 Um, the committee is all here. We can introduce ourselves. We'll start with Brian. Yep. Senator Brian Collin more representing the Rutland District. Senator Rue Hardy from the Addison District. Uh, Bobby Starr from Orleans, Essex County. Chris Pearson in Chittenden County. Anthony Flea to Weston County. So, uh, thanks for calling in. And, uh, could you, uh, give us a little bit about yourself and we'll start right in with the testimony. Yes, Mr. Chairman and members, Judy Belair. I'm representing the Vermont Chapter of the Sierra Club. And, uh, I'm going to volunteer with the chapter, but have a background in, um, with the Minnesota Chapter of the Sierra Club. That's a lobbyist for 13 years. Um, and so I would like to say that as the Sierra Club, the Vermont Chapter strongly supports this legislation. And I hope we can agree that less pesticide use should be our goal. As we all know, pesticides are poison. They can contaminate the environment and harm people. They can and do kill beneficial insects along with the small, very small percentage of what we consider to be crop pests. And by killing insects, pesticides have impacts of the food chain. Also, many of them are toxic to more than just insects, birds, amphibians, mammals, and humans can also be at risk. So, as we agree that less pesticide use should be our goal, are we doing anything about it in Vermont? When the pesticide advisory council was established decades ago, a main focus was to assess the use of pesticides and recommend reduction strategies. Unfortunately, that focus was lost, and that's why we need this legislation. This legislation, I believe, will help us reduce pesticide use in Vermont. S272 includes the definition of integrated pest management. If this policy were implemented, it will lead to the reduced use of pesticides and reduced resistance in insect pests because it establishes the policies that pesticides are only used as a last resort. Currently, pesticides such as neonicotinoids are applied to plants and crops whether or not a pest problem exists. The Pollinator Protection Committee, which was established by this legislature, as you know, recommended in its report that, quote, pesticides used in Vermont should be based upon need, not used prophylactically, unquote. Eric Boir, a member of the committee, and then president of the Vermont Treat Group Growers Association, said, quote, integrated pest management should be the foundation of any grower program regardless of crops. Demonstrating a need for a pesticide application does not have to be some great endeavor or burden for a grower. They should be able to articulate that need and have a record of their specific pest pressures for that growing year. The Pollinator Protection Committee voted 8 to 1 to pass the recommendation of no prophylactic use. And I believe the agency voted to oppose this recommendation, so it would be interesting to find out the agency of agriculture's opinion on prophylactic use. I would also like to mention one prophylactic use in Vermont that could easily be eliminated, the use of neonicotinoid-coated plug-in seeds. Six years ago in 2014, the EPA's Biological and Economic Analysis Division concluded that, quote, which data indicates that in most cases there is no difference in soybean yield when soybean seeds was treated with neonicotinoids versus not receiving any insect control treatment. Still quoting, in comparison to the next best alternative pest control measures, neonicotinoid seed treatments likely provide zero dollars in benefits to growth, unquote. So the question is why we are still allowing this use in Vermont. It just doesn't make sense. The concept of ITN has been around since the 1950s. It was formulated in the national policy in the United States in February 1972 when Nixon directed federal agencies to take steps to advance the application of ITN in all relevant sectors. But how much ITN is actually being practiced in Vermont? The University of Vermont extension does have an ITN program, but it appears to deal mostly with specialty crops like apples and grapes. We're not aware that the agency of agriculture has focused on implementing ITN in our state. However, Kerry Jager and a PowerPoint presentation on Munich last year did lay out a pest scouting method to determine whether grubs or wireworms were present at levels requiring the use of treated corn seeds. So that was a good thing. I also wanted to point out that about five years ago on Kerry who adopted rules requiring farmers to document a need to use corn and slugging seeds treated with neonix. They laid out the scouting protocols and also required the feed dealers advertise that untreated seeds were available for purchase. Now, according to 2018 seed sales data, two-thirds of the corn and slugging seeds sold in Ontario were untreated seeds simply by requiring IPM. In short, IPM works if it's implemented and if we want to prevent a disaster in the making, we should implement it without delay. We are seeing more and more headlines about precipitous drops in insect populations. Most recently, a study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that NAIC lies declined in the Northern Mississippi River Basin by 52% from 2012 to 2019. In the Western Lake Irrigation, from 2015 to 2019, the reduction was a shocking 84%. Another study found that toxicity to insects in agricultural areas has increased 48 times not 48%, 48 times in the past 20 years because of the use of highly toxic neonics. Entomologists in Germany documented a 75% loss of insects in the natural area over the past 20 years. The data continues to mount in study after study. We certainly can't rely on the pesticide companies to protect us from harmful effects of pesticides, nor can we rely on the environmental protection agency. Historically, the risk assessment of pesticides, which the EPA requires, does not fully evaluate sensitive species. It doesn't look at ecosystem or habitat impact. It doesn't look at secondary or non-target impacts on sub-lethal or low pesticide doses or pesticides registered under conditional registration of the poll for a pesticide to get registered before all studies are done. So now the chickens are coming home to roost and it's up to us to act because Vermont is not immune from the impacts of pesticide use. If you're wondering if we're really losing insects, when was the last time you remember having the clean insects off your windshield? If we need to fully monitor pesticide use in Vermont, that targets for pesticide use reduction and implement IPM, help farmers get off the pesticide treadmill and hold the agency accountable for pesticide use reduction. So I urge your support for this legislation and I'd be happy to take any questions. Yeah, thank you. Before we get too far into it, could you send us a copy of your testimony so we can refer back to some of the material? Yes, I will. Yeah. And Linda can take care of that for you. Thank you. Yeah, are there questions? Yeah, Senator Pearson? Thanks for being available this morning. You know, you make a sort of straightforward argument that we should be using less, but one of the discussions we've been having this year is around glyphosate. And very clearly its use has been increasing in Vermont and there was a bill in front of us to ban its use. And as we explored the wisdom of that, you know, I would say for myself, it has some appeal to slow down pesticide that is whose use is on the increase. But banning it would likely we've been informed mean that people switched to a much more toxic pesticide and herbicide. And so, you know, to me, I feel a bit stuck and maybe in this case something that a lot of people are worrying about. Glyphosate is the quote-unquote better option and I do feel sort of stuck by this dynamic, but I'm curious to me that would be a scenario where maybe we do tolerate that herbicide because the alternative is sort of worse. Do you have a thought on that sort of dynamic? Well, most of my work has been done with units. So I know, you know, the research I've done, them, their numbers studies show they definitely work. So, but I fall back on the integrated test management idea and just looking at other options first. And I, you know, if we did that, I don't know what the other options are to be replaced using glyphosate, but there must be something. Well, atrazine is one of them. I mean, the, yeah. No, I'm talking about alternative to the use of any herbicide. Yeah. The alternative to herbicide use. You know, there must be an integrated test management strategy for doing that. I don't know what it is, but I think in whenever we use a pesticide we should look for alternatives first. Yes, this is Senator Starr. Are you, do you live in Vermont or do you have some connection to us? Yes, I do live in Vermont. Right now I'm in Walden. Okay. So you know that we've really been pushing our landowners and crop growers to do using cover crops to prevent runoff from the fields. And from our testimony that we've taken, there is an alternative to spraying this pesticide on those crops in the spring too so they can get other crops in. But it's crimping and rolling, I think they call it, of the plants that are on the fields, but it, it hasn't been developed well enough so it works yet. And every, from what testimony we've received, as Senator Pearson stated, the alternative in pesticides is worse than what we're using. And you know, I don't, I don't know if we've gotten here yet to have a good alternative and not use any pesticides. I mean, there isn't, there isn't anyone on the committee that, that I know of, unless they're holding back on me, that supports using more pesticides. We're, we're trying to, to reduce them. And, and we're working to, to get there, but we, and we have had some successes. As far as the bill goes, we also have had testimony in regards to the make up of the, of the members and we, in the bill it says that they'd like to move it from agriculture to the Department of Health. Well, in recent years, I think we had testimony to the effect that the Health Department wanted to get away from, from this crew. And I can verify that through our, looking back through our testimony. But it seems to me as if we've heard that in some of the testimony that's been presented. And we also had testimony that, well, they should, it should be moved and the make up should be changed because they never meet. And I think we found that to be false as well. But anyways, just a few comments in regards to what we're facing to try to balance all this. Senator Polina has a question. Let's hope when you could talk a little bit about neonic treated seeds and what happened up in Canada. I presume there was a lot of resistance. I shouldn't presume, but I guess I'm asking whether I would expect to do a lot of resistance to the restricting the use of the treated seeds and how that's gone over, how people are doing now dealing with it. And I also wonder whether there's been efforts in other places around the world to, I'll use the word ban. I don't stress that that's the right word, but restrict the use of neonic treated seeds. Well, in Canada, they, they established rules five years ago for planting treated seeds and the rules required that farmers dig holes in their fields and put potatoes or something in it would attract us to verify that there were pests. I know the grain farmers weren't happy with the rules. They, I think they went to court about it and lost. But they were planning to effect. And I've been checking the seeds, they're required to report their seed sales, whether they're used or untreated seeds. And as I mentioned in my testimony, now five years later, two thirds of the seeds are untreated. I've been trying to get more information from Canada about the availability of treated seeds, but there apparently isn't a problem. And so I haven't, other than that, all I know is what I can find online. I have tried talking to folks in Canada, but I'm not getting a lot of feedback. I should also mention that Quebec has now put regulations in place, again, also requiring a demonstrated need for using neonic seeds and requiring a prescription from an agronomist before you can buy neonic seeds in Quebec. So, and as far as Europe, the 28 countries in the European Union have banned the sale of, and the outdoor use, banned all outdoor uses of neonic seeds, and that includes the seeds. That includes what? Or the seeds, is that the last thing? That includes the seeds as well, yes. So 28, the 28 countries of the European community? Yes. And they're still growing food? Just start, I know. Just one check. Other questions? Well, I guess, Carrie, do you have any questions? I guess that's it on questions, and if you could send your testimony into Linda Lehmann, we'd appreciate that, so we'd have it dig into as we alter the bill or move forward or whatever we're going to do. So thank you very much. I'd be happy to get that. Yeah, and thank you very much for your time and your testimony. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you, and I'll continue to listen in. Oh, okay, good. So, that's Nate, and you know, you heard of Sandra Duce ourselves, so we moved right along. Good morning, thanks for letting me come talk to you on this beautiful, snowy day. Here's a copy of my testimony for each of you. My name is Matt Shamblah, I live in Berlin, Vermont. And I'm a retired pesticide chemist for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, where I work for 30 years, ever since 1986, when the agency first started doing pesticide monitoring as the environment, I was hired to develop the analytical part of that question for the agency of ag 30-something years ago. And you've been in before? Yes, I've been in before talking about pesticides and tile drinks and a couple of times over the last few years. So again, I've been involved in pesticide issues in Vermont for ages. Like I said, I helped set up the analytical end of the environmental monitoring program for pesticides for the agency of ag. I was involved in starting up the surface water monitoring program for the agency of ag in 2000, when they all did that. Yeah, well it was because of the deformed frog problem way back then. So D.E.C., Milbury College, and us at the ag department got a grant to look into the deformed frog issue and look at pesticides and whether they were contributing to it. I don't remember this one, what is this? 2000, about? No, it was just before. 1999, something like that. Was that the campaign that had bounty on them for kids collecting them? Yeah, so the result of that was we didn't find any evidence that pesticides were related to the deformed frog issue, but we did discover that atrazine in particular was present everywhere all the time. So we could find atrazine in Lake Champlain samples in the spring. So before planting, before spraying, so it was left over from the previous year, we were finding atrazine in Lake Champlain from top to bottom, so 300 feet down we could detect it, so it is there all the time. And that expanded on to things like golf course monitoring, surface water runoff railroad monitoring, and neonicotinoid monitoring. It's always nice to hear the update from the agency yesterday on Neonix and what they've been doing lately. I'm interested, I'll be happy to talk about that a little bit at the end if you want me to discuss what you did yesterday. The atrazine applications are a little bit alarming because for years we were tapering down, but now the reports are coming in that's headed back up. Definitely a concern I'll be talking about that a little bit more later on too because what I'm here to talk about today is the need for the agency of agriculture to update their pesticide regulations and to reinvigorate the pesticide advisory council and V-PAC. Two issues that I've been paying attention to for a long time, whenever I had the opportunity I went to V-PAC meetings because part of my job was to find out what problems were out there before they became problems. So I paid attention to pesticide use data for 30-something years and went to V-PAC meetings to find out what their concerns were before it became thrown at me so to speak as a chemist. Were you the rat from the agency on that board? No, I just went as an employee just to observe and be there to answer pesticide questions. And that's usually like back early that was Phil Benedict and Jim Leland? Exactly. So you were working with them all through the years? Oh yeah, yep. Phil hired me way back when. So yes way back when it was the Vermont Department of Agriculture before it came to food and markets or the agency or anything else it was just the plain old Vermont Department of Agriculture in those days. Okay so on the first page of my testimony in blue is the preamble to the Vermont regulation for the control of pesticides from the Ag Department agency's webpage. So I won't read the whole thing but this is the intro to the regulations that agency uses to regulate pesticides and it specifies that the department will use integrated pest management in a way as to make sure that pesticides used in an environmentally responsible way. So it's right there in the preamble that they want to use integrated pest management. Integrated pest management as you probably know focuses on pest prevention and only using pesticides as needed. Unfortunately if you actually read the regulations, integrated pest management is not defined anywhere in the regulations and not even mentioned anywhere in regulations. So how can you regulate pesticide use if you're not even defining what it is or integrating into the rules? So again these regulations were written in 1991. It's way past time for the agency to bring these into the 21st century and require integrated pest management as their preamble implies that you only use pesticides when they're needed and that has been subsumed by their other issues. Part of that is according to statute the Vermont Pesticide Advisory Council's duties. So their duties are listed in green. I won't read any of that but essentially the function of BPAC is to advise state government on using pesticides safely and recommending policies to reduce the use of pesticides and BPAC is currently not doing that because they are again subsumed by the day-to-day issues of regulating permits that they are responsible for of course and regulators and mosquito control and so on which are important issues but they aren't policy and BPAC was set up to advise state government the legislature the governor and everybody on policy issues for pesticide use in the state. It's been around since 1970 but it's gradually been it's duties have been like I said taken up by these permanent issues are required to do by statute but it takes up more time than it should because they should be working on policy issues not the details of what's permanent for what which suite of both section of the railroad track whatever. BPAC current membership is made up primarily of professionals D.E.C., Fish and Wildlife, Orson Parks, Ag, V-Trans are all agencies that have representatives and they all use or regulate pesticides in one way or another. I think BPAC should be reinvigorated and expanded to include more individuals with expertise in minimizing pesticide use and the environmental consequences of pesticide use so I suggest you expand that to include a representative of NOFA and a representative of the Rubenstein School at UVM and also to stop and reassess the members of whether the current individuals are the appropriate ones for looking at policy rather than technical issues and that's up to the individual actual agencies to decide of course. The Rubenstein School is that the College of Ag and Life Sciences? No, it's environmental. That's not currently in the bill right now. So BPAC needs to concentrate on the big picture questions of what it's supposed to do according to statute and not get buried in the details of individual permits so that should be part of the rewrite of the pesticide regulations in my opinion. The third issue I want to address is the pesticide use data that the Agriculture Agency collects which you've been hearing a little bit about in the news over the last few weeks I think the BT Digger article and so on have talked about the new pesticide use data that the AG agency posted online not too long ago and so both agency of AG and BPAC need accurate pesticide use data to be able to make policy decisions and currently that has not been available so. Well yeah it dragged for a while right? Quite a while. But that report you you sat in on our meeting yesterday yes that I thought that report that was quite thin yesterday's report from minor and. Yes yes I have a few questions I'd love to ask Eric or Kerry about that but yes it was great to hear but it wasn't really talking about pesticide use issues which is what I was talking about what they've been finding as far as environmental monitoring but if I won't keep going. Okay so the data that has been available is has been questionable for quite a long time and slow to be published and that's you know it's intricate detailed data they're trying to collect and complicated I understand it's you know very time consuming especially if you're doing paper copies of everything but nobody can make good policy decisions don't have good data so that figure on the middle of page three the line in orange is the atrazine use data on corn that I accessed from the agency of ag web page in 2018 when I was looking at pesticide use so accessing the data on their web page in 2018 it looked like atrazine use on corn was decreasing by about four thousand pounds per year so that's great yeah I didn't pay much attention to it again until this new data came out where new and improved data shows that it's actually increasing by upwards of 2,000 pounds per year statewide for the last 10 years so again that's an issue that somebody should be paying attention to but they either be packer agency of ag but you can't if you don't have that data so nobody can perform their role on policy issues without good data so I think it's imperative that agency bags theater held the fire a little bit to make sure that they get this data out and that it's accurate within 12 months at the end of the year when did you leave the agency uh 2016 so if you look on your chart 2016 we were at the low point are almost to the low point probably in 15 well if you look at the orange line but the orange line is inaccurate that's the wrong data that's the data they had on their web two years ago but it's wrong the blue line is what they're publishing now and they hopefully are it's better data than what was published two years ago what uh but we'll we'll check that out so here is a chart I don't have this in your information but this is a chart again the orange is the old data that I had from for atrazine use uh from 1985 when I started looking at this data all the way up until 2018 most current data so the orange line you can see there was a general trend down and then you know out the year 2000 atrazine you peaked and that's when EPA regulated atrazine more because it was showing up in the environment a lot and Roundup ready corn came on the market which mean meant that they were using more glyphosate to control so that's where this drop off is by 2007 atrazine use had dropped a lot and because glyphosate was taking over and atrazine was being discouraged um the blue line again is the most current data that act partner is showing which shows that it's going to back up again atrazine use so even though the intent of uh Roundup ready corn was to discourage the use of the traditional corn herbicides like atrazine and replace it with glyphosate it happened for a little while but now they both are increasing so here's a chart the line across the top is acres of corn in Vermont the blue is atrazine use and the orange brown whatever it is is glyphosate use so again in around 2007 there was virtually no glyphosate used on corn because Roundup ready corn had not become common for field corn has been increasing steadily ever since until now a large percentage of that herbicide on corn is glyphosate but atrazine is not decreased so um you know i i continue to express this feeling of being trapped i really do feel trapped and and i'm not sure what we're about but um so it's this room the uh the first linear chart that has a big dip because like when like corresponding to glyphosate coming toward a mature in the work then i'm going to guess that that stopped working as effectively and people said you know what i like better with that i mean is there but so so try it and so something changed except like say it's still well that's what that's my question is so but it seems as if they decided to double up exactly and that's what i mean your research you know do we have a better explanation uh well the in the d t digger article it was mentioned that atrazine is cheap and so but whether but it's not replacing glyphosate it's on top of glyphosate so again what i want to uh emphasize is that these sorts of issues v-pack should be doing that's their job to look at pesticide use or should be their job look at pesticide use look at trends and figure out how to minimize the use and risk of pesticides and right now nobody's doing that yeah the agency bag isn't doing that and the bag isn't doing that well somebody's doing it because we have carry in twice a week here and you know to talk about pesticide use and what's good what's bad uh what we could do to reduce the consumption the use of that and and i mean but it isn't happening on the ground as far as i can tell you know uh there is nobody saying to farmers uh how can you use less pesticides it's we don't think you should use this one atrazine for instance but it's not how do we do without as much herbicides is it possible and how do we do that because you remember the atrazine and glyphosate do they do the same thing the glyphosate is a universal herbicide it kills everything atrazine is more selective okay um so um well i have a question and then just a comment i mean i mean i i feel similar to senator pierce but what in addition to that sort of feeling trapped i i'm really frustrated that what we do in our six months here with pesticides seems sort of scattershot it seems like okay this is the one that has made the news so we're going to focus on that and so we have a bill on glyphosate and then you know we're continuing to hear about neonics and so we have another bill on neonics and then you know we have one on chlorpyrifos because there's that's been in the news and then i see the data and i you know i saw the data when carry presented us to originally and not my question was what hey what about atrazine what the heck is that and is that bad should we be focusing on that and then yesterday i don't know if you were in the room you were in the room and i saw the data and i was like well should be looking at varroa sides we're using those a lot and and so it seems really scattershot that we as legislators are not experts so what we're not getting is a really comprehensive look at use of pesticides and herbicides so we can track it and and really focus on the ones that we should be focusing on and trying to prevent the as you say the increase in pesticide pesticide use um so you know i don't even know if we're looking at the right ones and and so then my question is is that who chairs this committee and can we get the b-pack and can we get them in here to testify i thought we had carrying already on our do you chair do you chair it we've solicited a chair the last chair from the department of health retired um because there's a lot of issue here but as the health she was asked the health department being um designated by the health department commissioner they asked to step down his chair the so there's no chair that's the so the b-pack is the b-pack is supposed to be advising us and you carry is not on b-pack right you're not okay so okay but you're not the chair i mean it seems to me that that this isn't an entity that's supposed to be advising the policy makers on what kind of policy and the regulators on what kind of regulations and so i i i don't know why we haven't had somebody besides carry in from that not that i don't appreciate members were in the room when you when this came up okay the andy shyly was sitting in the corner well we haven't had somebody in that chair saying i'm from v-pack and this is what we're doing so part of what i am suggesting in my testimony is that uh in addition to reinvigorating v-pack that staff member be hired to be a staff person for v-pack so working for the chair rather than working i mean an employee of the agency bag of course but under the direction under the direction of yeah they've only added about 40 people over there in the last three years like that one more one so you haven't gotten through your testimony so no i have and i don't want to control the whole time because i have to go soon but uh so uh i would offer the suggestion that you up the pesticide rig registration fees a little bit in order to hire a full-time staff member to work at v-pack whose job would be to take the data that agency of ag gets and interpret it and do the research necessary that the that v-pack requires to make policy decisions make presentations to you and the house ag committee and anybody else who needs it or wants it at least once a biennium an official report and presentation which v-pack used to write a report to the legislature which uh was not paid attention to so uh require actually a presentation to you all on how that what they're doing to minimize the risk and use of pesticides one of the ideas that surface i'm intrigued by curious on your quick take is you know there there's a permit process you know you have to apply to have permission to use this pesticide you have to be certified applicator but there's no point in that chain where anyone has to even say that it's required that and it's the term that is pointed to me is prophylactic right and that does seem troubling to me it's you know if we have to accept these chemicals as part of the business surely we would agree that it just shouldn't be automatic it would should be a reaction needing the technology what if you know maybe we could fall short of getting a staffer but what if we just simply require people to assert that this wasn't necessary is that even worth entertaining or is that just going to be a box against check it's i think it's a excellent idea it would require i think they'll be right at the pesticide regulations that i suggest if needed to be done uh but you would you need to figure out a way to make sure it's not just a box that gets checked to do this for example that's what they need the treated seeds that's how it's dealt with in i mean it's Ontario or Ontario they have to show that there's evidence that they need to use them or if they're going to use them they can't prove they're using and that's what the the neonic bill that's on the wall would do the same thing i would say that you can't use it unless you show a need that you let's you show that you need it and that should be inherent in all of our regs for pesticides use as far as i'm concerned you you shouldn't be using them unless there's a problem when they aren't recognized as places or economic places they certainly are how many people use poison at any time they want well i mean how this all got started and used really bad was because there weren't any bingos and we don't hear the horror stories of our food crops and what happened back in in the 30s and in the 40s and that's why DDT came along was to because we couldn't even beat ourselves because we didn't have anything to protect our soils and it got carried away well that's a longer conversation and we were feeding ourselves pretty well with we were not treating it eating feeding ourselves that we were doing it without causing as many cancers before we started using a lot of chemicals so well you didn't have evidence that chemicals are what kept us from you didn't get back into the dust bowl days and you see those people out from the middle west and i wasn't there but i i'm pretty sure that we were feeding that ish so prior to that neo nick treated seeds my understanding is i wasn't paying a lot of i'm not a farmer but my understanding was that they would broadcast spray the field with an insecticide if they had a problem so it wasn't automatic every spring field corn was sprayed with insecticides oh i mean i grew up on a farm and uh freaking that resin truck came every that's an herbicide i'm talking about insecticides which is what the neo nicks are for you know work well and wireworm and so on so uh but neo nicks we you sat there and heard that report yesterday not a vet found in the water streams of either runoff waters or the tile drainage water can i you don't respond to that uh so if you look at the data they find the neo nicks all the time in time they reported yesterday have not found neo nicks at levels above acute toxicity levels but they are finding them above that chronic toxicity levels so my question for you all is how what proof do you need that there's a chronic problem so the chronic numbers are based on a 21 day average right we're not finding those averages for 21 days if you look at your neo nick data that we generated in 2015 for jewel brook which is a very highly ag impacted stream uh we looked for neo nicks over a one month period eight times and detected one of the neo nicks eight times seven of those above the chronic level so the the chronic level for clothe anodin is 0.05 parts per billion and the average of those eight samples over a 30 day period was 0.15 so three times the chronic level so uh i was just at jury duty the other day so uh they keep talking about burden of proof and probable uh whatever they call it so in my view there's clear evidence that there is a possibility or probability of chronic problems in highly impacted streams but you can't prove it unless you try hard to find it um yeah um trapped i think have you got more testimony uh you can read what up the details and we still have uh one more we have one more person so i just want to ask one quick question on the bill are you suggested that that one that rep from nova and rubenstein or gond were there other specific suggestions you have on the language in the bill or uh i don't uh think that it's highly important that it gets moved over to the health department okay you don't no i think it's more important that accountability be built in to both the agency of that yeah carried back to get it moved like that well thanks for your time yesterday as well as today of course and i think we have mike are you on the phone yes sir yeah um we've got a few minutes here to work you into our discussion and um so has did you hear the introductions of our members i did okay so why don't we get the rolling and um floors yours thank you sir um i do have some uh i'm calling in from home um i'll introduce myself first yeah michael ball calling in from royalton vermont i'll give you my my job description qualifications in just a second but i did have thoughts on senator hardy's question on why there's such a scatter shot array of bills and legislation year after year and then there was also a question about roller crimping and effective alternatives and so forth um i guess i would ask you uh chairman star would you rather hear my thoughts right now or go straight into testimony well we've got about eight minutes before the bell rings uh for us to go onto the floor so which maybe give us your thoughts first who are you and where are you from a royalton yeah tell us a little bit about yourself michael we'll do thank you um okay so i'll just say good morning thank you for the opportunity to testify my name is michael ball i'm self-employed i'm the founder owner of an invasive species company called dot weed and i've been doing the work on at this point thousands of acres throughout new england and this is my tenth i'm entering my tenth growing season again as a sole proprietorship i managed terrestrial plants with non-chemical methods over extended timeframes i also prune apple trees and i garden i do not claim to farms i know plenty of farmers um but i garden and i prune apple trees which i've already begun for the season um i believe those are my qualifications to speak today and i've also got written here i have attended numerous d-pack meetings since perhaps the 2013 timeframe solely for the purpose of educating myself at my own expense i have listened to those meetings and i have occasionally submitted comments so that's who i am and where i'm coming from mike mike just so i understand senator pierce and what is an invasive species company what is it what is now he said terrestrial not aquatic terrestrial invasive species i do buying shrubs trees and basis plants and you're trying to mitigate them i am doing everything from suppression to eradication yeah people ask me what i do and i tell them i transition landscapes so they i i invite them to tell me what their vision is where they want to be and then i make no promises to do anything within 30 days i tell them i will get you there this is the program that will accomplish what you want thank you um yeah thank you for the question um well let me since you had the question on the on the roller crimping you can look up rodaleinstitute.org rodale is spelled r-o-d-a-l-e rodaleinstitute.org roller crimping and you can read about how important timing is and some of the considerations with how to how to roller crimp a field that you're trying to know till i did have an organic farm and tell me once atrazine is for people who don't know how to farm i thought that was i thought that was a pretty clear statement um i'll continue now here with my testimony um i want to acknowledge that the membership of the v-pack does operate professionally and can be proud of worthy accomplishments i have said in the past however that the overall performance of the of the v-pack is still a mission fail this leads to my overriding point today the failure of the v-pack does not rest on the shoulders of the council alone but rather is a reflection of the national fascination with better living through chemistry when v-pack was created the stated goals were a fit for that moment in time no member of the public then could have known that herbicides would become such a profit maker with more and more uses identified and recklessly promoted the desire for ever more profit has driven us to this day in age where our usage is exponentially more than what's even conceivable in earlier times the global warming scenario offers a parallel example immediate profit ahead of common sense and scientific integrity so we sit here today facing not only a massive increase in annual usage but also an unknown toxic legacy resulting from decades of untracked pesticide usage we may have tracked select quantities over select time spans but we have not tracked or explored cumulative effects that may contribute to declining soil health so the urgency today is real very real much more so than in previous decades i'm going to skip a point about public participation i know we're pressed for time yeah i got about three minutes on mine all right thank you uh i would love to i did share these notes with linda leeman there so you have them yes we do have your testimony okay i'm going to move on my my the point that i'm skipping is public participation public engagement is absolutely broken in the world of attending meetings and getting getting public engagement it's a broken piece of the equation i'm going to carry on now v pack talking about the council not getting the information it needs to empower its decision making consider 2016 the summer of 16 brought essentially no range of the southern reaches of the state and central max this severe drought condition equates to major stress on all types of vegetation as well as on soil microbes there were also at the time three species of exotic past beetles in the immediate vicinity so you know about hemorrhagic woolly asian longhorns and emerald ashwood why would any in 2016 why would any regulatory or advisory body permit the use of pesticides or toxins under such drought conditions in a climate so today with more disturbance events and huge swings in water table and ground conditions why would we seek to introduce yet more stress into that landscape that never comes into the conversation we even have power companies doing test runs on new pesticides in southern vermont how does this happen where are the universities and the scholars and the stewards we know that beetles are seeking out weakened trees and if the drought were not bad enough why is there no discussion of cumulative effects long-term health i was at that meeting and it felt to me a member of the public to recommend to the power company that they might wish to coordinate with their county forester if nothing else it's experimenting with herbicides in a stressed situation anyone that does maple sugaring knows annual sugar production traces back through the years and depends on many contributing factors so we cannot just operate in a bubble i want to say as well that pesticide usage is now an environmental constant like acid rain once was and like migrating passenger pigeons once were the annual application of tons of pesticides is an environmental stressor that will kill off some species while forcing others to evolve as survivors and those survivors will require yet stronger chemistry to suppress them and rather than functional soil and healthy plant communities we will pursue ever more powerful and profitable synthetic toxins yeah we the bell is ringing and we've got to go up to the senate floor so we're going to have to excuse ourselves and we have your testimony and sorry we didn't have more time for you but we'll read through your testimony and you can follow what we're doing on the bill on our web page very good thank you yeah thank you