 to take note of next week and then the week after you'll advance to the next one. These are the zoom controls if you've been on before you're quite familiar with this if you have any questions please put them in the chat box and I will try to answer to the best of my abilities as we go. Next, as always please complete the survey. The link will be sent to you in an email after the webinar is complete. We take these responses to help us next year so please fill it out. Next, I'm pleased to introduce Andrew Thaustensen, our pesticide program specialist for the NDSU Extension Service and as you might have seen Andrew is coming to us today from the University of Arkansas. Take it away. All right thank you Stacy. Thank you. Mary Polling here is the guru of the zoom and and also my wife Gail Thaustensen is here and it's gonna be interesting because we get a little bit further on in the presentation. I'll make some comments about how she played a role in some of the work that we've done on minimizing pesticide exposure so we'll get right after it. First off, whenever we talk about pesticides we you know we can easily get you know sidetracked into a lot of different issues so I wanted to at least talk about the things that we aren't going to talk about and then spend some time talking about what I am going to talk about and then we'll get after. There there are a lot of debate out there about the relative safety or or the non-safety of pesticides and whether or not they cause problems with the environment. And some people have a worldview in terms of convictions that you know we either shouldn't or should be using pesticides so I'm not going to get into that discussion. The other thing is is some some people have big enthusiasm for organic foods which in theory are raised without certain pesticides but you know I'm not going to go there today and so we're going to try and focus in on some of these sorts of issues. We are going to discuss the necessity for using pesticides properly. Bottom line, if we use pesticides properly it will help to reduce or minimize any kind of adverse impacts on the environment and certainly on reducing human exposure to pesticides and the absolute necessity for following label instructions. And I have a picture of my family when I was a little bit younger and my hair had more color and I was perhaps a little bit thinner. My son has since 24 years old on the right and my daughter is now 21 and they're all grown up. And my reason for for sharing that with you is that I've been involved in pesticides. Looks like we I've been involved in pesticides for 22 years in my position at NDSU and my children have been raised in an environment where pesticides is always something that I was talked about or discussed and sometimes used in in our home and in our garden. The upshot of it is is that by the time they became high school and into early college both of them participate in the applications of pesticides. As part of their summer employment my son worked in mosquito control for six summers in a row and my daughter spent two years working with the NDSU wheat science program so they always have worked around pesticides and my reason for bringing this up is is that I just want you to know that as long as we follow the pesticide label instructions as best we can I don't think that the risks are such that people are going to be hurt or adversely impacted and I just want you to know that I definitely would not allow my children to participate in those sorts of activities if I thought that it was going to be an adverse situation. So enough of the preliminaries. Let me see if I can't go to the next slide. Here we go. Andrew I'm going to tell you that we lost your your screen is not sharing. It said your account needed some annotation updates. Okay go down here. Hang on. That's why we have smart people here. Not sure what that did what happened there. So let's try it again. Hang on. How about it now Stacy? Okay you you've just Stacy you've disabled him the ability to participant screen share. So you need to go to host manage participants and go to more and give okay allow okay we get it and make make host that's not me. Go ahead and make him co-host. Can you make him co-host? I can't make him co-host. Okay. Your license must be different than ours so let's try this. Okay so yeah that way we're gonna do it like this so if you see somebody come in then you'll know because you're the only one who can mute him because she won't be able to mute. All right Stacy Kitt. Do we need to go back a slide or two? Are we good? Yep I can see you now. All right so what I want to do now is I want to talk about just a handful of tips for using pesticides appropriately and I just want you to know that my focus with the University is to train professional applicators as well as farmers and ranchers on how to use pesticides appropriately. I'm moonlighting now as I talk about things from a homeowner's perspective but there are a great deal of tips that I've learned over the years and plus I use these things around our homes so a lot of these things I have firsthand experience with. So why don't we use pesticides in the first place? It's it seems rather obvious we are trying to control or kill some sort of pests whether it's an insect and we'll use an insecticide or we're trying to control or kill weeds and we're using a herbicide or whether we're trying to control a fungal plant disease. Pesticides are used to control or actually kill pests. The bad part of that is is that pesticides can also kill things that we don't necessarily want to kill or they could have adverse consequences on those things and one of them are just things like honeybees. These are beneficial insects we don't necessarily want to go out of our way to harm these creatures and they do provide a really important function in some of our food production and in the ecology of these sorts of things. Just want to talk a little bit about pesticide drift and in not only are we concerned about harming creatures like bees and other beneficial insects but when we make a pesticide application they can also go to a place that we don't want to go. You know we may well be interested in trying to control a weed but we don't necessarily want to take out our shrubberies or our ornamental plants and this is an example of a plant that's been adversely impacted by off-target movement of spray drip. We also want to be concerned about things like deer and maybe you know if you're up in Fargo maybe you really like the bunnies in your backyard. I don't know some people don't have real great enthusiasm but we don't want to necessarily hurt off-target things like deer and other and the family dog the neighbors' dogs or cats those sorts of things and obviously we don't want to harm humans and especially our little kids and we don't necessarily want them to be running across the lawn that we've recently treated with a pesticide especially when they're not wearing any shoes or socks. So pesticides do have a downside risk and we have to understand that and appreciate that so that however you attack the whole pesticide thing when you have made that decision that you are going to use a pesticide to control or kill some sort of pest we have to just follow some basic safety procedures. The first one is is just plain dressing for success. I mean I can't emphasize enough the necessity for not being out there with shorts and flip-flops, a tank top shirt or a bathing suit. I've seen everything. We need to wear clothes that are appropriate for the job that we're trying to accomplish. Now how are we going to know that and the first way that we're going to attack that is we're going to get some instructions and we're going to go to the product label that is found on the product that we purchase and it's going to give us instructions about the sorts of things that we need to wear and the sorts of ways in which we need to protect our body from exposure to pesticides. Now I just want to make a couple of comments about this and that is is that most pesticides only require a long sleeve shirt, a long pants, shoes and socks and sometimes a hat or something to to cover up some of it and then the oftentimes there will be some comments in there about gloves. The gloves aren't necessarily on par with the ones you see here in the screen but it is something that you're going to need to look at the label for for instructions. Now when part and parcel to reading the pesticide label all of the instructions for using that product to minimize risk to the user, to the environment, to the food plants that you're working with, to the shrubberies, all of those sorts of things are going to be found on the product label. Now first and foremost before you even get to the directions for use you're going to find information on what sorts of clothing you need to wear, do you need eye protection, how serious is the glove protection that you need, all of those sorts of things are going to be found on the pesticide label as well as directions for use. The other high point is there's going to be a very serious and frank conversation with you about those sorts of precautions you need to take in order to have adverse effects minimize. So they'll say hey if you swallow this it's not going to be good for you. You need to be wearing some sorts of eye protection so that you don't get this in your eye. You need to keep it off your skin and then there's going to be a section in there about first aid statements and the first aid statements will give you information necessary in case heaven forbid you do get this stuff on your skin or you do get this stuff on your eye and if it's serious enough that you need to seek out some medical attention to take care of it. The second tip that I want to put in front of you is this idea that whenever you're spraying pesticides obviously you want to kill the pests or control the past but we don't want that pesticide going to a sensitive area or sensitive site a place where people or animals or honey bees are all of those things are what we consider sensitive site. You need to really do an evaluation around your yard and think very seriously about the sorts of things you need to avoid in terms of getting that spray on those particular locations and that can be anything from other garden plants different sensitive species in your garden to you know keeping it away from food areas your picnicking areas that you may have in your backyard or on your patio. All of those sorts of things are part of just getting situational awareness so you know those sorts of places that you want to avoid and protecting those sensitive sites. So sensitive sites include a couple of other really important things obviously different plants may react very very badly or adversely to pesticides getting on them and one of them can be food crops and things like grapes. We have some herbicides that are extraordinarily biologically active against grapes and if we're trying to raise grapes we don't want those grapes to be damaged by the pesticide that we're using. The other thing are things like water protecting the groundwater protecting surface water so if we have a creek in the backyard or if we have a pond in the backyard those sorts of things we need to be very concerned about avoiding getting that pesticide into those particular areas and you're going to find information on the pesticide label that will clue you in about how sensitive those sites may be to that particular pesticide. Now obviously once we find the sensitive sites and kind of do a site assessment then we need to, I know this sounds really elementary, we need to know which way that wind is blowing so that when we make those pesticide applications it's not going to go in the place that we don't want it to go. So you kind of need to know which way that wind is blowing. There are a lot of different ways to know that. We don't want people to be spraying when the wind speeds are rather excessive. Each pesticide label will make it clear how much wind speed can be tolerated. As a general rule of thumb we don't like to be spraying when wind speeds get above 10 miles per hour but it can vary depending on the pesticide and the pesticide label. The other thing is obviously if you have a 2 or 3 mile per hour wind and you're spraying 2,4D or Trimac or something on your yard to control dandelions and you have tomato plants that are a foot or two away and the wind is blowing towards them, 2 or 3 miles per hour is too windy when that wind is blowing towards those tomatoes. So you need to not spray when the wind speeds get excessive and you need to make sure that that wind is not moving in the wrong direction. There are a lot of different ways to determine wind speed. There are apps available on the internet which will give you information about wind speeds in your zip codes. These will help get you on the map. I'm not going to get into great detail on measuring wind speeds but you need to be mindful of that and especially when wind speeds get approaching 10 miles per hour you need to be very concerned about making applications on a base like that. We're getting right down to it and one of the things that we want to do whenever we're applying the pesticides is we want to keep that nozzle no higher than it actually has to be to get the job done and if we're using certain small lawn lawn sprayers the nozzles are designed to create a certain pattern on the lawn and we don't want those nozzles to be spraying any higher than necessary and a lot of times that information is not only going to be found on the pesticide label but it will also be found on the manufacturer the equipment that you're working with. Now I know many of you will be using handheld sprayers and that's just fine but it also means that you need to keep that one down and keep that spray equipment down so that you're not getting that spray up into the wind and move to a place that you don't want it to go. So having that nozzle set too high or not keeping it down low close to the target is not going to be a good thing. Obviously we're concerned about sensitive areas and we may not get the coverage that we want so we may not get the efficiency or the effectiveness if we don't pay attention to those sorts of things. Finally the last thing I just want to leave with you is this notion that in general and I say this in a very generic way lower spray pressures will create fewer fine spray drops and those fine spray drops are the ones that are easily carried in the wind and move to the wrong place. And so we don't want to be excessive in our spray pressures kind of as a rule of thumb you can usually with a small wound sprayer get an acceptable pattern with spray pressures between about 25 and 35 PSI well once you start getting above those numbers you're going to generate a lot of fine spray drops and those will be subjected to wind and off-target movement of your pesticide spray application. Like I said I am not going to get into all the details associated with this but I want to leave you with a couple of resources that I think that you can certainly make good use of. My friend Carol Ramsey Black with Washington State University put together a couple of video presentations of going on 15 years ago and they're older video clips but they are still outstanding in terms of covering the waterfront on pesticide safety for homeowners. There you have the URL it's tinyurl.com forward slash homeowner pesticide and another thing is if you just want to type in Washington State University homeowners guide to pesticide safety and YouTube you'll probably come to Carol's video clip. This is about 22 23 minutes and I definitely think it's worth the look. For those of you who want to get a little bit deeper and you want to implement certain control strategies that avoid or minimize the use of pesticides I would invite you to go to Carol Black's companion video clip the homeowners guide to integrated pest management and that can be found at tinyurl.com homeowner IPM. So if you just go to Google type in homeowner guide to integrated pest management Washington State University should be able to find it too is about 20 or 22 minutes long. Both of them are outstanding video clips and I definitely think that it's worth the time and effort to go through those before you start tuning up and gearing up to use pesticides this spring. So when you're done using these pesticides I think the thing that is absolutely critical is is that you need to clean up. When you're done using pesticides I want to see you get into a shower situation and I want you to get out of those clothes that are potentially contaminated with pesticides and I want those clothes to to be taken care of appropriately and washed appropriately. So getting out of those clothes is absolutely critical. I think the most important thing in terms of keeping yourself in good health and not suffering adverse consequences of pesticides is to you know shower and clean up as soon as you can get into some fresh clothes. I think of all the things that I tell my professional applicators and I'm telling you folks cleanliness is absolutely critical and proper maintenance of hygiene after a pesticide application has got to be paramount in your thinking. So now we're going to shift gears and I talked a little bit about a handful of pesticide related safety issues and gave you some resources but now I just want to talk about a subject that has been kind of I don't know near and dear to my heart but also to my family. My wife Gail is here and about six or seven years ago my son came home after working a long day in pesticide control controlling mosquitoes and he had pesticides on his clothes and Gail said you know what are we going to do with this? How are we going to handle this? And unfortunately most of the information that we had and the advice that I had to give her was really quite spotty and not really very helpful and so not only was Gail concerned about this but my bosses were and we had people in the family and consumer science group at North Dakota State that said you know we need to update this stuff and so I brought a bunch of my colleagues together and we talked about how do we actually launder pesticide-contaminated work clothes especially in light of the fact that most all the research in this area was done many many years ago. So that's the publication and I believe Stacy and them sent out information on how to make that available to you as a download an Adobe Acrobat file. It's on the NDSU website and I have more to say about that a little bit. So the first thing that we need to know is is that our work clothes and the stuff that we are wearing when we go out there to do the spray job in effect is your personal protective equipment. That's your clothes are designed to intercept any kind of pesticides that may get on to your skin and you know just simply putting on a shirt, putting on a pair pants, a hat, gloves if necessary as well as shoes and socks is about 90% of the PPE that we have out there. Now personal protective equipment can get very very elaborate and some people really want to dress up and I understand that there is a certain element of fear associated with these pesticides and I just want to caution you that if you decide that you are going to wear way more clothing than what is prescribed on the pesticide label that you may well put yourself in a hazardous health situation by getting heat stress or heat stroke. So if you want to wear more personal protective equipment when you work with pesticides I'm okay as long as you understand that dressing up a little bit too intensely may have just as many adverse effects as not wearing enough clothing. The other thing is that some pesticide labels you know have different views on that but bottom line the clothing is that you wear when you go out there to do that spray job is going to get material on it. It's designed to get material on it and you'd rather have it on your clothes than on your skin. Contamination is inevitable but it is definitely a very manageable thing. So let's talk about a handful of some common sense approach. First off you need to review that pesticide label. It doesn't matter whether it's a professional or homeowner you need to know what the obligations are in terms of washing or clothing. The other thing is handling the clothes making sure that those clothes are kept separate from the rest of the family laundry. Storing those clothes if that happens away from the rest of the family laundry until they can be appropriately washed and then we need to use good wash settings when washing these clothes and I'll talk more about that here in just a little bit. Decontaminating the washing machine is important especially when we have some really highly contaminated clothing. Now I understand that some people don't go to that extra step and it also depends on the amount of contaminants that you're working with but generally speaking you really should be looking at decontaminating the washing machine after you get through washing your contaminated work clothes. If you work with commercial laundering firms and many of my professional applicators do we recommend that they visit with those firms so that they understand what they're working with and then especially professionals we want them to visit with launder mats or co-ops a coin operated laundry facility so that they also know what they're doing out there in terms of using somebody else's equipment. It's really all about reducing residues in home so we want to do a good job cleaning up outside as best we can and then if we have the ability to remove the clothes outside of the home in other words if you have a shop area or a workshop area that you can change out or even a private secured porch area that would be a good thing if not if you're going to be changing those clothes out in the house try and change them out in an area that can easily be wiped down or cleaned up. Contaminating clothes should be stored and washed separately from the household laundry and that means putting it in a plastic garbage bag or a tote or something like that if you're going to hold those clothes for very very long after use. On the other hand we'd really like you to wash your clothes just as soon as you can after you get through using them because what we found in research is is that the longer we wait the harder it is to get pesticide residues out of the clothes and but if you do have to wait we want you to store those clothes in a tote or bag or something that can easily be contaminated and keep them segregated from the rest of the family laundry. If you need to store them it would be nice if you could store them on a porch or in a shop area or garage and then when you're loading up the washing machine it would be great to minimize any kind of skin exposure by wearing a long-sleeved shirt or long pants when loading that washing machine and gloves. Now I don't get as excited about this part of the hygiene situation because most of the contaminants that on out those clothes are diluted pesticides so the risk is not as great but again what we're trying to do is to reduce contaminants so anything you can do to avoid getting that stuff on your skin would be a good idea. With respect to optimizing wash settings you've got to read the manual for the washing machine that you're going to be working with and I can't emphasize this enough because I know that when I sat down to write up this publication I read a number of manuals and I asked Gail if she could provide me with a copy of the manual for our washing machine and you know I think we own that machine for eight or nine years I had never read the manual and just reading that manual will give you an enormous amount of information in order to get the most out of that washing machine. The other thing is don't overload the washing machine make sure that your loads are not much more than 50 to 75 percent of wash capacity the more you load that machine the harder it is to get the dilution and the decontamination of your clothes. Use as much detergent as your washing machine will handle. We don't want to use what we call gentle detergents detergents that are designed for baby fabrics or things like that. We want to have good quality detergents so avoid the gentle stuff. Use hot water at the highest possible setting for your particular machine that will maximize the dilution and improve the cleaning of your clothes. Use a pre-wrench or pre-soak before you get into an aggressive wash cycle and and use high-speed spins always whether it's with the the rinse water or the the final spin cycle. The high-speed spin will get a maximum amount of material out of the clothes and down into the into the sewer so that they're no longer on your clothes. If you can it would be swell if you could dry these clothes outside but we all live in the northern parts of the United States and that only works for a month or two out of the summer and of course as we so many people have washers and dryers in their homes very rarely are we seeing people close put clothes out on a line but if you can that would be a good thing. Run an additional empty cycle with soap without clothes in your in your washing machine before you start using it for the rest of the family laundry. With respect to additives and detergents the important thing here is is that I don't think that you get any value there's never been any research that indicates that these sorts of additives are going to be a positive thing for removing the contaminants out of the clothes. Now if you have a need for it that is separate and different than the pesticides I'm okay with that it's just that don't be thinking you're going to get any additional value out of it. Now we don't really know the value or the merit associated with pouches or pots those are relatively new since the researchers come out but my suspicion is is that they probably would be okay. I think the thing that is most important is is that you develop a good cleaning regiment and when you do that I think it's not as critical in your soap selection in terms of pod liquid or dry materials as long as it's good. So I want to talk about a couple of other points this will inform you a little bit about the limitations of some of the work that was done back in the 80s and early 90s and how we're trying to address it moving forward. Most of the pesticides that were done in these research studies were much more toxic than the sorts of things that we're using today. Generally these pesticides that we have today are lower toxicity and the amount of active ingredient in those materials are not nearly as high. Having said that pesticides are still a risky thing manufacturers have done a really great job in terms of reducing exposure in terms of packaging and formulation but again pesticides are still risky they can pose the health risk and I think that anytime you can minimize exposure to yourself you're you're going to be in much better place in the long run. A good laundering routine is really what's critical here even though we are working with less toxic pesticides than we had when this research came about. Detergents have changed an awfully lot over the last several decades. We no longer have phosphates in our detergents generally they're much better the detergents we have now are much better at dissolving contaminants than in the olden days. They can tolerate hard water situations and they just really are a much better product than they used to be. We're also using much more liquids the liquids tend to go into solutions some more and the pods and pouches while we don't have any research on them these are highly concentrated formulations of either liquids or the dry formulations. They're in pouches and pods because they are so concentrated and and my suspicion is that they would probably be just fine. Again it really comes back to developing good routine good procedures and when you do that I think regardless of the soap you'll be in good shape. This is the big one and that is is that washing machine design has changed radically over the last 25 or 30 years and we're moving towards washing machines with digital control systems. My sister this happens to be her washing machine she's so very proud of it. She spent an enormous amount of money on this thing. I was a bit shocked when she told me but it's got Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and it has all kinds of customizable controls and it is absolutely mind-boggling but what's really cool about it is we could set up all kinds of different programmable cycles and timelines in terms of how aggressive we want that wash cycle and when we could set up wash cycles the last for well over an hour just in the wash cycle alone. I wouldn't recommend that you wash your clothes for an hour in that wash cycle because you'll be wearing out your clothes but certainly a nice aggressive wash for at least 20 minutes would be really excellent. Customizable spin settings again I'm really big on very high spin settings and then the rinse cycle duration and intensity we can set up a couple of rinse cycles if we want and we can have those rinse cycles go on for a much longer period of time and all of those things we have the capacity to do with these new washing machines. Steam assisted clothing cleaning is something that commercial laundry is only had the ability to do but we're seeing that being made available to a typical homeowner out there. We don't know how valuable it is but we think it would be helpful. We also don't know about some of the newer washing machine designs the front or top load machines without agitators there isn't a great deal of research work that was done in those particular areas. A couple of items that other items that I want to share the superheated heating coils that are found in these new washing machines that will take the hot water from your tap running up to 155 or 60 degrees we think that that would be helpful but we don't know exactly how helpful that would be. The older machines will work just fine I don't think any of you need to rush out there and buy a new washing machine to properly wash your clothes. The point I'll make here is is that the simple washing machines require if you want soak cycles, rinse cycles, all those sorts of things you may have to do a manual reset in order to get the setting that you want and unfortunately we all know how it works. The phone rings one of the kids needs your attention on some particular problem and you get distracted and you forget where you're at and that washing machine continues to go through the normal paces and when it does you don't have the ability to intervene and most people will not do anything other than just pull the clothes out put them in the wash and into the dryer. They're not going to go start at at ground zero again. The other problem that we see is in a water and energy conservation these are becoming much more of a problematic area especially on the west coast water and energy conservation are becoming more important all the time. I always tell people obviously minimize your exposure that's a good thing anytime. Maximize your efficiency in other words you can go with a little bit heavier load capacity we don't want you to go above 75 but if you're going to hold clothes for a couple days that may be self-defeating because we want you to wash those things as soon as you can after after you get changed out of your clothes. The other thing is is we think that we may be able to get by with longer wash cycles and rinse cycles at cooler temperatures but we don't know that there hasn't been any research done on it to date. The other one is is these new fabrics and finishes all the things that I've been talking about today are based on research that was done many many years ago and nothing has been done with the newer fabrics everything is with your cottons and polyesters some of your other fabrics like rayons and things like that that have been around for a while but these new breathable fabrics there hasn't been any work done in those areas. I recommend that you at least visit with your supplier or manufacturer to make sure that whatever you do in terms of washing doesn't adversely affect the clothing and the other thing is is we have in our house washed a number of garments over the last several years of some of these breathable fabrics they tend to stand up fairly well to to some of the wash protocols that we've been talking about. I haven't seen any adverse impacts on the clothing but we also don't know how good of a job we're doing extracting pesticides from those newer fabrics. We think it's probably going to be okay but we don't have any good information in those areas. So I would invite you to download and print out a copy of this publication Laundering Pesticide Contaminated Clothing it's also a tiny URL in DSU-PS 1778 and I think that all of the details that I've talked about here over the last few minutes will be there it should be helpful to you and I would highly recommend that you share it with any friends or anybody else that may be working with pesticides and make sure that when you get done at the end of the day you get out of those work clothes get into a shower and make sure that those clothes get handled appropriately and with that Stacy I am done and we've got a few minutes to be able to visit with folks so I'm gonna I'm gonna bounce out of my presentation and go back to a headshot okay. Perfect if you have any questions please either place them in the chat or feel free to unmute yourself and ask away. So I want to stop the share yep and I'm back to me and so Stacy if you want to handle any kind of news or any kind of chats that people have and feed those to me I'll do my best to be able to answer them okay. Yep and Sherry we will put all of the links that Andrew talked about in the email coming to you after the webinar. Right. Any other questions? Alright so I see some chat questions on there and I apologize I have to wear my glasses to see what's going on. I was looking to see if I was chatting to you privately. Yeah and they're put in the they are going to be posting the links for you all and you know I I don't want to sound like I'm bragging but I'm telling you that the materials that we have will go into much more detail in things that I think you can use in your day-to-day use pesticides. Alright if there are no questions you must have covered done a really nice job. Alright well I just want to thank Stacy you and your crew for getting all this set up. They will be putting together the archive of this and making that available to folks that couldn't have participated in this today. I also want to thank Mary Pauley with University of Arkansas Extension for her help and for the generous use of their studio and making me look great and sounding great and by the way Stacy or Julie or any of you NDSU types we have to get one of these systems. I was just thanking Matt. Yeah yeah we are gonna get one of these mark my words. Alright well thank you everybody and have a great day. Alright thank you all. Take care.