Dealing With Pesticides

Farmers continue to produce more food on less acreage even with drought, insects and disease. They use as many tools as necessary to get the job done of feeding the world. One of those tools helps to keep insects from destroying valuable crops. Pesticides can be very useful but if not handled or applied correctly, they can create many other problems. and that's where people like Joel Kangiser, Policy Assistant with the Washington State Pesticide Management Division comes in. He recently talked to a group about how this past year shaped up.

KANGISER: Fiscal year '15 we had about 4 or 5 pretty serious crop damage incidents. we had 17 human exposure cases. Eight of those resulted in a notice of intent. Five notices of correction and four cases where we didn't take any action. One of the surprises a little bit this year was that we actually had 13 complaints on aerial applications. Eight of those were fixed wing and five for helicopter. That's really up and that's almost an aberration

He said normally there is one or two so this was unusual.

KANGISER: Airblast applications. Those are sometimes very serious. We had sixteen cases this last year whoch is about what we've been getting in recent years. As far as our penalty goes and how we go about our business of penalizing, we're required by law to issue a notice of correction, it's like a warning letter for the first time offense unless the violation a probability of placing a person in danger of death or bodily harm or has the probability of causing more than $1000 dollars of property damage and the third thing would be causing more than minor environmental harm.

And that's Washington Ag Today. I'm Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.