in the stable air, move laterally in very light breezes and affect plants two miles or more downwind.
Researchers at North Dakota State University found that three times more spray was detected 100-200 feet downwind, and 10 times more was detected at 1,000-2,000 feet downwind with vertically stable air as compared to normal conditions with any given wind speed.
Drift doesn’t even have to occur at the time of spraying. Vapor drift can actually be a greater problem than spray drift, as it occurs over a longer period of time and can travel farther. Some herbicides can volatilize, or change into a gaseous state and move off the target field. Formulations known as esters are more likely to cause vapor drift than those called amines, which are non-volatile. Hot weather makes vapor drift more likely. Research showed that vapor formation from a high-volatile ester of 2,4-D tripled when the temperature increased from 60° to 80°F. But really sensitive plants, such as tomatoes, can be damaged by herbicide vapor at the lower temperature.

What can you do?
Your first line of defense against drift problems is to establish barriers between your crops and fields that might be sprayed. These can be windbreaks or simply buffer zones where nothing is grown. If you’re growing tomatoes or grapes, it’s recommended that phenoxy herbicides be kept at least a quarter-mile away. The organic certification agency OCIA requires at least 25 feet of buffer between organic fields and sprayed fields.
But buffer zones may not be enough, given the long distances pesticide drift can travel. Your neighbors need to know what’s at stake if they spray negligently. And you’re going to have to be the one to tell them.
Be sure neighboring farmers know that you are growing either organic crops or herbicide-susceptible crops. Be sure they understand that your crops are high-dollar, and that you have the records to prove the value of your crops. You might want to point out that it makes more sense to leave a few acres near your fields unsprayed, particularly if the neighbor is growing low-value crops such as beans and corn, rather than risk damage to your high-dollar horticultural crops. Show them the chart on page 4 so they are aware of the fact that some herbicides are more damaging to your crops than others; a good neighbor might choose a lower-risk herbicide for fields adjacent to yours.
Be aware, though, that many farms are not operated by the landowner. The person who lives in the house next door might lease the land to another farmer, one who doesn’t know about your farm. And much of the spraying done today is hired out to licensed pesticide applicators such as the farmers cooperative association. These people certainly won’t know about your farm, unless the farmer has made it a point to tell them. And once they’ve been given their marching orders to spray, chances are they won’t stop till they’re done.
That’s why Ruth Whetstone and Elvin Mackerman sustained extensive damage to their peony nursery in Center Point, Iowa, last year. On May 2, Elvin was on his hands and knees in the garden when he heard the pesticide spray truck coming through the field next door. Despite his 67 years of age, Elvin leaped across a 4-foot fence and in front of the sprayer. He asked the driver to stop, explaining that the peonies were susceptible to herbicide damage. “You can talk to my boss,” Elvin says the driver told him.
Elvin ran home and he and Ruth frantically tried to find the phone number for the applicator; they called the landowner, who gave them the number of the farmer, who finally provided the number of the pesticide application company. By then, the spraying was complete.
The peonies, which were in bud, were damaged by the herbicides, a mixture of 2,4-D and Roundup. Ruth and Elvin had 3,500 peony plants and 100 heirloom lilacs in the nursery at the time of the spraying. Whether the plants will recover fully won’t be known until this spring. So the farmers are waiting to see whether the applicator’s insurance company will offer them adequate compensation for their loss. Ruth and Elvin also are concerned about Elvin’s health after he walked directly into the path of the spray to try to stop the applicator. He says he suffered immediate effects, and his doctor has documented chronic damage from the exposure.
Their experience illustrates another facet of preventing drift: Know who does the spraying in your area. Find out from the landowners around you, and then send a letter advising the applicator of your location and the crops you’re growing.
Finally, learn how your state handles drift complaints. Usually, the agency that licenses pesticide applicators is responsible for violations of the rules, including drift. It’s probably within a department of agriculture, health or environment. Find out the protocol for investigating drift cases. That way, if it happens to you, you know who to call and what procedures to follow. If you are the victim of drift, start building your case immediately. Take photos or video of the spraying in progress, and take notes about all your actions and the state investigator’s actions pertaining to the incident. It’s nothing to look forward to, but you may find yourself in court seeking payment for your loss. The more rational and systematic your approach to the incident, the better your chances of being compensated.