EPA Staff Gets Farm Tour

With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

It was in an address at Bradley University in September 1956 when former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower told the crowd, “You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”

Sixty-six years later, it still rings true. It’s for this reason that a recent tour hosted by the National Cotton Council holds so much weight. The guests were key officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Don Parker is Vice President of Technical Services with the Council…

“We’re very fortunate. We were able to get 4 staff from EPA headquarters in D.C. to join us visiting different farms, the focus being on weed management in cotton.”

He said they were trying to show them the diversity that producers have on their own farms as well as their concerns…

“At the same time, to try to help EPA understand whenever they talk about looking at registration of a product and they talk about you having an alternative, in many instances those are not valid alternatives because of the crop rotation that’s coming in because of what you have already used in that crop.”

Parker said it was a very good session with the EPA staff.