IowaWatch (https://www.iowawatch.org/tag/iowa-department-of-agriculture-and-land-stewardship/)
Normally, Story County soybean farmer Kevin Larson said, he would resolve a dispute with a neighbor privately. Instead, he went to the Iowa Pesticide Bureau in 2017, just like a lot of other Iowans did.
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Iowa will not add investigators to handle an increased number of pesticide drift complaints, favoring instead more efficient ways to handle complaint inspections, the state’s chief agriculture officer said. “I’ve got to manage the department of ag within my budget,” Mike Naig, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, said in IowaWatch’s weekly radio program that aired this past weekend. “It’s true, we’ve not seen a budget increase in the pesticide bureau, and I don’t expect to see a dramatic increase in the pesticide budget. So, what we do is look at how to manage the workload with the crew that we have.”
Naig’s comments followed an IowaWatch report on how workloads for Iowa’s eight state investigators who respond to complaints of misused herbicides have more than doubled the past two years. The workload increase went from 110 misuse reports in the 2016 crop year to 249 in the 2018 crop year.
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Workloads for eight state investigators who determine whether herbicides are applied properly in Iowa have more than doubled the past two years, with no plans in sight for adding staffers. The workload increase — from 110 misuse reports in the 2016 crop year to 249 in the 2018 crop year — coincides with the introduction by agrochemical companies of dicamba-based herbicides to kill weeds in farm fields. In spite of this, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship Pesticide Bureau has not added staff investigators and completing cases is taking longer, spilling over into the next crop year. Cases taken on in the 2018 crop year, which ran from Oct. 1, 2017, to Sept.
A bill has been introduced in the Iowa Legislature that would increase the fee for a three-year public or private pesticide application certification from $15 to $30 and designate money raised from those fees to the state’s pesticide and administration fund. The fee for commercial applicators would remain at $75. The bill was introduced Feb. 25 and passed its first subcommittee hurdle two days later. It came a month after an IowaWatch story about how recommendations for investigating Iowa’s pesticide application, made by the Iowa State Auditor’s office in a 2012 audit and subsequent reports, had not been addressed.
Problems the Iowa State Auditor’s office identified in a 2012 audit and subsequent reports and recommendations for investigating Iowa’s pesticide use violations still linger years later. The Iowa Legislature has not changed state law on some fees the state Department of Agriculture Land Stewardship Pesticide Bureau charges licensed pesticide distributors and applicators, an IowaWatch review of public records shows. In other instances, applicators do not take continuing education classes in the same year they apply. Explanations exist for some of the concerns. For example, applicators take continuing education after harvest and before the next spring’s planting season during what is called the crop year, which runs Oct.
Briana Reha-Klenske starts helping migrant farmworkers lacking insurance who need medical care by asking: for how long are you in Iowa? A bilingual health care manager, her patients are migrant farmworkers who are only in Iowa during the summers, which limits her ability to help.
Adequate data do not exist for making clear decisions about antibiotic regulation in the hog industry, a key researcher says in a recent IowaWatch story. Hog farmers who either use antibiotics or do not have strong thoughts on what that does should be, this IowaWatch Connection podcast shows.
With morning temperatures approaching 90 degrees one day in July 2015, a migrant laborer walking down rows of corn began to experience symptoms of heat exhaustion, including difficulty breathing and extreme nausea. The laborer was working near Boone, Iowa, for an independent contractor with the St. Louis-based Monsanto Co.
Some considered silos indispensable to profitable livestock raising and dairying. Not only were they practical, the structures were considered an ornament to any farm. The conical silo roof, with its curved walls was said to add a very pleasing enhancement to any farmstead.
Iowa’s organic farms, vineyards, apiaries and other non-conventional farms surrounded by row crops treated with pesticides are at risk of being hit with drifting spray that can leave their farms’ futures uncertain.