Federal officials involved with protecting salmon visit potato country

Washington Ag Today June 17, 2011 The National Marine Fisheries Service is required to consult with the Environmental Protection Agency on pesticides and how they might affect salmon runs. Chris Voigt, Executive Director of the Washington State Potato Commission, says that is why a tour was held this week in Washington state for some of the officials from those federal agencies.

Voigt: “There are big concerns about how the biological opinions were written by National Marine Fisheries and so we thought it would be beneficial to get those folks actually out of their cubicles and out into the field with the EPA to show them how we farm and how we use crop control protectants.”

Voigt says suggestions in the biological opinions for spray buffers of from 500 to one-thousand feet would be devastating for potato growers.

Voigt: “These would be buffers between any field and any ditch, canal, stream, waterway. So the implications could be huge. I mean, literally almost your entire field could become a buffer zone if you happen to have a canal or ditch that went around it.”

The NOAA and EPA officials were taken to an irrigation district in the Columbia Basin and were shown what those buffers would do to irrigation in the Columbia Basin.

Voigt: “Showing, highlighting the buffers around all, every canal, every ditch in the region.”

That’s Washington Ag Today. Brought to you in part by the Washington State Potato Commission. Nutrition today. Good health tomorrow. I’m Bob Hoff on Northwest Aginfo Net.