 Welcome back to our meeting room. It's nice to be close and cozy, but Andrew, I guess you're up next from the Highway Agency. I am back, and could you tell us a little bit about your usage of these chemicals and why you use them? What the purpose of yours is and what's gone to man? I appreciate the opportunity. My name is Andy Shively. I'm the head of materials coordinator for the Agency of Transportation. I've been in that position since about 2007, including membership as the appointee for V-PAC, excluding two years in the interim when I ran the pesticide program for V-Trans. Our program is primarily to establish safety and durability within the transportation infrastructure. That is why we use herbicides in the right way. It's very clear about it. We use primarily glyphosates. It is the predominant chemical we are going to use currently, and if we're prohibited from using that chemical, we're going to have to switch to a more harsh chemical. The reality is, I've heard that from Mike, I've heard that from many other people, including Senators here, that that is the reality. We're going to be using more harsher chemicals to meet the same effective need to control vegetation in the right way. And you use this to control vegetation where? Primarily guardrail, but it also has a lot to do with safety relative to inspections, relative to the infrastructure itself of the transportation system. Safety would be, as an example, poison ivy, you can't allow workers into an area of poison ivy to do inspections of a culvert exit, so you're going to have to treat that poison ivy before you allow employees in that area. So it's mainly guardrails, culverts, mild virus, postages, science, yes, exactly. Speed limit science. And how many, do you have an idea of how much you use on an annual basis? It's been very sporadic over the last few years. Last year, we averaged somewhere around $10,000 to $50,000 worth of chemical. We've transitioned over the last few years to applying and treating ourselves. We aren't contracting up to outside contractors anymore. We are training up and providing our own applicating capacities within VTRANS. Last year was one of the start-up years for us doing that, so we didn't treat as much as we normally would have. And how did, that would be great if we could get on a downward swing of these things and was your usage down from the year before, do you know? I think it'd be really hard to compare those usages because there was so different amount of application. I think they're not, it's really difficult to make that comparison because they were so different. Years prior, the entire state, all the districts in the state applied guardrail and last year maybe only two or three districts really took the opportunity and applied. Why was that? Mainly because as I was saying, we're going through a transition period where we're twilling up our own people to be able to do the application themselves. We're not quite up to that. So that's a really interesting moment in time where you could maybe compare the effects of lower usage during this transition to the effects of higher usage. Did you do anything, I mean were there negative impacts of not applying that? I don't think so because I'm confused there. Are you saying that the pesticides weren't applied or that we contracted out for a bunch of them? I'm saying the pesticides weren't applied at all. Minimal applications throughout the years? Yeah, my question is did anything bad happen? Anything good happen? I didn't take any of that into account quite honestly but I came here to speak about this so I could really come up here to clarify. Well these are moments when actually something happens that you didn't intend but it's a point in time when doing research is really interesting because you didn't intend necessarily to have a drop in pesticides usage but it happened because of this change in your policy and your use of staff and that's great. So really trying to understand what were the effects of this unintended drop in the use of pesticides and did it have harmful implications to the safety of workers and to the safety of drivers etc. or did it not? Those would be interesting questions to try to tease out of this unintended experiment. Understood and I got your point it feels like a missed opportunity because they don't have those answers for you. Frost never came out of the ground up north where I live so they didn't have to... All summer it was frosty over the northeast kingdom. Just along these lines what is the safety, like what's the strategy around a speed limit sign? Around a speed limit sign? Well or some of the signs I'd like to understand the logic that says you know there's a... So you made the point about a worker that has to go to inspect something. So they're protecting them from poison ivy. It seems like some boots could work. But okay we'll accept that. What is the logic of needing to spray? Why do we need to spray around the signs? Okay so we'll start with the federal highway does require us to maintain the infrastructure in a certain measurable condition. As an example being able to see the guardrail. Being able to see the reflective roadside delineators. Being able to see the line of sight around a turn that isn't encroached by a large piece of grass or a lot of vegetation growing up. So there's a lot of safety components that are kind of inherent to the way the system operates that you don't normally notice until they're really bad. Bads require this like on the federal highway system? Yeah FHWA requires that we maintain our system in a certain measurable manner. But okay so they don't require that we spray with glyphosate. So take the next step for me in the logic. The next step for you in the logic of why we spray? Yeah so let's go back to the speed limit sign. You're maintaining that it's for safety that we spray around a speed limit sign. I don't understand that so explain that to me in a way that I'll understand why safety dictates spraying a speed limit sign on that. I put you on the spot. I'm happy to speak if you want me to. I love Mike he's great. We have a thousand miles of guardrail to maintain. So in a sense we're talking about an argument in economics. The cost of using those traditional chemicals compared to the manual methods that would be required to achieve the same vegetation outcomes would be tremendous. I've looked at numbers there's so many different variables the way you want to look at it. It's pretty clear that it would be an increase in cost and it would be substantial. To use mowing for example? To use nonchemical means. But I see the guys plowing the high you know mowing along the highway. So we do that. Are we saying that so I really I don't mean to pick on this speed limit sign but it's just an example of it seems like a fairly innocent little signpost there. So what and we're already going to mow there. So what are we gaining? I'm not trying to be difficult I'm not understanding. I think I rather can we pick on guardrails. Because I think there's more of an applied reality that that's a safety component. So it's a speed limit sign. We both know if you knock somebody over speed knock over a speed limit sign or people don't see it. They're going to speed it either way. Right example. The example this is Mike Bald was from the rail lines. The train conductor has to be able to see those and they spray out carry nose. Spray 20 10 20 feet in front of it and 10 feet behind it because you can't have fragmites encroaching of cover up a sign saying crossing ahead. Right. This really quickly for this. These are the conversations carried to Gary to that that happened at the council and around each entity's vegetation management plan. And everybody who asked for a permit has a vegetation management plan that describes the safety issues associated with the treatment that they want to do. And I'd be more than happy to provide the vegetation management plans for each entity. And it sort of, you know, has an example of what I don't know. How many are there? About 18. So all right. So the guardrail. So were we less safe last summer when when a small percentage of them were treated? No, because it's more as Mike would have noted it's a cumulative effect. There's other components like erosion control and the accumulation of vegetation around the edge of payment that might channelize water and go to a weak spot and create an aggravated erosion scenario where if that vegetation didn't exist or it had been removed prior. You wouldn't get that kind of a cumulative effect. So that's just on the erosion control side of things. And as opposed to line of sight, that's a completely different kind of an issue to talk about. There's two different things in my mind. There's the public safety component and those who use the transportation infrastructure. And then it's the impact itself on the infrastructure and how it reduces the durability over time. And that's a little bit more difficult to talk about on a year to year basis. You can't say just because we didn't do it this year, we had this one erosion scour. I'm not saying that couldn't be the case. It could very well be the case. But it's not as easily tracked as that. Right. I'm saying that the long-term impact on infrastructure you can't do in a one year. But you could do, you could determine about safety in terms of whether or not they were blocking the guardrails in a way that was... I guess I want to get back to a question that Senator Pearson asked because I don't think I understood the answer. If we're already out there mowing, how is it more expensive or less expensive to be out there than applying glyphosate? So, we don't mowing under the guardrails and we're treating, using the chemical specifically to treat under the guardrails. We're not chemical mowing. We're treating a two foot swath under the guardrail where we can't mow. So that in effect affects the durability and the longevity of the guardrail system over time, over a long period of time. That is the use that VPAC hasn't allowed states like Maine do chemical mowing. They treat their entire right away when they're beside that stunts the grass. So other states allow chemical mowing, allow invasive species controlling it right away, allow the flower vets that we put in. Those are all uses that VPAC does not allow V-transit do. So I get a permit to use chemical mowing on my front lawn. You wouldn't need a permit, but you could. Half random is self-familiarity, I would do it. I get very sick of that mowing. I could spray that. I wonder if your cutter doesn't come with it. I like that chemical mowing. I'll tell you the road sides. I don't know how you determine who mows and when, but always down in southern Vermont, they're nicely mowed. And the further north you get, the later you get mowed in. It isn't very attractive for guests coming to our state to go from a nice landscape roadside to the mess that we have up north later in the summer, I'll tell you. Was there a question there? Mike has an answer for a question that I'm not sure exists, but go ahead. Mike Baldwin, there's an organic farm. They're not certified organic, but you could get input. There's a farmer in North Palmford and four other landowners who don't want wild parsnip in the bowl of land that they inhabit. Twenty landowners, five of them have hired me. No wild parsnip because you get the sap on you, you're screwed. You're losing eyesight, your second degree burns. This landowner and her brother, they mow road sides for miles at their own cost, at their own expense, at their own time. They're farmers. They don't get any money from me. They don't get any from the state. They do their poor neighbor, their rich neighbor. They do that at their expense because they don't want the mowing to spread the weeds. Now, I'm on the weeds. There's no, you will not find parsnip in the 20 square miles of North Palmford where I work, but they don't want chervil and they don't want to use pesticides, but they get zero funding support from the state or from an office. It's out of their pocket. I think that's broken, but that's what they have to do. That's a town mowing center. Sorry. Other questions, Brian? Yeah. So if a glyphosate became unavailable to you, what would you be using? We'd likely be using the sulphameter on products like oused. As an example, it's going to be a vegetation. It's a grass control. We'd like to have to follow that up with a brush or tree control, like a triclopere or maybe granite, but I got to go there. We would have to use a harsher chemistry and we'd have to apply multiple applications. So it would be more harsher, more often. Thank you. Did you go to your in-house applicators as a cost-saving measure or because you thought they were better trained or better at the job? I think it's a combination of a lot of things, including all of those. Do you feel like... Control would have been another... I was just about to say you have more control over when and how and how much. Administratively, it was a challenge to manage contractors. Yeah, there were a lot of reasons. Control being one of them, from a timing standpoint, from affecting the standpoint. Do you think you might be able to manage those in-house staff toward a goal of reduction in use? I think we already are. I think that's what our goal is and always has been. Keith, do you have long-term statistics on how much you use? Oh, yeah. We have to report annually to the A&J Ag. It's part of our permit on how much we use. Does that... Do those statistics show that your use is going down? I don't think this most recent bump shows that. The drop in this inconsistent year kind of throws that in disarray. There's a lot of ways to look at that number. Do you want to look at overall use or do you want to use that pounds per thousand feet of guardrail? Pounds per thousand feet, I think would be the most important because if you can get that reduced, there's less chance for run-off. So there's lots of ways to do that. If you keep putting in guardrail, that final number is going to keep going on. There's an A&J too. Does that change the amount of guardrails that the feds demand that? No, I think the need for guardrail is more of an independent process based on site-by-site needs, not necessarily whether the feds require it in any one shape or form. It's site-specific, the need for guardrail. But that's to prevent people from getting hurt. It's always generally grounded into safety and safety issues. Distance to river, whatever the case may be. Any rules? I have one more. So I know part of our water quality plans are for you to do, or VTrans, maybe you personally mentioned, to do different plantings along. When there's a new highway put in. New construction. New construction. Different plantings, culverts, all the whole shebang. Right. And one example that I see all the time is in Northern Addison County, Southern Chittenden County along Route 7. A couple of years ago, we did Route 7 along there and put in a lot of different plantings, planted a lot of trees. That sort of fairs Berkshire lot area. And I'm wondering does that have an impact? Does on pesticide use, does it increase it or decrease it? It has no impact. The impact really for that stretch would have been extending the gravel apron beyond the edge of pavement so you're not establishing a zone for vegetation to be able to creep into. Okay. So we're trying to engineer out the need to even treat underneath it. Right, that's what I'm talking about. So the vegetation itself and what you described, no that's not really going to impact the use of glyphosate but just the engineering of the guardrail system itself will because now that guardrail may not necessarily need treatment ever or maybe for a long time based on encroachment. Okay, so I guess my broader question is you're implementing practices that might change the infrastructure along the roadways. Correct. And with the intention to reduce pesticide use overall. Okay, that's good. I'm just curious how many, when you talk about these in-house applicators, how many of them are there? Oh boy, Jen, I'm going to look at you. My colleague, Jen Callaghan, works with two of us. We have at least one in each district and most districts, we try and get at least two per district. We have turnover so we're constantly retraining and getting more people out. How many is that? Eight. Eight. And I think our goal is to basically be able to have them operate in teams. Are they actually walking along the guardrails with this implement spray in the weeds? No, it's in a truck. Okay. No, it's truck line and spray application. They do reconnaissance prior to that to mark their buffer distances to waters or whatever conditions VPEC may impose. Then the truck is going along the road at some slow pace and they're spraying while the truck moves. Exactly. The train of traffic control behind them. So you can imagine equivalent of a high school kid going along the weed whacker, like just whacking the weeds on the road. The statistic I have that is, I may get a little wrong so bear with me was an example would be maintaining the Champlain Causeway, which we cannot use any herbicides on. We have to maintain mechanically. So that's literally weed whacked. I think it takes three people ten days to treat to control vegetation. I went ten mile stretch of the causeway. So if you extrapolate that out to managing the entire infrastructure system, it starts to look like really big numbers. And why are you not using, why can't you use it along the Champlain Causeway? Because it's too close to the lake. Oh, it's the middle of the lake. Okay, I'm sorry. Yeah. I was thinking of the, yeah, for as it goes up. No. The white background. Got it. Okay. Well. Have you had those new records? Yeah. Yeah. There's another one. Re-whacking is definitely dangerous. But that's... 10 miles. 10 miles. Yep. Well, thank you for your time and... Appreciate the opportunity to be brief. May I ask you a quick question? Have you experimented with acidic acid? I mean, it killed one. Vinegar? Vinegar. Vinegar. It's going to kill them quick. I don't know if AFFM would permit that for us. Well, that's a good question. Acidic acid will kill plants very quickly. If it doesn't, you know, then it's like steam. It burns the top. It doesn't affect the roof structure. If it kills the top and then the plant won't grow any higher, you know, if you spray it, it could. But we don't lessen any toxicity. Acidic acid? Correct. I'm exposed to vinegar almost every day in my home. This is 20 percent. 20 percent of seedage. Dish. Yeah. Have you ever experimented? Yep. Thank you. For the record, my name is Margaret Lagas, and I represent Green Mountain Dairy Farmers and Crop Life America. Pesticide use in Vermont has been on a steady decline for the last several years, and there are really two reasons for that. The first is that pesticides are expensive, and obviously farmers are always looking for a way to save money. The second is that there's constant, ongoing research in integrated pest management systems that help farmers find ways to handle weeds and pest pressures without the use of outside inputs. There are also corn breeding programs that are looking into creating crops that are more resistant to pest and weed pressures. There's also the use of satellite technologies by tractors so that the pesticides are only sprayed in the areas that the fields are scouted and then the boom only sprays exactly where they're needed. So there are kind of a variety of reasons why that might be why those numbers are going down. Vermont's actually one of the few states that actually has done quite a bit of research on these particular pesticides that you're talking about today, predominantly neonix and glyphosate, and whether or not there's a movement in the environment of these products from their targets. And I think you heard on glyphosate that not the state has done extensive testing there, and they have not found that they've moved away. You heard just last week about neonix as far as treated seeds, the work that was done at Miner Institute, not only on the water that was coming out of the tile drainage and into ditches, but also to the non-target species, the golden rod that was in the ditch, and they didn't find any movement of the neonix into those plants. Then they also looked at beeswax. They also didn't find it in the beeswax, although they did find some of the chemicals that, you know, bee folks are using to kill veromites. So Vermont's agricultural practices have changed dramatically in the last 10 years. For anybody who has lived here, you know that for decades you would drive by corn fields and they were tilled twice a year. You would see them, they were bare. The earth was turned over. That really was used as a method of disturbing the pests that were in the soil. You turn up that soil. Pests like to live within their own strata in the soil. You turn it over. You disrupt their lives and you reduce their numbers and their ability to kind of appropriate the way that they would like to. That also obviously reduced weed pressures. You turn them upside down, and hopefully those weeds are going to die back and be as vibrant. As you know, over the last five years or so, and especially after the initiation of the RAPs or acquired ag practices, farmers have adopted two major new methods of farming on their corn land, and that is no-till or reduced tillage and leaving cover crops on the fields over the winter. So now you don't see fields turned up twice a year. So that also saves on, you know, tractor trips as well. Invert, nationally cover cropping covers about 22% of all corn acres. In Vermont, we're on average 30%, and in the actual watershed districts, when they look at, like the Champlain Valley watershed group, which covers Addison and Chittenden County, they're up to over 60% cover crop. So we've made a dramatic increase in that practice among those farmers that are really looking at that and trying to start using those means. What that means is that soil has a higher organic matter content because as those weeds die down, they basically die into the soil and become incorporated into the soil over time, like composting, basically. It means that both weed and pest pressures are increasing and rapidly changing in Vermont because we're not turning up the soil, so we're not disturbing the pests in their natural habitat kind of, and so they're kind of growing and changing. We've got fungi in the soil that's kind of doing the same thing, like biota is changing, and it's something that Vermont farmers haven't dealt with in the past, so we're learning a lot, and UVM Extension is doing a lot of research on what's going on under the soil now. It's very different than it was just five to 10 years ago. And on top of that, our weed pressures are completely different because we're not always killing back the weeds as much as we did before. On top of that, Vermont has seen, as I'm sure you've heard a couple of different times, we call a year in Northern Vermont over the last decade or so. The good news is that because of the RAPs and the cover cropping and the increase in organic matter in the soil, that has had less of a negative impact on Vermont farms than it would have if farmers hadn't dramatically adopted those practices. 1% increase in organic matter in the soil holds about 20,000 gallons of water per acre. That's a lot of water. So that's great for your crops. It kind of puts down some of that real research where they said organic farmers are so much better off than conventional farmers. We're now kind of coming up to the same standard because we are increasing our organic matter in the soil. And so we are competitive with those numbers as to how much water we can hold. The beauty of that is twofold. It's not only great for our crops, but it's great for roads and bridges and water quality because that water is not leaving our field. These much larger two inches or more individual rain events into those fields, into ditches, into streams causing erosion and hurting roads and bridges. One acre holds 20,000 gallons for 1% increase in organic matter. And that's research. Two tractor trailers that haul gas are well done. Right, the big ones. That's a lot of water. And that is really important because Vermont is having these big, weird weather changes and big rain events. And then potentially longer periods of time with no rain and then these huge rain events. So it's really important that the soil become more like a sponge. It's really important. And so it was brought up a little bit earlier that if Vermont just wanted to we should just tell the pesticide companies that we want changes or we want crop changes and so on. We're a flea on the tail of a dog as far as a crop producing state. So those companies are really not for a sales or marketing opportunity. They almost write us off at the time because we've got 100,000 acres of corn. There are farms out west that are almost 100,000 acres of corn on a farm. So it's just very, very different. We just don't have any market authority really. I talked about the fact that Vermont actually has information on whether or not glyphosate is leaving farms and having a negative impact. We have not found that glyphosate in doing that. It is a very important tool for farmers with regard to cover cropping. So we would obviously prefer that you not take it away from us. Organic farming has its place in the market and you heard earlier that NOFA really wants to encourage more and more people to get into organic farming. It's really not reasonable to believe that the marketplace could sustain all farms in Vermont being organic in the realm of dairy. I don't know that much about fruits and vegetables, but in dairy, they're not taking any new organic dairy farmers. Their market is as saturated almost as much as conventional farmers are. They've seen a reduction in their quota system that they have that, sadly, conventional farmers are just starting to get into and they're not taking new farmers. So there's just no room for more folks to turn to be organic. Currently several farms in Vermont just called around to a couple of different agronomists to find this out who are planting non-GMO crops due to the fact that they have a market opportunity to grow non-GMO corn have found that they have had a significant increase in wireworm in Vermont in the last few years part of that due to some of the cover cropping and the climate change issues that are going on. That's what neo-nics go after. And what these farms had to do this last year was to put the neo-nit in the pesticide box as they planted their corn. The rate of neo-nit application as a side dressing versus as a seed treatment is ten times the level. So you're literally putting ten times as much neo-nics into that field in order to deal with that infestation than would be if they were able or wanted to take advantage of just using the neo-nit treated seed. So there's a dramatic increase. If you grow corn and use non-GMO neo-nit yep you're good to sell it as non correct you can you can still sell it all the buyer wants is non-GMO they're not caring about the pesticide application what they want is the non-GMO corn so they don't care whether the corn is treated or not or at least in these sales markets they don't. What they care about is non-GMO and that's you see a lot of food products that say non-GMO they don't say pesticide free non-GMO so that is a niche market that is out there and is growing as I said Vermont research has shown that both neo-nics and glyphosate that share are staying where they are put and not hitting non-carget species right exactly not juice we call it and this is really the most important consideration for Vermont is are these pesticides that are being used in Vermont having negative impacts on either the humans in Vermont or the environment in Vermont not what's happening nationwide or someplace else what we care about is what is happening here and how your actions are going to affect the farmers in Vermont and the health of the humans that live in Vermont when we look at neo-nics and bees what we learned was that it's like number four or five on the negative impacts that bees are having for oomites and trachea mites are like number one yeah we've got we've got a lack of genetic diversity we've got climate change we've got a lack of early forage for bees those are all big problems then pesticides come in it's usually number four or five that's mentioned so it's really pretty far down the list and corn is not a bee pollen source and so even though we are growing neo-nick treated seeds in that can show up in the corn pollen they're not really negatively impacting bees seed treatments use significantly less volumes of pesticides like they talked about before it's almost ten times the volume that would be on a treated seed and so that has a lot of benefits to you know the reason that we started doing seed treatments was because you used to have every single farm had bags of these fungicides and pesticides they put them in their planters the employees would be mixing them up with these red arms because they have colors and then you would be planting them and so every single so you basically had pesticides spread out at every single farm in Vermont so they were A. at the store, wherever you were buying them then they were taken to the farm they were stored there there was potentially unused obsolete or eventually banned products sitting at these farms all over the place the agency runs a program to try to pick up all these products then you went to a seed treatment and all of a sudden you got rid of those problems you got rid of your employees you got exposed to them there was an environmental benefit so a lot of people are like why in the world would you do this and why are they potentially used prophylactically well that's one of the reasons is you keep all these products off of farms you may be using some more or some in areas where you might not actually have a pest pressure that's present right then but you have significantly less than the environmental and human health impacts of pesticides being out there so for some for some of the pests that neonics go after there's very little opportunity to know that an invasion is pending, go ahead well finish your sentence so I was just going to say that for some of them like wireworm and some of those pests that neonics go after it's getting harder and harder to predict in the fall whether or not you're going to have a spring invasion and therefore you would be able to order your seeds ahead of time and in some of those places where they have banned neonic treated seeds like Ontario they have found that their ministries of agriculture have had to allow a lot of either side dressing or the use of these treated seeds in the intervening years because they have had these pest pressures that have come along Margaret at the beginning you said that overall pesticide use is down in Vermont and Kerry handed us this chart a few weeks ago that does not say that picture in fact paints a picture of more use in the last decade so are you talking about acres treated or are you looking at the bar graph from the digger story which just showed in the last five years that there's been a fairly decent decline in overall pesticide usage I think you're looking at individual pesticides versus overall usage over time so that might be the difference you've certainly seen an uptick in glyphosate and then recently you've seen an uptick in atrazine so you have seen those too the other thing I would say is that most of the large companies chemistries like Bayer like Corteva like some of these others are looking more to biological controls they're looking at ways to create either products that help a plant protect itself or to create the plants themselves that don't mind the incursion of a bug that don't one of the big problems is you want to protect corn from these incursions from some of these pests because once there is an incursion then you get a mold in there called mycotoxin that causes abortions in cows it's a very lethal it's a really difficult disease to control you get mycotoxins in your corn and then you have to treat your whole corn pile for it it's like a fungus that gets in there and it gets in there because it gets into that little cut that the bug made in the corn plant so they're looking at a variety of ways of trying to create corn plants that can stand being bitten on by a bug and then not creating that mycotoxin in reaction to that and also being able to grow under more and more weed pressures as well to be able to withstand that weed pressure and still survive and thrive so they are looking at a lot of different ways it's not that they're not sensitive to what consumers are wanting which is less and less pesticide use and more biological RIPM controls the issue is it takes a long time to create these products 5-10 years before they can get to the market place so it's slow but it's definitely coming and those of us who grow crops have definitely seen that change in the kind of corn plants that are being grown in Vermont then there were 10 years ago talked about water retention how important that is and then I just want to read you just a little section from Governor Cuomo the Governor Cuomo's veto message on the chlorpyrifosfan in New York which was passed by the legislature and in his message he basically rejected the bill because it bypasses the rigorous process available to challenge an approved product and substitutes the legislature's judgment for the expertise of chemist health experts and other subject matter experts in the field basically what he's saying is that there's a regulatory process in place and that's what we should follow when we think that we have chemicals of concern in Vermont you know Carrie took the opportunity to not re-register chlorpyrifos in Vermont that's exactly the way that it should have happened it shouldn't be a political process where social media is getting people all hyped up about a variety of things and then the legislature steps in and does things potentially without regard to actual science we have the science on the ground in Vermont these products are not causing problems where they don't belong and therefore we should not be having the legislature try to ban or restrict their use climate change is real in Vermont farmers are facing it in a dramatic way and these are just tools that we can use and they're becoming technically in some ways because we are having you know army worms and black fungus and wire worms are all things that are increasing over time in Vermont not decreasing and these are the chemicals and these are the opportunities that we have to protect our crops from their negative effects Are there questions for Margaret? I just have a I had a comment but I'll hold that but I do have a question because one of the sentences and I wish you had written it down you said about protecting the health of Vermonters and protecting farmers and farming abilities and health of Vermonters and farmers are people in Vermont and they themselves need to be protected against the harm of potential harm of pesticides and I do appreciate the difference I mean I remember when I was a kid going to farms and just seeing the seeds being just like sprayed and so it's changed and it's clearly a lot safer for farmers themselves but I'm wondering if you know of any studies about the health of farmers as over the long term with the use of pesticides specifically I mean I know that there was one referenced earlier and earlier testimony but as someone who represents farmers I would assume that this is a concern of yours of their families their workers their health and whether or not us enabling these to be used maybe they see a potential economic benefit but they may not see their own personal health benefit so I think what you would find is that most of these products are restricted use and so they're not applied by farmers they're all applied by commercial applicators and very few farmers are commercial applicators and do it so farmers are not being exposed to these pesticides on their own farms anymore and if you are going to start requiring that A you can't use them prophylactically so you can't use a seed treatment and you have to use a side dressing then those products are going to show up on that farm be mixed on that farm and even if the farmer isn't doing the mixing it's a commercial applicator those products are still traveling over Vermont roads where you could have an accident then they're showing up at a farm they're getting mixed in a box which is out in the open potentially you know with some dust off or whatever right in that area so I think that seed treatments are significantly more healthy for not only Vermont farmers but their employees than the others. Plyphosate isn't used as a seed treatment but that is also generally applied by a commercial applicator not applied by a farmer it doesn't have to be applied by a commercial applicator but the farmers are still on the farmers land and the farmers still farming that crop that so Plyphosate applied to it so they're still exposed to it. Plyphosate has a very short half-life compared to almost all of its chemical or chemistry counterparts some of its competitive options have half-lifes in the multiple days and weeks and it has in the hours to days in sunlight predominantly and you're only supposed to apply Plyphosate on a sunny day it does break down in the sun fairly quickly and it doesn't generally move to water and so those are the big benefits of Plyphosate and it does make it significantly safer than the other products a farmer might use which then persists in the environment much longer so Plyphosate is significantly safer for the farmer than its counterparts are. With the new type computerized carriers do farmers know how much they how many pounds of this they need per acre in different spots or is it just so generally what happens is you'll mix a tanker for the farm and then you plug in all of the testing that you've done into the computer on the sprayer and as the sprayer goes one boom goes or a piece of a boom and another boom goes and it all goes and there's a big map in front of you that shows where you need to spray and where it's not going to be spraying and so the tractor kind of follows that pattern and then you know at the end of the day it's basically you know you're done or it's going to go and get used on another farm but it's so they definitely know how much is used and that they're going to be paying their applicator per ounce of product generally it's you know it used to be pounds of product now we're down to ounces per acre of product and sometimes even less than that I mean we've had a dramatic reduction in the volume that goes on and what they've done is they've made it better what they call a surfactant so you've got the chemistry itself and that goes into something else it's either an oily product or something else that then makes the chemical itself spread out more and then stick to the leaves itself and not leave its target species and drop to the ground or whatever and so it's really over the years it's been a big change in the surfactant which has really allowed these chemistries to be applied at a smaller and smaller rate per acre but yes you pay per ounce or pound of product that machine that they use is if you guys had a little TV I'd love to bring you the John Deere has a great little video about it all it's really cool super cool to watch I know well I did I showed the energy and technology committee on my iPad the one I was up there but yeah the reason they're using professional applicators is because of the cost of that machine that actually applies to the product and it probably must be safer for everybody every time you can use less it's better it saves you money and it protects the environment no farmer wants to be out there spraying pounds of product that they don't need I mean farmers are under the gun to save money every single day and there's just no way they're out there throwing their money away well yeah you got it yeah I don't have a question for Margaret if we haven't heard from power companies there are people with rates of ways either right I mean I assume that the same situation exists that there's something the pipeline oil pipeline people we haven't heard from them but we'll I would suggest that they would use whatever we permit them to use so if we take glyphosate out of the rotation they'll come in with another product there are a lot more products that for them to choose from their main they use a lot less glyphosate their primary uses of triclopyr garlon 4 so they can do basal bark treatment glyphosate doesn't work well for what they want to do they need a product that permeates tree bark they do basal bark application so they'll cut and then they'll cut and then stunk treat and they need something and in oil that penetrates the end of that cut stump so glyphosate is not higher in their list triclopyr really is they use phosamine and ammonium a lot as well that's what they use elsewhere so whenever they come to a road crossing they'll treat that treat and what will happen is when winter comes the leaves will fall off the tree and they won't come back so you won't see the brown out that you see from a round up application so the utilities they do use glyphosate but primarily it's a slew of other products that they use well I want to thank everybody we had a couple more names on our list but Covey Bordeaux and they grabbed laws and we'll have to get back to them but we have a medium we're supposed to be at most some of us but it's been a very interesting morning and the subject is really important all of us so thanks a lot for participating and and for your time