Pesticide Report

Pesticide Report

Pesticide Report. I'm Greg Martin with Washington Ag Today.

The Washington State Department of Agriculture has released their pesticide report from July 2014 to June 2015, the fiscal year covered by the agency's latest annual report to the state Legislature. Joel Kangiser, Policy Assistant for the Pesticide Management Division of WSDA gives us an overview of the report.

KANGISER: It's a report that we're required to do annually and provide to the legislature and it talks mostly about our pesticide compliance program but it also mentions some of the activities and our licensing and pesticide registration program. So it talks about the investigations we do and the types of enforcement actions that we take and then also the types of inspections we do and the violations we find and enforcement actions.

Violations are obviously one of the key components of the report.

KANGISER: Roughly about half of them were related to drift and that would be mostly in the agriculture sector but we also do get a few in the non-ag sector. Whenever a pesticide drifts that would be considered illegal but as far as illegal use, using a pesticide that's not allowed - we don't see a lot of that except for in our new marijuana industry they're having some difficult times controlling pests so there are some issues we're seeing where they're using products that are not allowed.

Also covered in the report are the number of pesticide certifications issued, the amount of pesticides disposed of and the amount of fines levied.

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

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