Triazine Network Works to Educate EPA

The Triazine Network is an Environmental Protection Agency scientific advisory panel that not only represents corn growers, but is a broad coalition of growers of many crops across the nation who rely on Atrazine and other triazine herbicides. They are tasked with helping EPA to understand the importance of the herbicides to farmers. When the EPA announced its June 30 proposal on Atrazine, farmers took immediate notice of EPA ultra low level for the herbicide. Greg Kissick, Kansas corn, CEO emeritus and co-chair of the network, says that the models the EPA is using for making the label recommendations is incorrect.

“Problem we have with the current use of their models is, if that see, lock can basically triple, triple from 3.4 to 9.7 then how many acres of how many corn acres have to go through some of the mitigation according to the models? Well, when it was 3.4 it was approximately 70, I think 2% of all corn acres had to have some mitigation. Goes to 9.7 but they're still using models which say 68% of corn acres across the country need to have mitigation. So there was almost no change in the number of acres that they say need to have mitigation.”

In addition to EPA, Atrazine is also under review with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.