By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has eliminated its chemical use program, a survey that tracks which pesticides are being used on what crops across the country.

“Our key message in response to media inquiries is that limited resources have eroded NASS’ annual survey budget over the last decade,” said Vince Matthews, deputy director of the Michigan NASS office. “This has resulted in necessary adjustments to NASS programs, including a decision to collect chemical use data on a rotational basis. NASS will not conduct any agricultural chemical usage surveys on crops produced in 2008.”

There wasn’t much done for last year either, said Ellen Dougherty, a spokeswoman for the NASS Washington, D.C. office. The Federal Register gave notice last year that this program was being suspended.

“The Agriculture Resource management, Chemical Use, and Postharvest Chemical Use Surveys” are being suspended, the May 2007 Notice reported. “The Fruit Chemical Use Survey and Postharvest Chemical Use Survey are being suspended, along with their associated publications.”

Further down, the Notice said that “information from these data collection efforts is used extensively by government agencies in planning, farm policy analysis, scientific research, and program administration.”

“There were just a few crops that we had data for this year,” Dougherty said. “The earliest year we would be able to collect data for again would be 2010 if funding for the program is restored.”

In comments published earlier this year by a government advisory committee on agricultural statistics, Rebeckah Adcock of the American Farm Bureau Federation stated, “let me remind USDA that the NASS Agchem Survey Program is the only source of publicly available pesticide use survey for the nation. Only one state, California, has a set of full use reports. The NASS program provides some usage data for 25-30 states; but more importantly, the NASS surveys cover 80-90 percent of the acreage in the U.S. for the crops in the survey. The NASS data are authoritative for all of the major crops grown in the U.S. ... Without the NASS data, there are only proprietary sources of data of uncertain accuracy and completeness which cannot be released publicly.”

Matthews said that under a cooperative agreement with the Economic Research Service, NASS plans to collect wheat nutrient and pesticide data as part of the 2009 Agricultural Resource Manage-ment Survey and plans to publish this data in May 2010.
But that data is limited.

“The Bush administration just keeps cutting access to public data at every turn,” said Steve Scholl-Buckwald, managing director at the San Francisco nonprofit Pesticide Action Network.

“Everybody thinks that the government ought to be tracking what’s being used. It’s in everybody’s best interests to have this data. We want good data about where the worst things are being used.”
Scholl-Buckwald said that this latest move isn’t about the “usual anti-regulatory pressure that would be there” since the amount of money involved isn’t that great. Rather, he said it’s more like a political point of principle to limit public access to information.
“My guess is nothing will happen with the lame duck administration,” he said. “I don’t know what’s in their heads. This is really bizarre.”

Matthews said that NASS is committed to working with the agricultural community to identify potential NASS funding sources and, in the absence of increased funding, set commodity rotation priorities for future, limited surveys.