By TIM ALEXANDER

Illinois Correspondent

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — A winter full of voluntary label interpretation and stewardship meetings for applicators and farmers who wanted to apply dicamba-based herbicides to soybeans in 2018 may not have done enough to help extend the product’s two-year trial period.

This is because of another active season of complaints to state departments of agriculture regarding alleged off-target applications resulting in damage to non-genetically modified dicamba-resistant soybeans and specialty crops.

“2018 cannot look like 2017” when it comes to dicamba complaints, warned Rick Keigwin, director of the U.S. EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, in February.

He indicated in a speech at the annual meeting of The Pesticide Stewardship Alliance in Memphis that farmers would not be able to use the new formulations of dicamba herbicides in 2019 if the EPA and state regulators received a similar number of complaints during 2018 as they did in 2017 – when more than 2,700 complaints of off-target dicamba applications alleged damage to soybean fields.

With many acres of replanted or double-crop soybeans across Illinois just coming out of the R-1 growth stage, some in the Land of Lincoln are concerned that complaints of dicamba misuse damaging neighboring crop fields may eclipse the 246 complaints received by the Illinois Department of Agriculture (IDOA) in 2017.

At this crucial juncture in soybean growth, Jean Payne, president of the Illinois Fertilizer and Chemical Assoc. (IFCA), wants applicators and farmers to know that any applications of in-season dicamba near soybeans in Stage 2 constitute a willful misuse of the product. She is concerned about whether the EPA will renew the product for 2019 and beyond.

“I think the (winter) applicator training gave everybody a better ability to understand the complexity of using this product. I think a lot of the applicators did an incredibly good job of following the label instructions,” she said last week. “Unfortunately, we still have widespread issues in the countryside with non-Xtend soybeans.”

There are 142 alleged dicamba misuse complaints filed with the IDOA as of July 6, according to IDOA Public Information Officer Morgan Booth. In all, 227 agriculture-related pesticide complaints had been received by the department.

“If plants are in the flowering stage, you are off-label if you are applying now,” Payne cautioned farmers, especially those in southern Illinois who double-cropped soybeans after wheat or had to replant soybeans. “We haven’t had very many reports from southern Illinois yet, and that is the factor that remains to be seen.”

Manufacturers of dicamba products Monsanto, DuPont and BASF are said to be huddling with retailers to determine the causes of such widespread symptoms in non-tolerant soybeans after an off-season filled with free stewardship meetings for farmers wishing to use the herbicide.

“We had such attention to proper application, and I don’t think we had widespread misapplication,” Payne offered. “I think the industry really needs to figure out what the factors are that are leading to these problems.”

But figuring out what happened with dicamba misuse in 2018 might not be enough to ensure farmers will be able to use in-season dicamba after this year, she warned. “EPA is going to give is some kind of indication of where they are going with this label sometime in August.

“The Monsanto and DuPont labels expire in November, and the BASF label expires in December. They will probably give us some indication then as to whether they are going to allow the label to continue or not,” she said.

Dicamba complaints were just starting to appear in Indiana in mid-June, reported Dr. Bob Waltz, Indiana state chemist and seed commissioner. He was hopeful his office would receive far fewer than the 240 dicamba-related complaints it received in 2017, because of training provided by his office and Purdue University extension.

Almost 8,000 people were trained from Jan. 1 to the present on the proper label use of dicamba, he said on June 17.

In Missouri, where in-season dicamba spraying was prohibited in 2018, 173 complaints of pesticide misuse involving ag applications had been received as of July 12, “most” involving alleged dicamba misuse, according to Missourinet.com. The Show-Me State is facing a shortage of inspectors to investigate all of the damage claims, it reported.

In Iowa, where the majority of dicamba misuse complaints in 2017 were filed post-July 4, 121 complaints of product misuses with ag applications had been reported as of July 2 this year, compared with just 82 such complaints in 2017, according to the Iowa State University extension.

Payne worries that farmers who have exhibited proper dicamba stewardship will find themselves without a valuable in-season tool at their disposal for dealing with problematic weeds in soybean fields.

“We would be losing out on an effective weed-control herbicide, one that is incredibly important in burndown and early in the season. We could potentially lose it in the post-application market, so if your soybeans are in the ground, you can’t use dicamba,” she explained.

“If the EPA were to cancel the post-application use, next year 80 percent of the soybeans will be tolerant to dicamba. And you will basically be in the same situation that Arkansas (and Missouri are) in, where it is illegal to use dicamba over the top but people do it anyway.

“My concerns are long-term. How can you manage weed control in a very restrictive environment when you have very few post-emerge tools in the marketplace that work anymore – and where do we go from here?”