Water, Endangered Species and Orchards

Water, Endangered Species and Orchards. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. There are a lot of people watching how things are going to play out with a portion of the Endangered Species Act...some salmon and farmers needing to apply pesticides to prevent insect damage to their crops. Bruce Grim, Executive Director of the Washington Hort Association and the Marketing Association says they are keeping a close eye on the issue. GRIM: We certainly are continuing to be concerned with this issue regarding the lawsuits, regarding the endangered species act and the creation of the thousand foot buffers NMFS is proposing and certainly the registrants are involved there. That, I think, is a huge issue of major concern. Grim says that the data being used is old. GRIM: That's part of the real problem here is that NMFS seems to want to stick with using modeling data that as I understand it goes back to the 1990's based on what people might think would happen under a certain set of circumstances, well we have 6 years of in stream testing that's been done by WSDA and the Department of Ecology has done the actual tests on this stuff and we know based on 6 years of in stream sampling that we don't have a problem with pesticide residue in streams that would cause any problems for salmon at all. This issue is going to quickly become more than a west coast issue. GRIM: Because this was raised in a lawsuit involving salmon recovery it's been kind of perceived as a west coast issue. I think we well understand now it's going to be much broader if other are brought into lawsuits and more pesticides and more endangered species are brought into the equation, it will become a national issue very, very quickly. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.