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The paper trail
by Dan Gunderson, Minnesota Public Radio
February 17, 2003

Several memos clearly outline the limitations that the state Agriculture Department faces in testing and monitoring for a variety of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals.

Moorhead, Minn. — The Lopez memo
Author is John Peckham, Investigation Section Supervisor for the Department of Natural Resources:

"There is at least one clear violation of state and federal pesticide law. The violation is that workers were in a field when an application of Poast was being made aerially by the farmer. The Poast label prohibits anyone being in the field during application."

The SFIREG memo
An issue paper dated Oct. 14, 1999, from the State Fifra Issues Research and Evaluation Group. (FIFRA refers to federal pesticide law) Minnesota Department of Ag Investigations and Enforcement Manager Paul Liemandt helped write the document.

"The lack of this analytical capability severely limits the effectiveness of state regulatory, enforcement, and environmental monitoring programs as set forth in the EPA/states cooperative agreement. The inability to analyze for these compounds opens the EPS, SLAs (state lead agencies, ie. ag departments), and state laboratories to criticism from opponents of pesticide use, who may rightly assert that the responsible agencies either do not know how to adequately monitor pesticides in the environment or that they are not willing to do so."

The AAPCO report
from a Dec. 2002 meeting of the SFIREG group.

"As co-regulators with the EPA we asked that the EPA acknowledge (and thereafter financially support) the fact that many new active ingredients challenge the current capabilities of SLA labs. Without this support, future monitoring and misuse actions are seriously in peril and may not be achievable with current technologies. In fact, last summer, Minnesota raised this concern regarding analysis of 'Callisto.'"

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