So the cat woke me up at 4:45 AM this morning… (Glares at cat. Cat doesn’t look at all ashamed of herself.) So I got tired of sitting around and was out on the bike by 6:30 and by 7 this is where I was. I was kind of glad she did wake me up that early. Nothing but me, the early morning sun, surrounded by bird song and frogs singing? It doesn’t get much better than this.
If you thought that dicamba based herbicides weren’t going to be a danger after the 9th circuit court ruled EPA’s certification of the products in question ignored basic science and reports of damage, you’d be wrong. While the EPA is required to certify products like this, individual states are actually in control of what farmers can or cannot use on their crops, and it looks like only two or three states where dicamba resistant crops are grown are going to actually halt the use of the product.
To make things even more – interesting, shall we say, the EPA has just issued a statement saying that despite the court ruling, farmers can continue to use “existing stocks” of the herbicides until July 31. So EPA is basically telling the states and farmers that even though the court stated that the certification for the products had to be recinded, what the court said doesn’t matter and you can keep using the stuff.
If you’re confused by all of this, well, so are a lot of people. On the surface it looks like EPA just basically told the 9th circuit court to go eff itself and they’re going to do whatever the hell they want anyway.
The 9th circuit court issued a scathing rebuke of the EPA in its overturning of the agency’s approval of Monsanto’s (now owned by Bayer) XtendiMax dicamba based herbicide. You can read the actual decision at https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/06/03/19-70115.pdf
It is a very interesting document. Considering how generally dry and dull documents like these are, this one is actually pretty interesting. It is a scathing report on just how bad the EPA has become.
Basically the EPA downplayed, ignored entirely, dismissed, or never seriously examined known issues with the herbicide. It dismissed or ignored reports of serious problems with the herbicide drifting over long distances. It ignored or dismissed reports of crop damage caused by the herbicide, calling them “alleged”. It vastly underestimated the actual amount of damage the herbicide was causing, completely ignoring continued reports by scientists, universities, farmers and others concerning the extent of the damage. It substantially understated or even ignored entirely the risks posed by use of the product. Where it did acknowledge damage was being done, it claimed that the damage was being over reported based solely on the word of Monsanto, the company that made the stuff.
Basically the entire document is a graphic illustration of how the EPA totally failed to do its job properly.
Anyway, as of June 3, 2020, EPA certification for the dicamba blend from Monsanto and two other vendors has been revoked and supposedly it is now illegal to use the stuff at all. And while a lot of farmers and others who have had their crops, orchards and ornamental plants killed or damaged by the stuff are a bit relieved, you can be damn sure that this isn’t going to be the last of it. Bayer is, of course, going to immediately appeal the decision. And as for EPA itself, it’s been virtually useless for years already, with a lot of the higher ups being former employees of the very businesses it is supposed to regulate. Same is true over at USDA and most other government regulatory agencies.
I normally don’t do this, but I want to plug Affinity Photo which is now on sale until June 20 for half price, $24.99.
Before that, though, I should point out that I am not associated with Affinity in any way. I don’t get paid anything, haven’t received free or discounted products from them, nothing. I recommend it because it is just plain good. And cheap. Even at its original list price of around $50 it was cheap. Now that you can buy it for $24.95, well, that’s about what Adobe gets per month for using PhotoShop. And Affinity does damn near everything PS does.
I’ve had Affinity for my iMac for several years, but because I already owned Adobe CS 6 on the iMac I rarely used it. It was an impressive piece of software, but I was used to PhotoShop and didn’t want to invest the time in adapting to a new program.
But now that I’ve switched over mostly to Windows, and was getting tired of coughing up about $25 a month for PhotoShop on this machine, well, I decided I finally needed to look at alternatives once again. I just bought Affinity for Windows and installed it and so far, well, wow, it’s amazing. Especially at this price.
If you’re a photographer or artist, even someone who only occasionally fiddles around with graphics, take a look at Affinity Photo. At $25 on sale it’s amazing. And if you aren’t willing to drop money now, you can get a free 90 day trial.
Woke up around 4 AM for some reason, pulled open the curtains and saw – snow??? Yeah, snow, not that daffodil up there from this weekend. But I’m not going to put up a picture of snow because things are depressing enough, so hopefully a daffodil will cheer you up. We knew it was coming, the storm, but I don’t think we really believed it. We were lucky because we got just a light dusting. Other parts of the state got as much as 5-8 inches. Sheesh. Welcome to spring.
I have to admit that all of this is getting to me. I’m a rather anxious person to begin with and this whole climate of fear we’re living in with the 24/7 virus news going on right now certainly isn’t helping. I try to avoid even watching the news or reading newspapers, to be honest. But it’s hard not to. You can’t turn on the television, pick up a newspaper, turn on a radio or get on the internet without being bombarded with infection numbers, number of deaths, warnings to stay home and if you do have to go out wear hazmat equipment and treat everyone you meet as if they were infected. And meanwhile we have an administration that is saying everything is going really, really well and the isolation may be lifted at the end of the month, and at the exact same time the crawler down at the bottom of the screen is showing the number of deaths ticking up all the time and an announcement pops up that New York had to hire a contractor to begin digging mass graves on an island in NY harbor because they can’t deal with the number of bodies, and one of the heads of the Wisconsin legislature is shown in full hazmat gear telling people it’s safe to go vote in person without taking any kind of special precautions and later claiming the election is totally valid even though hundreds, perhaps thousands of people gave up trying to vote because of the 4+ hour wait times because most of the polling places were closed (only 5 out of 180 were open in Milwaukee) and the fact that the post office didn’t bother to actually deliver hundreds, perhaps thousands of absentee ballots that people had sent in for weeks ahead of the election, and even if people did get them and sent them in they won’t be counted because the post office didn’t put a postmark on them…
Yeah, it’s starting to get to me.
Testing stuff
I’m not sure what’s going on with WP this morning but I’ve been running into all kinds of issues here. I can’t “Like” posts or comments on other WP sites, I can’t Like comments on my own blog, for heaven’s sake. I can’t access WP tools from my website, only if I go directly to my administration page. All kinds of weird stuff. I don’t know if it’s something local (i.e. and issue with my browser) or if this is effecting other people. Hopefully it’s just a temporary thing, possibly caused by system overloads. It’s about 7 AM local time so that means a hell of a lot of people are probably trying to get online to check emails, do work, school, etc so it could be just some kind of overload.
I did a bit more digging into the case of the Missouri peach grower who won a large judgement against Bayer and BASF over it’s dicamba herbicide blend and ran across this item. Bayer markets a dicamba blend called Xtendimax and BASF markets a similar herbicide called Enginia. In addition to a $15 million judgement for actual damage, the jury tacked on $250 million in punitive damages. So the total judgement against the company stands at $265 million. punitive damages are awarded when a jury finds the actions of the defendant to be especially harmful.
They will certainly appeal this case and, like the judgement against Bayer/Monsanto over health problems with it’s glyphosate herbicide, the monetary amounts will almost certainly be reduced by a huge amount on appeal or even thrown out entirely. And even though I dislike dicamba a great deal, even I have to admit that there are some serious issues with this particular case.
There was evidence that trees in the orchard were suffering from Armillaria root rot which could have caused the problems the trees were suffering from. Some testing did indicate the trees were exposed to dicamba, but at a time before Monsanto released its Xtendimax herbicide for use, so how could Monsanto be responsible if the product hadn’t even been released for sale yet?
As with the case where Bayer/Monsanto lost the glyphosate trial, there seem to be some serious problems with this verdict, at least on the surface. I didn’t hear the testimony and didn’t read the entire court transcript, but from what I know now, if I’d been on that jury I don’t know if I would have been able to rule against the company.
But that goes only for this specific case. Dicamba is a nasty, nasty herbicide that vaporizes easily and can drift for miles. There is absolutely no doubt that it has caused millions of dollars in damage because of drifting, despite what the company says. Bayer continues to claim there is no problem with it, and that all of the problems either A) didn’t really happen, B) were due to illegal applications of its product, C) caused by applicators not following application guidelines or D) were due to other plant diseases.
grouchyfarmer 