Editor's Focus: Aug. 2000

I’ve had quite a few conversations over the last month with various lawn care operators, manufacturer representatives, distributors and other industry personnel about the fate that befell chlorpyrifos (marketed by Dow AgroSciences as Dursban).

For those of you who haven’t heard by now, Dursban won’t be available for lawn care applications under terms of an arrangement between Dow AgroSciences and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In reality, the term "agreement" is a bit of a stretch because the EPA didn’t offer many options to Dow AgroSciences.

What concerns me about the developments with Dursban is what this means for the industry going forward. The EPA will likely be emboldened by its success in this instance and the scads of praise it received from various media outlets for "saving children" and "protecting the environment." In fact, just a few days after the Dursban story moved off the front pages of newspapers the EPA attacked atrazine, saying it’s likely that the herbicide causes cancer. Now Novartis is scrambling to dispute the EPA’s claims about one of its products, just as Dow AgroSciences did to little avail. Other possible victims in waiting include diazinon and malathion.

But, regardless of the manufacturer and the product, one constant remains – a lack of defense from the professional end users. This industry did not come to its own defense as the Dursban issue escalated. Yes, contractors wrote letters to government officials, but with little effect. There was no wide-spread concern or effort to mobilize the industry into one voice.

Should we continue with this "it’s not my problem" attitude, more pesticides will be lost. A recent survey by the Professional Lawn Care Association of America found that only 24 percent of its members encountered customer concerns or complaints regarding chlorpyrifos, and those likely stemmed from publicity as opposed to unprompted concern.

The industry’s enemy isn’t the general public. They don’t know enough about the products we use to decide whether or not they should worry. We are battling a government agency driven to garner as much popularity and as many votes as possible, and that may come at the expense of small, quiet, non-responsive industries. If that’s the case, then we should all start wondering what product we’ll lose next.