by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 4, 2012 | Agriculture, Toxification
By Pesticide Action Network
Results released today from water sampling across four Midwestern states – Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota – indicate that the endocrine disrupting pesticide atrazine is still being found in drinking water at levels linked to birth defects and low birth weight. Syngenta, one of the world’s largest pesticide corporations, has continued to promote the use of the chemical, despite growing concerns from independent scientists. The US Environmental Protection Agency will weigh these findings as it continues its re-evaluation of the chemical in the coming months.
“These water monitoring results should raise concerns for policymakers, they confirm that atrazine continues to contaminate Midwest drinking water at meaningful levels,” said Emily Marquez, PhD, endocrinologist and staff scientist for Pesticide Action Network. “Endocrine disrupting chemicals like atrazine are hormonally active at vanishingly small amounts. That is why scientists are looking again at atrazine, and that is why the EU set water contamination tolerance levels at 0.1 ppb. EPA’s current legal limit of 3 ppb is 30 times that and much too permissive. The best way to ensure rural communities and farmers are protected is to keep atrazine out of their water entirely.”
In the results released today, atrazine was found in a majority of water samples from Midwestern homes and farms. Atrazine is found more often than any other pesticide in groundwater – 94% of drinking water tested by USDA contains the chemical. The weed killer is the second most widely used pesticides in the U.S., with more than 76 million pounds used last year, mostly on Midwestern corn fields. Atrazine is applied most heavily in Illinois, where applications exceed 85 pounds per square mile.
The results, on average, demonstrate that levels frequently found in drinking water are five times the former legal limit in Europe, and five times the levels associated with adverse health effects, including low birth-weight in babies. Europe’s legal limit was 0.1 ppb before the chemical was banned in 2003. One Illinois sample is above the EPA limit for atrazine in drinking water, and is well above the level associated with significantly increased risk of birth defects.
“Syngenta’s atrazine is linked to irreversible harms like cancer and birth defects. Rural families are on the frontlines of pesticide exposure and we risk contaminating the water of millions of people with the chemical’s continued use,” said Julia Govis, a mother, author of Who’s Poisoning Our Children, and Statewide Program Coordinator of Illinois Farm to School.
As EPA continues its reevaluation of the chemical and plans to release additional findings on atrazine in June, new studies highlight the link between low-level exposure atrazine and adverse human health effects, including cancer and altered development. At the same time, the chemical’s manufacturer, Syngenta, continues to influence scientific analysis of the chemical, downplaying evidence showing that atrazine is harmful.
Last summer, EPA’s independent scientific advisory panel concluded an 18-month review of atrazine’s health and environmental effects. They pointed to “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential” for ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, hairy-cell leukemia, and thyroid cancer.
Unfortunately, EPA has been misled or ignored key findings. Dr. Jason Rohr, a scientist from University of South Florida, took a look at industry-funded reviews of the effects of atrazine on fish and frogs, indicators of impacts on human health, and he found: “The industry-funded review misrepresented more than 50 studies and included 122 inaccurate and 22 misleading statements. Of these inaccurate and misleading statements, 96.5% seem to benefit the makers of atrazine in that they support the safety of the chemical.”
Despite pressure from pesticide maker Syngenta, farmers across the Midwest are demonstrating ways of producing corn and growing food without relying on Syngenta’s atrazine.
“Levels of atrazine in our water raise concerns about the health impacts on farmers and communities like mine. The results underscore the challenges facing many farmers; they are caught in a pesticide trap, and it’s no surprise that they are forced to use more and more pesticides. These results should spur state and federal officials to take action and support farmers as they transition away from Syngenta’s atrazine, towards safe and healthy farming,” said Anita Poeppel, owner of Broad Branch Farm in Central Illinois.
From Pesticide Action Network: http://www.panna.org/press-release/atrazine-found-water-dozens-midwest-communities
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 8, 2012 | Agriculture, Listening to the Land
By Ann Perry
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are studying the overall improvement in water quality when native prairie vegetation is restored to fields once cropped with corn and soybeans. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists in Ames, Iowa, were part of a team that examined changes in groundwater during prairie establishment at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge near Prairie City, Iowa. ARS is USDA’s chief intramural scientific research agency.
ARS researchers Mark Tomer and Cynthia Cambardella work at the agency’s National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment in Ames. Their group studied concentrations of nitrates and phosphorus in groundwater in a 17-acre field that was being converted from corn and soybean row-cropping into a reconstructed prairie. The researchers set up groundwater monitoring wells and collected water samples from 2002 through 2009.
After a final soybean harvest in 2003, the field was seeded with native grasses and forbs. As the prairie became established, nitrate concentrations in groundwater samples declined and stabilized within five years. Initially, nitrate levels in groundwater samples taken at higher slopes averaged 10.6 parts per million (ppm), levels that can fuel the downstream development of the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.
But nitrate levels in groundwater samples taken near surface waterways averaged only 2.5 ppm, and after 2006, nitrates disappeared from the shallow groundwater near the waterways. Further upslope, groundwater samples still had measurable nitrate levels in 2006, but levels diminished to around 2 ppm after 2007.
Unlike nitrate, however, phosphorus levels did not decline. Between 2006 and 2009, phosphorus concentrations averaged 0.14 ppm along the ephemeral waterways, while average upland concentrations were only around 0.02 ppm. The higher phosphorus concentrations were found in shallow groundwater wells adjacent to grass waterways. When groundwater levels rose enough to produce overland flows that contribute to stream flow, the phosphorus concentrations were high enough to threaten local water quality.
From Physorg: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-prairie-quality.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 6, 2012 | Agriculture, Repression at Home
By Tom Philpott
On Friday, Iowa governor Terry Branstad signed a bill that will make it much more difficult for animal-welfare advocates to sneak cameras into Iowa’s factory livestock farms. The bill’s fate is being watched nationwide, because Iowa’s factory farms grow more hogs and keep more egg-laying hens than those of any other state.
The news got me to thinking of my own attempt, years ago, to peer inside of an animal factory.
I was on a tour of a rural Iowa county, given by some farmers who were angry that massive hog-raising facilities had been plunked down in their community (I wrote about it here). At one point, we got out of the van so I could gape at two rows of such low-slung buildings, each holding thousands of hogs. A vast manure cesspool separated the two rows.
Even more repellent than the smell—which nearly dropped me to my knees—was the large man who came barreling out of one facility to demand to know what we were up to. When we informed him that we were citizens standing on a public road, he reminded us that just beyond that road lay private property, and we’d be well-advised not to set foot on it. I asked him if I could have a look inside one of the buildings. He shot me a glare and turned on his heel, barking into his cellphone as returned to his lair. I took the response as a “no,” and we moved on.
The scene neatly encapsulated the terms of factory meat farming. The industry insists on its right to impose its excesses on society—the unspeakable buildup of toxic manure, which pollutes air and streams—but refuses to let society peer in to see what’s going on behind the walls. We are forced to smell, in other words, but refused the right to see.
For several years now, animal-welfare groups like the Humane Society of the US and Mercy for Animals have pursued a kind of guerrilla watchdog strategy for combating this state of affairs. They plant undercover agents to seek jobs at the facilities, and when they’re hired, the agents eventually sneak in cameras and document the scene. As the regulatory agencies like USDA, EPA, and FDA have shown little appetite to inform the public about factory farm practices—much less rein them in—these groups have become our shadow regulators, our eyes on the factory-farm floor.
Read more from Mother Jones: http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/03/will-agribiz-tied-governor-keep-iowas-factory-farms-shielded-view
