An insecticide draft strategy released by the Environmental Protection Agency aimed to work with the Endangered Species Act may be too vague for US farmers. Iowa State University Extension Entomologist Erin Hodgson says the strategy and its open comment period has the goal of providing a guideline to minimize exposure while also acknowledging the needs of farmers.

“They’re really getting serious about the protection of these endangered and critical species, and many of those would be insects, and so of course, when we’re spraying insecticides out in the landscape, many of those that are critical would be highly susceptible to those insecticides.”

Hodgson says a top EPA concern is non target species exposure in areas defined as critical habitat.

“The guidelines will just be to try and minimize the exposure, minimize drift, minimize runoff, minimize soil erosion and things like that, where you can have insecticides move to unintended places.”

But there’s a key problem to the EPA strategy.

“It’s super vague right now, and even when the bulletins come out. So the areas that they’re going to identify for critical habitat, all the labels are going to change. So every insecticide label is going to have some sort of verbiage. And of course, we have lots of products out there, and so those labels are going to slowly change over the next year, maybe even a couple years.”

Hodgson says farmers should become more familiar with reading labels, because there’s no specific information for each label.

“Even if you don’t do the spraying yourself, if you contract it out, or anything like that, just reading the label, because at the end of the day, it’s the landowners that are going to be responsible for some of these issues, these legal issues, that come up with the Endangered Species Act. But then also just becoming more aware of what the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA is recommending to mitigate that risk.”

Still, Hodgson says there are some practices farmers can continue to control.

“When to spray, how often to spray, you know, the actual application. And so I’m a big advocate of using treatment thresholds, so density or injury based thresholds, so it’s a response to a high level of insect pressure. And so for a lot of areas of row crafts in Iowa, we can, we can tend to back off most treatments because they’re not economically feasible and they are high risk or high exposure to non-targets.”

By paying attention to surrounding landscapes and backing off on some applications, Hodgson thinks farmers can make a lot of progress, both financially and environmentally. Last year, around this time an herbicide draft strategy was also released by the EPA, working with the Endangered Species Act. It, too, was criticized as two vague. Still, after a public comment period and review, it was finalized just this month.