Experiments to reduce insecticide dust 'show promise', says University of Guelph scientist

Thursday, July 10, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

The powdered fluency agent designed to help with seed flow in planters and developed by Bayer CropScience along with a new polymer seed coating that goes on after neonicotinoids are applied to field crop seeds are showing promise in planter dust reduction, says a University of Guelph scientist.

But it’s too early to have “actual data,” says Prof. Art Schaafsma. He will be presenting the plant agriculture department’s neonicotinoid research to farmers at the Ridgetown Campus, where he is based, on Thursday.

Schaafsma says “there’s a very good chance that we can pretty much clean up the dust problem.”

Neonicotinoids have been linked to bee deaths. But Schaafsma says “it’s not that all the bees are being wiped out in Ontario.” This is a very complex discussion because there are “so many confounding factors.”

The scientist describes a polymer coating that is applied after the neonicotinoid insecticide is put on the seed and has dried as “somewhat like” nail polish. “It looks really interesting from what we’ve see so far.”

He expects that “we’ll have some good data to share with the seed industry hopefully in time for their production cycle” this fall, when farmers order their seed, either with neonicotinoid seed treatment, or without.

The pressure to churn out results quickly highlights a problem. “This issue is flying faster than the science and the data can keep up,” Schaafsma says. “The science needs to catch up to the rhetoric and we need some time to make that happen.”

Earlier this week, Ontario Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Minister Jeff Leal said in a national newspaper the province intends to move away from the widespread, indiscriminate use of neonicotinoid-based pesticides. During the next few months, Leal plans to consult with industry, farmers and environmental stakeholders on practical options, including considering some type of licensing system.

But where does that announcement leave Schaafsma’s and other researchers’ work? Schaafsma says “it would have been nice to have made that conclusion and directive when we had all the answers.” The government “ haven’t let science catch up.”

The fieldwork for this year of the four-year research project that started last year has been done and samples were collected but researchers must now process the samples “to get the numbers. It’s inappropriate to say: ‘these are the conclusions’ without having the numbers to go with it,” he says. “We’re scrambling to get all of this done.”

Schaafsma says another promising piece of their research work is dust deflectors added to the newer vacuum corn planters that have been blamed for dispersing the seed treatment. The deflectors divert the dust to the ground rather than allowing it to blow into the air. “Some of the seed treatment was being abraded in the process of moving” the seed through the planter equipment and that dust has a very high concentration of insecticide, Schaafsma says, adding “that is the cause for concern.”

Dust is one consideration while another is the build up of neonicotinoid insecticide residues in the soil, air and water and how long those residues stay in the environment, Schaafsma says.

Lab results have shown that lower levels of insecticides affect insect behavior without killing them “but what we don’t know really well is what’s happening in the environment at lower (insecticide) levels and that’s the focus of the debate at the moment,” he says.

On average last year, scientists found about three parts per billion of neonicotinoid residues in surface water near or in cornfields. That is a really small number, he says. “The question is: what does that mean?” Many people are jumping to the conclusion that because it’s there it is causing a problem. “We don’t know.”

More than $2 million in funding from the provincial agriculture ministry, Grain Farmers of Ontario, the trade association CropLife Canada, and the North American-wide Corn Dust Research Consortium has been earmarked for the research. BF