Pesticide Police, Overwhelmed By Dicamba Complaints, Ask EPA For Help
Across the Midwest, millions of acres of farmland have been damaged by dicamba, an herbicide that can harm crops not engineered to withstand it. There are so many cases, regulators can't keep up.
Every summer for the past three years, the phones have been ringing like crazy in the Office of the Indiana State Chemist. Farmers and homeowners were calling, complaining that their soybean fields or tomato plants looked sick, with curled-up leaves. They suspected pesticides from nearby farms â a kind of chemical hit-and-run.
It was up to investigators like Andy Roth to find the true culprit.
"It's sort of a mad rush at the beginning," he says. "You rush out, you do the field work, you take the pictures, you take the samples, you get them back here" to the office's forensic laboratory, where soil and plant tissue can be tested for pesticide residues.
The lab
