When the Neighbor Kills Your Garden
When the Neighbor Kills Your Garden
Dear Julie...
Dear Julie Gammack,
I had to write in response to your latest Iowa Potluck article - the one about the gardener who lost most of his veggie crop because the neighbor’s pesticides drifted on over. Killed every one of his tomatoes, his cucumbers, his peppers.
.
Unfortunately, pesticide drift is a thing. It can happen to vegetable farmers here in Iowa, and there is little to nothing they can do about it. An Iowa farmer told me a similar story ten years ago about an herbicide being sprayed on a neighbor’s land. In her case, the fog of chemicals didn’t kill her tomato crop, it rendered it inedible. Although the fruits looked fine to the naked eye, federal law did not allow the said chemicals to be sprayed on tomatoes. Because we eat the skin of a tomato and often eat it raw, the bar for what can be sprayed onto the vegetables is high. (As opposed to what is sprayed on the ground before a plant is grown, as in the case of strawberries and “pre-emergent”soybeans, or on a husk, as with corn.)
In your farmer’s case, it was likely a chemical known as diacamba that was sprayed on the neighbor’s soybeans. As with corn in Iowa, the vast majority of the soybean seeds farmers plant in the state are now genetically modified to resist specific herbicides, making it easier to kill the weeds in the field. Just spray liberally and the beans will continue to live while everything else dies.
In 2018, more than 40% of soybeans planted in Iowa were Dicamba-tolerant (meaning they were genetically engineered to resist the herbicide). But Dicamba has been problematic from the very beginning, far more so than the glyphosate found in Roundup that is used on “Roundup Ready” corn and beans. The problem with Dicamba is that it has a high volatility rate—it gets trapped in the air and travels onto other farmers’ fields very easily. Even though the federal government restricted the use of the chemical (not to be used after June 30th nationally and June 20th in Iowa), there has been widespread contamination across the state in 2022.
Why not just keep using Roundup on fields if it is less volatile, you ask? Well, pesticide drift happens with glyphosate (the main ingredient in Roundup) too, and the chemical has its own issues. The maker of Roundup, Monsanto, now owned by Bayer (yes, the same company that makes your aspirin) has settled nearly 100,000 lawsuits at a cost of $11 billion, according to this website. But the more farmers use only one kind of herbicide (as with Roundup), the more resistant the competing plants (aka - weeds) become to the chemical, so farmers are always looking for alternatives.
If he was lucky, your farmer friend was ready for pesticide drift to occur and was taking meticulous notes about the health and yield of his crops before the incident to have a credible law suit. Perhaps too he knew exactly where to send the contaminated samples and got them out lickety-split when he realized what was happening. That is the kind of preparation farmers in the state need to take in order to currently sue for compensation. But that is not likely.
At least was just a new ruling against some of the companies responsible for pesticide drift. According to Bloomberg Law, maybe there is hope for your friend next time this kind of thing happens.
Monsanto Co. and BASF Corp. are liable for the herbicide dicamba’s damage to a farmer’s peach orchards, the Eighth Circuit said Thursday, but it tossed a $60 million award and called for a new trial to separately assess what punitive damages each company owes.
How much a destroyed peach orchard is worth as an income for a family for generations and likely as the source of family memories, a needed service for carbon sinking and a cultural icon for the community…well we will have to tune back later.
So Julie, what can you and your readers do to help farmers in this dire situation?
As a member of the Iowa Farmers Union (IFU), I am proud that our organization stands up for farmers in your friend’s situation, not just in solidarity, but by working to create tangible policy changes. The IFU actively lobbies for change.
Iowa’s farmers have a right to adequate legal & financial protections when pesticide drift destroys a crop, damages a farm business, or harms the health of farm families & farm workers.
It adds:
Pesticide drift threatens sensitive crops, livestock, and human health, and reports of drift are on the rise.
Drift is especially damaging for organic growers & food crops intended for human consumption.
Iowa ranks 6th in certified organic farms, and 30 percent of organic farmers are beginning farmers.
Conventional horticulture crops average $25,000 per acre or more in value, making it difficult for farmers to absorb even a few acres of crop loss.
It is important that consumers join farmers in this kind of fight, not just by “voting with your dollars” but by actively becoming involved. For more info on joining the Farmers Union in Iowa, click here.
Thanks for asking Julie. And very best wishes to your farmer friend—we feel his pain.
Beth
Sometimes, when your garden gets killed, you might think it's your neighbor's fault, but you'd learn something different.
When our farm garden's tomatoes and peppers went from vital to crappy almost overnight about a month ago, we initially thought the culprit was herbicide drift from a neighbor. We called the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship first, because you never want to confront a neighbor with just a suspicion. IDALS sent a guy out to our place, and his assessment was that it was much more likely that our county's ditch spraying program was the problem. The guy had a pretty good handle on our county's weed control practices and history -- suffice it to say that there's notoriety -- and this, combined with what we knew about both 1) a recently-imposed county requirement for local rural landowners who want to keep such chemicals away from their property to complete a set of two APPLICATIONS to be left off of the otherwise ubiquitous spray protocol (https://www.hardincountyia.gov/540/Roadside-Spraying) and 2) a 2021-imposed set of 'hoops' for citizens to jump through in order to, again, APPLY to publicly address the county Board of Supervisors at one of their meetings, all of which need to be cleared by 5 business days prior to that meeting -- made it pretty evident that our garden trouble was fomented by the county, rather than a neighbor. I'd like to think that our county is the outlier when it comes to the adoption of a "weed-free," Iowa Farm Bureau, fencerow-to-fencerow-and-more mentality, but I really don't know the degree to which other rural county governments embrace this. Sad, though, to think that any rural dweller in our state has to concern themselves with practices like this in order to just grow some food.
Thanks, Beth. I will print this out and give it to him.