Blowin’ in the wind Maine activists look to set a pesticide precedent BY ALEX IRVINE

The Maine blueberry industry appears to be the focus of a coming national battle over the agricultural use of pesticides.

After their success last fall in pressuring Maine’s largest blueberry grower, Cherryfield Foods, to abandon aerial pesticide spraying, a group of local and state activists are going after the state’s number two berry concern, Jasper Wyman & Son. Last Thursday, four months after a November 18 meeting with company officials and agriculture industry representatives, advocacy groups Environment Maine, the Toxics Action Center, the Sierra Club, and Beyond Pesticides announced their intent to file a lawsuit against Wyman, alleging that the company’s aerial spraying violates the Clean Water Act.

Pesticide use is already governed by FIFRA, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, but FIFRA is silent on pollution issues that result from pesticides that end up in places they aren’t supposed to be — such as water bodies adjoining blueberry fields — and it’s not too difficult to get exemptions from the EPA for purposes of using pesticides in ways not covered by their original FIFRA permitting.

The groups argue that aerial spraying is point-source pollution because it originates from a definable source and often enters water bodies beyond the intended target area. "Under the Clean Water Act, a discharge of a ‘pollutant’ from a ‘point source’ requires a NPDES [National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System] permit," reads the groups’ notification letter. "Aircraft fitted with application equipment to release pesticides are point sources under the Act. The Citizen Groups believe that the pesticides that land in navigable waters are pollutants under the Act."

Wyman president Ed Flanagan thinks there’s more going on than a dispute over his company’s pesticide use. "I’m kind of surprised that their response was to announce this, because I thought we had a good meeting," he says. "I don’t think those people have two heads or horns on their tails or anything like that, so I was happy to meet with them. I’m very proud of how Wyman stewards its land." Flanagan sees this action as the first shot in a much bigger fight over the future of American agriculture.

"On the surface level," he says, this is about aerial spraying, but "this is something that has national implications. The question is why us? It’s all about what governs agriculture — the Clean Water Act, or EPA and FIFRA?"

Josh Kratka of the National Environmental Law Center, which is a party to the potential lawsuit, takes up the FIFRA question. "When EPA is evaluating a pesticide under FIFRA," he says, "it does a balancing act of economic benefit and environmental cost. And it sets very general standards for precautions that applicators need to take and precautions that in general should be taken to make sure the product is being applied only where it’s supposed to be applied. Beyond that, the situation you have in Maine, for example — which is a great example of why FIFRA alone isn’t enough — you have planes and helicopters flying all throughout the year and spraying pesticides that in some cases are going into streams where you’ve got endangered species." This, he says, is why the Clean Water Act needs to be involved.

Cherryfield’s decision to end aerial spraying puts some pressure on Wyman, which contends that it can’t afford to convert to ground spraying, as Cherryfield has done, and also that boom sprayers don’t adequately cover the crops and therefore aren’t as efficient in fighting off various pests. In addition, Flanagan says, "We really don’t think going to boom spraying is going to make a material difference in the level of drift," which is already measured in parts (sometimes fractions of parts) per billion.

Regulations are in place to minimize the drift of airborne pesticides, but studies by the Maine Board of Pesticides Control (BPC) have shown that even under approved conditions, aerial spraying results in contamination of local water bodies. Washington County residents have also complained about pesticide drift reaching their homes, although not too loudly since blueberry work is one of the few reliable sources of income in the area. Five Maine towns have banned aerial spraying — Coplin, Lebanon, Limestone, New Sweden, and Rangeley — and during the summer of 2003, the town of Addison went through a bruising fight over a proposed ban that eventually failed by 17 votes. During discussion of this potential ban, a number of area residents complained of careless spraying and other poor practices, including the aerial application of chemicals not recommended for aerial use. University of Maine-Machias ecology professor — and former head of the BPC — Alan Lewis recounted the spraying of his organic blueberries during applications of pesticides to a neighboring property, and also claimed that an applicator lied to him about the wind direction before another spraying, forcing him to call in a BPC inspector.

From 2000 to 2003, BPC drift studies found discharges from Wyman aerial spraying in the Narraguagus River, Great Falls Branch, and several tributaries. The pesticides in question go under the trade names Imidan and Orbit, and their active ingredients — phosmet and propiconazole, respectively — aren’t the kinds of substances you want to be downwind of. A 1993 study funded by the US Department of Agriculture found phosmet moderately toxic to humans but extremely dangerous for fish and aquatic insects, killing half of the aquatic invertebrates studied at levels as low as two parts per billion (which is still more than what any of the drift studies here in Maine found). It’s also particularly rough on honeybees.

Propiconazole, too, is much harder on insects and microscopic aquatic critters than it is on larger animals, and it is a more persistent threat; phosmet decays quickly on contact with water, but propiconazole’s half-life is more than a year, meaning that repeated sprayings will build up in a receiving body of water, with correspondingly greater toxicity to the local flora and fauna.

Adria Elskus, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Maine, is beginning to research the effects of pesticides on Atlantic salmon. She’s examined hexazinone and phosmet, two of the more common pesticides that end up in Down East rivers. Because phosmet degrades so quickly, it isn’t much of a concern except at very high levels, she says. "The current thinking is that that short exposure is going to be insufficient to cause any problems," she says, "but we don’t have any data to support that. I’m thinking that it’s not likely to cause a problem, but I can’t rule it out."