Ag waiver requirements to increase this summer
The next phase of the Conditional Ag Waiver for Irrigated Lands program begins this summer, and could have significant long-term impacts on the availability and regulations for many commonly used crop protection products in almonds.
Under Phase II of the Conditional Ag Waivers program, watershed coalitions this summer will expand their toxicity sampling procedures to screen for more than 50 commonly used pesticides. The expanded sampling requirement could raise coalition dues as much as 50 percent for almond growers and other farmer members.
The
East San Joaquin Water Quality Coalition, for instance, has raised its dues 50
cents to $1.50 an acre in response to the increased testing requirement. The
dues will also help fund sampling for an increased number of sites, which will
go from 13 to 19 in 2006-07, according to Parry Klassen, chairman of the
watershed coalition and executive director of the Coalition for Urban and Rural
Environmental Stewardship (CURES).The state water board is in the process of setting standards that watershed coalitions will have to meet for many commonly used pesticides, including common almond crop protection products such as Treflan, Prowl, dimethoate, methyl parathion and simazine. This new phase will also require coalitions to sample for fertilizers within each coalition boundary.
The water board is set to begin risk evaluations for these high use pesticides and establishing water quality criteria. If maximum tolerances are exceeded at a sampling site, the Coalition will be required to implement management plans for keeping those pesticides out of the waterway.
Until now, coalitions have been required to do toxicity testing for potential impacts on indicator organisms. The toxicity testing has been broad in scope, but under Phase 2 will be more specific to certain pesticides deemed high use within an area. San Joaquin and Sacramento River watershed coalitions now must ramp up their program to comply.
“Moving into Phase 2 is really stepping things up for all coalitions, except the Westside Coalition because they voluntarily began Phase II sampling when the Ag Waiver program started,” Klassen said.
If that pesticide sampling shows continued exceedances for specific pesticides, the result down the line could be restrictions and regulations on the use of those crop protection products.
“The coalitions’ responsibility is to do grower and PCA outreach and provide BMPs (best management practices) for those products that have exceedances,” Klassen said. “Then it’s up to growers to adopt those practices. If after a certain time we can’t control those discharges then there could be restrictions by county ag commissioners, the Water Board could force a TMDL to be developed for those products, or DPR could take action to restrict uses to mitigate those detections.”
Sediment toxicity testing will also be a bigger issue for Central Valley watershed coalitions as regulators look for potential levels of pyrethroids and other pesticides in impacted surface water channels. In the East San Joaquin Coalition, which encompasses a major almond region from Stanislaus to Madera counties, seven of 13 monitoring sites registered sediment toxicity, and the Coalition will begin doing advanced analysis to identify whether or not the source of the toxicity is pyrethroids.
“It’s troubling to see so many sampling sites with sediment toxicity,” Klassen said. Recent studies out of UC Berkeley have shown that in the San Joaquin Valley some of this sediment toxicity in ag drains is due to pyrethroids. These insecticides do have the characteristic of binding to organic material and settling out in sediment,”
He and others are concerned results of the sediment testing could have implications on the regulation and availability of pyrethroids. The Department of Pesticide Regulation is preparing to put pyrethroids under re-evaluation to collect new data due in large part to concerns about sediment toxicity. Ultimately this could result in new, perhaps more restrictive, labeling for these important almond insecticides.
“Outreach on best management practices and stewardship for pyrethroid use is our first step,” Klassen said. “CURES initiated a pyrethroid stewardship program in early 2005 aimed at growers who rely on these chemical tools that focuses on promoting BMPs to minimize sediment transport from fields into waterways,”
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