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What's In Your Toolbox?
As you start the 2006 season, you may be thinking about the new tools you have selected to do your job and better serve your customers. For most of you, those tools include an array of pesticide and fertilizer products along with the more traditional rakes, shovels, power equipment, vehicles and labor. Even those of you who perform mechanical services such as mowing, trimming and planting are dependent on the availability of healthy turf and landscape plants and rely on the continued availability of plant health and pest control tools for the long-term success of your business.
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After many seasons, most of us in the green industries tend to take the tools we use for granted. Increasingly, to produce the quality that our customers demand we have replaced manual labor with gas- and diesel-powered equipment, precisely controlled irrigation, controlled-release fertilizers, improved plants and precision use of pesticides along with cultural pest management practices. When a tool was lost to regulatory action or obsolescence, we replaced it with the newest innovation from our suppliers. Even though these new tools often cost more, they typically brought increased efficiency or effectiveness. We forgot about the old tool and considered it the responsibility of the supplier to offer new tools as needed and to defend the continued availability of all the tools required to do the job, especially pesticides and fertilizers.
As pressure to ban or restrict many of the chemical tools needed to care for turf and ornamental plants has grown, we find that our industry may be losing tools faster than they can be replaced. As it becomes increasingly costly to develop and register new pesticide products, we see fewer new choices available to lawn and landscape managers. Also, we continue to hear discussions on limiting the use of fertilizer products, energy and water on turfgrass as well.
In towns and cities around the country we are hearing a vocal activist minority and some elected officials refer to turf and landscape plants as “cosmetic uses that provide no benefit or value!” These arguments have been carried to state legislatures across the United States with limited, but increasing success. We need only look to our neighbors in Canada to see the results of this kind of anti-technology activism. As you read this article, there are nearly 100 federal and state bills proposing limits on the availability and use of the pesticides and fertilizers you rely on to get the job done. Your trade and professional associations continue to work together to defend these products, and we expect to defeat most of these bill in 2006. However, these proposals will continue to be introduced until they are passed into law.
Activists focusing on eliminating all pesticides and fertilizers understand the difficulty of passing federal and state legislation and are turning to local governments to take away these valuable plant health tools. While most states pre-empt local pesticide regulation, activists are succeeding in cities and towns with policy proposals restricting your access to pesticides, fertilizers and other vital inputs. In addition to product and technology use restrictions and bans, activist groups are also seeking to pass local regulations requiring local bonding and certification that includes language calling for “use of pesticides only after other methods have failed” along with unworkable product storage and confusing notification requirements. Even though local regulations are illegal in some 41 states, activists promote them, towns and counties enact them and state legislatures and regulators are pressured to accept them.
Here at RISE (Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment), and at allied green industry associations, we’ve been closely tracking this growing trend in local activism against our industry and your business. Our collective goal is to help you defend your business when your freedom to choose what is in your toolbox is threatened. Unlike federal and state politics, things happen fast locally and strategies used at the federal and state level don’t work – local issues need a local response. If you are called on to defend your business and the plant health products you use in the towns and cities where you operate, we want to help. Let your professional association know about it or contact us at RISE, fgasperini@pestfacts.org. Together we can make a difference and ensure that you have all of the necessary tools for success available to your business and your customers.
The author is director of state issues for Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment.