A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plan to protect endangered species from the effects of weedkillers could require farms near vulnerable habitats to take additional conservational steps.
The EPA last week revealed its finalized strategy to safeguard over 900 federally endangered and threatened species from herbicides, a result of nearly two dozen lawsuits against the agency over its failure to meet Endangered Species Act obligations when approving pesticides. The new framework will be used to help determine which on-the-ground conservation measures farmers should take — and when — in order to offset any herbicide impacts.
Pesticide spray drift and runoff can kill fragile populations of plants, leading to habitat loss for pollinators and animals. The EPA determined in 2020, for example, that the widely used herbicide glyphosate is likely to injure or kill 93% of plants and animals with endangered species protections.
“The EPA is taking a critical step to finally address its decades-long failure to protect endangered species from toxic herbicides,” J.W. Glass, an EPA policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “Reducing herbicide runoff into our nation’s streams and rivers will help hundreds of imperiled plants and animals."
The strategy won't impose any immediate requirements or restrictions on pesticide use, but will instead be used by the agency during new active ingredient registrations or registration reviews of conventional herbicides. The EPA reviews each registered pesticide at least every 15 years, meaning the impact of the new rule could take years to be felt depending on the herbicide.
Eventually, the changes could require farms to take strengthened conservation steps depending on where they're located. The EPA is working on a system where farmers can scan a QR code to understand whether they're near an endangered species habitat and need to adopt additional mitigation measures.
Farm groups have remained wary of the plan, saying it creates a confusing patchwork of rules that will likely raise costs for producers. Josh Gackle, president of the American Soybean Association, said the EPA’s plan "is likely to cost U.S. farmers billions of dollars to implement and could result in significant new hurdles to farmers accessing and using herbicides in the future.”
In response, the EPA has tried to make it easier for growers by expanding the conservation options eligible for compliance, reducing the level of mitigation needed for growers who take part in state, federal or private conservation programs. However, the agency's current map determining when additional conservation measures are needed is also overly broad, encompassing farms that are sometimes miles away from the nearest endangered species habitat.
"When the herbicide strategy was first introduced, you have these extremely large [areas] that encompassed entire counties, and growers who would be nowhere near any sort of endangered species habitat," Glass said in an interview with Agriculture Dive. "So that is still an ongoing thing that EPA is working to fix."
In addition to addressing herbicide impact, the EPA ultimately plans to create a framework to protect endangered species from rodenticides, fungicides and insecticides. The agency has released a draft of its insecticide policy, which is similar in approach to its herbicide strategy.
Glass called the EPA's strategy a "good first step," noting the agency has the complicated job of balancing compliance with the Endangered Species Act and the needs of the agricultural industry.
"There are two options: You could have chemical bans or you could exempt the ESA entirely," Glass said. "And then there's this middle path that's very hard to walk, and that's where we are right now.”
