EPA's Atrazine Ban

EPA’s Atrazine Ban. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

The newest effort to get atrazine off the market is summed up in the Federal Register this week. The summary states that EPA is seeking public comment on a request from the environmental advocacy group Save the Frogs that EPA ban the use and production of atrazine. Atrazine has been reviewed and re-reviewed - Technical Herbicide Lead for Syngenta Crop Protection Gordon Vail says scientific data continues to show it is safe and not likely to cause cancer.

VAIL: The not likely to cause cancer is the best category you can get into. Another thing they just did , there was an ag health study just completed and this was a big study sponsored by the government and they basically looked at ag workers from 1994 to today and those are the guys and gals out there handling the atrazine and they found no correlation whatsoever between atrazine exposure and links to any kinds of cancer.
 
EPA's fourth scientific advisory panel review of atrazine was completed in July and a fifth is scheduled for next year. Also - every fifteen years products must be re-registered - so with atrazine undergoing that process in 2013 - even more SAP's could be on the horizon. Vail says losing atrazine in the marketplace would be an estimated two-billion dollar blow to the agriculture economy.

VAIL: Atrazine is sold in roughly 60 products. You know it’s one of those products that’s mixed in many herbicides. It goes on the vast majority of acres - are getting atrazine and that’s really because of the effectiveness of it so I think a lot of growers probably spray atrazine and don’t even think about it because it’s in the product that they are spraying so it’s very effective.
 
And as fighting weeds becomes more and more difficult - Vail says atrazine is an important tool for America's farmers.

VAIL: Certainly as you look at the expanse of glyphosate resistant weeds and we’re seeing that everywhere; we’ve got water hemp, you’ve got Palmer amaranth, you’ve got mares tail, you know as we continue to see that evolution, glyphosate is becoming less effective so we need other tools and atrazine has been one of those products out there for 50 years. It’s very effective on those weeds.

Atrazine is primarily used on corn, golf courses and lawns among other things.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.