Monsanto says Arkansas plant board distorts dicamba

Monsanto on Thursday criticized the state Plant Board, the work of weed scientists and a task force of volunteers that recently recommended that dicamba herbicides be banned for in-crop use next year.

In separate and different letters to Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Terry Walker, director of the state Plant Board, Monsanto officials criticized nearly all aspects of the state's response the past two growing seasons to complaints that dicamba has harmed thousands of acres of soybeans, other food crops and ornamental plants not tolerant of the chemical.

In letters and a 33-page "petition" to state regulators, Monsanto said:

The Plant Board, a division of the state Department of Agriculture, was "arbitrary and capricious" last year in refusing to allow Monsanto's new dicamba-based herbicide into the Arkansas market and again, in July, when it instituted an emergency 120-day ban on the sale and use of all dicamba products.

Results of tests by weed scientists with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture into dicamba's tendency to move off target were an "outlier" of tests performed by the company.

The dicamba task force, which met twice last month before recommending an April 15 cutoff date for spraying dicamba next year, "ignored" evidence favorable to Monsanto. An April 15 cutoff date would make meaningless new dicamba herbicides intended for crops once plants have emerged.

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The company said it would "seek judicial review" if its concerns aren't resolved.

This summer, regulators in more than 20 states have received some 2,300 complaints of possible damage to soybeans and other crops not dicamba-tolerant. Nearly 1,000 of those complaints were filed in Arkansas, mostly in Mississippi, Crittenden and Craighead counties, leading to the July 11 ban. A weed scientist with the University of Missouri put soybean damage alone at 3.1 million acres across the nation.

The problems have prompted the federal Environmental Protection Agency to look again at the conditional, two-year registration it gave Monsanto last year for its new dicamba herbicide.

Monsanto is being sued in federal courts in Arkansas and Missouri, with the herbicide's alleged volatility being a central claim. The lawsuits also say Monsanto began selling dicamba-tolerant cotton in 2015 and dicamba-tolerant soybeans before the EPA had approved any of the new dicamba herbicides.

MONSANTO'S AMBITIONS

The stakes for Monsanto are high.

The company said recently that it plans to have its dicamba-tolerant soybeans on some 55 million acres -- half of the nation's soybean market -- next year and eventually on 250 million acres around the world. The company also is investing nearly $1 billion to expand a plant in Luling, La., to manufacture dicamba.

Monsanto developed dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybeans to help farmers combat pigweed and other crop nuisances that have developed resistance to glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup, a herbicide also manufactured by Monsanto.

The company has said its new dicamba herbicide, Xtendimax with VaporGrip, is 90 percent less volatile than older formulations of dicamba. Monsanto also allowed BASF and DuPont to market the newer, less-volatile dicamba herbicides. Until the July 11 ban, BASF's Engenia was the only dicamba allowed for in-crop use in Arkansas.

The Plant Board voted late last year to not allow the new Monsanto chemical because the company had refused to let state scientists study the herbicide for off-target movement, allowing instead only a study of its effectiveness against weeds. The board said at the time that it has long been its policy to not approve chemicals until those UA studies had been done.

That decision was among several made in Arkansas that wasn't based on law, Scott Partridge, Monsanto's vice president for global strategy, said Thursday by telephone, noting that Arkansas is the only state to not allow the Monsanto product this year and the only state to ban the use of other dicambas in midseason.

A 33-page "petition" to the Plant Board requests that the panel end the current ban, change pre-ban restrictions that allowed only Engenia in the state, and allow all EPA-approved, in-crop herbicides into the Arkansas market.

The Plant Board next meets Sept. 21 in its regular quarterly meeting, where it also will hold a public hearing on whether any of the new dicamba herbicides should be allowed next year and to consider the April 15 cutoff date recommended by the task force.

"Any recommendations and regulations need to be based on science, not politics and emotion," Partridge said.

THE VOLATILITY ISSUE

Weed scientists in Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee have said volatility is a major cause of problems, citing tests this summer showing that large-scale spraying of dicamba across tens of thousands of acres on hot, humid days can cause the herbicide to vaporize and move miles away to susceptible crops.

Monsanto disputes that volatility of the new herbicides played a major role in this summer's problems.

Partridge on Thursday echoed statements all summer by other Monsanto representatives that physical drift by wind, errors by applicators, or the use of other dicamba herbicides illegal for over-the-top spraying caused most of the problems. "This tool is too important to not have it available to all farmers," Partridge said, adding problems can be resolved through "education and training."

Regarding Monsanto's claims that farmers used illegal formulations of dicamba or made other errors, David Wildy, a Mississippi County farmer and task force member, said, "They're making a lot of allegations that they can't back up, and they're throwing their own customers under the bus."

"They have no way of knowing that," Wildy said. "I have no respect for a company that does that. We as a task force did the right thing. We listened to their side, we listened to the university people and we made the proper decision -- to just step back and stop the use of dicamba until we figure out as a state what to do."

A spokesman for the UA Division of Agriculture declined to comment until officials have had time to read Monsanto's documents.

Shawn Peebles of Augusta, a task force member and farmer with 1,500 acres of organic vegetables, voted for the April 15 cutoff date.

"Monsanto has invested a lot of money in its dicamba technology, and a lot more is at stake, but I hope the governor and legislators will support the April 15 cutoff date," Peebles said.

Peebles, a member of a U.S. Department of Agriculture panel on organic farming, agreed that the tests by state weed scientists didn't match those of Monsanto. "The talk the whole time was on dicamba damage -- in South Dakota," Peebles said of a meeting this week of the group in Washington, D.C. "That shows it's a nationwide issue, that it's a volatility issue."

Business on 09/08/2017

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