Hill Country Observer
July 2009

A farm, a school, a chemical
Parents raise questions about a common herbicide

by Judy Bernstein
Contributing writer

WEST PAWLET, VT.  The teachers and children had just wrapped up their flag salute and song on a May morning and were headed inside when they noticed the big truck in the cornfield alongside the school.

Behind the truck, they saw a plume of herbicide.

Nancy Mark, the principal of Mettawee Community School, was surprised and worried.  The owner of the farm was supposed to have alerted her before the contractor came to spray.  That way, she could have made sure the couple hundred children at the rural elementary school were inside.

But just as Mark was calling the farmer to ask what had happened, he was calling her, saying he too was surprised.

The next day, Mark got state inspectors to test the school for any trace of the herbicide.  She kept the children inside for several days until she was told there was no contamination at the school.

Parents were angry and scared, and the farmer was upset and defensive about what apparently was a mistake by the man doing the spraying.

The parents' concern was about the particular chemical being used next to the school -- atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides on cornfields across the country.  The weed-killer is also sometimes sprayed on golf courses and along highways, railroads and power lines.

Scientists are at odds over the potential dangers of atrazine.  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has supported manufacturers' claims that it is safe.  But European regulators have banned it, and widely publicized studies nearly a decade ago linked the chemical to sexual deformities in frogs.

Atrazine remains a favorite of farmers, who say it's affordable and effective.

Rich Hulett, whose family owns the farm next to the Mettawee school, said he looked into the cost of using an alternative herbicide; the alternative cost about 50 times more than atrazine to cover the same area.  The other choice, he said, would be to use machinery to remove weeds manually -- a time-consuming project that also would add to their costs at a time when area farms are struggling.

Hulett, his wife, Mandy, and father Dick say they believe atrazine is safe and that they haven't suffered any health effects from it.  In the 11 years since the school was built next to their farm, they said, this is the first year there's been any conflict.

But this year, some parents got involved who happened to know something about the atrazine controversy.

What's the worry?
Atrazine is one of the most frequently detected herbicides in ground and surface water.  Studies have shown it to be an endocrine disruptor in frogs, causing abnormal sexual changes, including hermaphroditism, as well as health problems in other "nontarget" species.

In research published in 2002, Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, found that tadpoles exposed to atrazine even at concentrations as low as 0.1 parts per billion had abnormal sexual development.  Some developed both testes and ovaries, while others had several sets of sex organs.  Some sexually mature frogs exposed to concentrations of 25 ppb experienced a tenfold decrease in testosterone levels.

Some other laboratory studies have linked atrazine to cancer in rats, and some epidemiological studies show a correlation between exposure and cancer in humans.

Although the European Union has banned atrazine since 2005, environmental officials in this country decided in 2006 not to restrict its use.  After a review of dozens of studies that took more than a decade, the EPA renewed atrazine's pesticide registration, saying it did not believe the chemical was likely to cause cancer in humans -- or to adversely affect amphibian gonad development.

Environmentalists were outraged by the EPA's conclusions, which followed a series of closed-door meetings between officials of the agency and Syngenta, the largest manufacturer of atrazine.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which had pushed for the EPA to ban atrazine as a threat to human health and endangered species, filed a lawsuit in 2003 claiming the EPA and the Bush White House were withholding documents that would show how industry was shaping the EPA's decision-making process.

In response to the lawsuit and the group's freedom-of-information requests, the White House ultimately did release a series of documents, with most of their contents blacked out, including a memo from former senator Bob Dole to a White House official urging the EPA not to restrict atrazine's use.

In Illinois, the state where the largest quantities of atrazine are used, a lawsuit working its way through the state courts argues that the chemical poses a public-health risk in drinking water at concentrations below 3 parts per billion, the maximum level deemed safe by the EPA.  The lawsuit, filed by a local water district against six manufacturers of atrazine, has been pending for five years.

Syngenta says the suit has no merit.  It told news organizations that the EPA, World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations agree that atrazine is not likely to cause cancer in humans and that the chemical is used in more than 60 countries around the world.

Parent seeks answers
In West Pawlet, Andrew Delano is wary.

Delano, whose 8-year-old daughter, Trinity, is a student at the Mettawee school, had asked school officials to notify him in advance of any spraying.  After the incident in May, he invited parents to an informational meeting about atrazine last month.

The meeting, held at the school, left him with mixed feelings.

Most of the parents he'd invited didn't show up -- perhaps, he thought, because they didn't want to be seen as interfering with the Hulett's farming business.

On the day after the spraying in May, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture collected test samples at four locations outside the school and from the school's water supply.

Only one of the samples showed a trace amount of contamination -- in the form of metolachlor, one of the active ingredients in the two atrazine-based compounds being sprayed at the farm.  But the quantity in that sample, collected from a windowsill on the front of the school, was well below the threshold for concern, agency officials said.

Delano, however, said he wonders whether even 24 hours was too long to wait before collecting test samples.

"I'm not sure that anyone in the crowd that morning didn't get a little on them, because people described a chemical smell in the air," Delano said.

The morning of the spraying, he said, the children were singing "Oh, What a beautiful Morning."  The song, Delano noted ironically, includes words about "the bright, golden haze on the meadow" and the corn being "as high as an elephant's eye."

If Delano and his wife, CarolAnn Hawkins, had been notified of the spraying ahead of time, they say they would have kept her at home for the day.  They've read a lot about atrazine and would rather err on the side of caution, Delano explained.

"It's a very scary chemical around young children," Hawkins said.  "These are children who are not fully developed."

Seeking a solution
At the informational meeting, attended by parents, farmers and school officials, the Huletts promised to notify the school next year -- and to spray on the weekend.

Those who attended discussed forming a "stakeholders" group to explore alternatives to using atrazine.  But both Delano and Rich Hulett said later that they weren't sure that would be very successful.

Cary Giguere, the pesticide program section chief at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, told the parents the state has no power to restrict the use of atrazine if the federal government has deemed it safe.  He suggested the school could plant a stand of cedar trees to help block any possible chemical drift from the farm field.

Delano called the reliance on chemicals in farming an 'ongoing war on nature" and questioned the safety of the level of atrazine allowed by the government.

But the Huletts took offense at the suggestion that their farming practices pose a hazard to anyone.

"I'm one of the guys you're throwing rocks at," Dick Hulett said, standing up to speak.  "How about we'll grow the corn and you pull the weeds?"

The Huletts said they're all healthy despite decades of applying atrazine to their fields.

"I have a granddaughter at the school, and I wouldn't do anything to endanger her," said Dick Hulett, who has worked the farm for 50 years.

The Huletts, like other farmers who turned out for the session, said they need to use pesticides to stay in business.

"Don't try to get us to go organic," Mandy Hulett said.  "It's not going to happen.  We need to live.  We need to feed our families.  It's hard enough as it is."

Blaming the farmer?
In the first few days after the spraying, before the results of the state's tests had come back, the principal say many parents were upset.

"It's a small community," Mark said.  "There were some e-mails that were circulating, and some people were calling me to say that some people were discussing this."

Rich Hulett was still smarting a month later.

"It's just too bad.  I mean, the letters and stuff that were going around town" made his family look "like criminals," he said.

Hulett said the incident was mainly the result of the failure of a driver for CaroVail, a company in Salem, N.Y. that provides herbicide applications at many area farms, to notify him before starting the spraying.

Peter Vail of CaroVail did not respond to a phone call seeking comment for this story.

Hulett said he doesn't know why the driver didn't call him beforehand.

"Apparently, he just wasn't thinking that day is all I can really gather," he said.

He said he understands how parents and school officials might have been alarmed to see the truck in the cornfield.

"It's shell shock when they see a big spray truck," he said.  "It's pretty intimidating to see that out in the meadow."

But the state's test results, he said, show no one was harmed.

Pushing for legal changes
Like other farmers, the Huletts face no legal requirement to notify neighbors about their use of pesticides.  In this case, they had agreed to do so as a courtesy to the school community.

Consumer advocates and environmentalists worried about the dangers of pesticides say the issue of notifying neighbors is only a small part of the problem.  They say they don't blame farmers or private citizens who use pesticides as much as they blame the federal government for not adequately warning people and educating them about safer alternatives.

Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides, a nonprofit group based in Washington, said farmers usually don't know any more than what they're told about the chemical being registered and legal.  At the same time, pesticides represent a huge market worth billions of dollars, and the agrichemical industry, applicators and even county agriculture extension personnel will promote certain chemicals.

A pesticide comes with a label saying how it should be used but without warnings about its possible dangers, something Feldman's group would like to see changed.

Feldman said the EPA could right now share more information than it does about what's known and unknown about pesticide health effects.

The agency, he said, "has tremendous discretion, and it has chosen not to use it because it is so heavily lobbied by the chemical industry."

Full disclosure, he said, would let farmers make up their own minds and switch to other products -- or methods that don't carry the toxic uncertainties of the chemicals.

Growing cover crops and intercropping, which is growing two crops in the same field, are two good ways to control weeds, he said.

Feldman and other activists are hoping the EPA's stance will change under the Obama administration.

And Daniel Rosenberg, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote in his blog last month that revising the Toxic Substances Control Act, under which the EPA regulates pesticide use, is widely considered to be Congress' next big project after climate-change legislation.

'Precautionary' standard
Some environmentalists say the United States should adopt the European Union's "precautionary principle"  for chemical testing.  Under that principle, European countries don't allow the use of chemicals that could pose health or environmental risks, even if those risks are not certain.

In contrast, the burden in this country is on environmental groups and others to show that chemicals are unsafe -- after the chemicals are already in use.

Chemical risk assessment is a "failed system," said Annette Smith, executive director of Vermonters for a Clean Environment.

"There is a clear lack of protectiveness of public health, especially around farms," she said.  "They have developed a whole different approach to chemicals in Europe.  It's been fought vehemently by the chemical industry."

She said Europeans' "different mindset" is perhaps prompted by the smaller land space that leaves more people living closer to both industries and farming. 

In Vermont, she would like to see the state's Pesticide Advisory Council take up the use of pesticides in agriculture.  The council currently reviews permit applications for pesticide spraying along roads and railroad lines and at golf courses and other locations.  But farms aren't required to have permits for pesticide us.
Editor's note:  Andrew Delano, a parent quoted in this story, is a contract delivery route driver for the Observer.