2018 Spring Farm

2018 Logan County Farm Outlook Magazine LINCOLN DAILY NEWS March 22, 2018 Page 21 soybeans were in the ground. But they used more of it in 2017, and they used it in a new way, spraying it over soybeans in the heat of summer, which can cause the chemical to vaporize from soil or leaves and drift away to damage other plants nearby 5 . The danger from dicamba is not from spray drift, but is instead from ‘vapor drift.’ A chemical that cannot produce vapors under normal operating temperatures (such as amine or salt formulations) can only cause droplet drift, which is generally limited to relatively short distances of up to a few hundred yards. This distance can vary greatly, depending on the specific circumstances of the application 7 . However, herbicides that produce volatile vapors (such as esters) are a different story. Not only can they drift in droplet form like amine and salt formulations, they have an additional ‘invisible’ form of drift called ‘volatile vapor drift’ 7 . While droplets might move a few hundred yards from the target and can be seen, vapors have the ability to drift many miles from the target and are invisible 7 . “I believe it’s an herbicide that has the potential to do really extensive crop damage as the seed system expands in the 2018 planting season,” Daiber said 5 . Monsanto insists that its version of dicamba does not drift from the fields where it is sprayed if farmers use it correctly. The company sued Arkansas over its dicamba ban 5 . It turns out the ban didn’t stop farmers, many desperate to control problem pigweeds, from spraying various dicamba products on the crop. The full consequences of those actions won’t be known until harvest but regulatory officials in several states cite a rough figure of 200,000 affected acres in the Arkansas, the Missouri Bootheel and Tennessee 6 . Citing new technology that may control vapor drift, Monsanto presses on with their expansion of Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans. With both the EU and Chinese approvals of the technology, and confident its dicamba formulations will be approved by the EPA, Monsanto “continues to be in a strong position to supply roughly 15 million U.S. soy acres when the selling season arrives,” reads a company statement 6 . “VaporGrip is a tool to help maintain low- volatility formulations to minimize off-target movement and make responsible use of the Continue 8