06/02/06 Household Pesticide Survey

Household pest control survey. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. The Oregon Department of Agriculture has taken on the very large project of surveying Oregonians on their household pesticide use. JONES: It's a legislative mandate that we do this. It's part of a larger system that is requiring commercial users or people who are applying pesticides to public property to report to a web based system. So this is just an additional component so that we have an idea of the total pesticide use throughout the state. That's Sunny Jones, pesticide reporting specialist with the Oregon Department of Agriculture. JONES: It's going to be compiled into an annual report that's provided to the state legislature that shows the pounds of active ingredient used either by zip code or water basin across the state because we don't know what is being used. It gives us an idea of how much is being used, where it's being used. It potentially could be useful in getting products registered with the EPA, showing that less toxic chemistries are being used. Jones says that random calls are made to different area of the state. Participants are asked to take part in a 3-month long diary keeping process. JONES: The state has been divided up into 9 different regions so that it is not weighted for everything coming from the Portland metro area. And then we have a contractor out of Seattle that makes telephone calls to random households within each of those 9 regions. They ask a number of questions regarding what the past use of pesticides has been, and then those users that agree at the end of that telephone survey are then mailed this 3-month diary to complete and mail back to the contractor. What we are looking for is 250 completed 3-month use diaries for each quarter and those are going to come from different users each quarter. Oregon is the only state to do this comprehensive of a pesticide use survey. By the end of the year, ODA hopes to have more than a thousand surveys completed, which could help environmental and health researchers evaluate household use of pesticides in Oregon. The household use survey is one component of the Pesticide Use Reporting System. The reporting form provided to participants instructs them to record what household pest control products are being used, when, where, how much, and for what purpose the products are used. Results of the surveys will be made available to the public as part of a statewide pesticide use report in July 2007. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.