By: Ron Hall
COLUMBUS, OH – Should the U.S. turf/grounds care industry develop and adopt an IPM accreditation program? You bet, said Teri Yamada, TY Environmental Strategies, LTD, Ontario, Canada.
She said a national industry-wide U.S. IPM certification program may head off what has happened in Canada, where 150 (and counting) communities have banned or severely restricted the use of traditional pesticide products on lawns and public grounds.
In offering “a cautionary tale,” Yamada, who has 27 years experience in the Canadian golf industry, warned an audience of more than 300 turf managers at the Ohio Turfgrass Conference not to take for granted the use of chemical products they’ve relied upon for years.
“Do not assume that (pesticide use) decisions will always be based on science,” said Yamada, after offering an overview of the political processes that this past decade led to a welter of different turfgrass care laws in Canada.
A matter of jurisdiction
The United States and Canada hold widely varying views on the regulation of turf care pesticides despite being linked by language, culture and economic interests. In the United States, pesticides registration is handled at the national level and pesticide usage by individual states. Local governments are not allowed to craft their own use laws. This isn’t the case in Canada, she said.
In Canada, three levels of government have a say concerning what products are sold, used and how they’re used. The federal government, through the Pest Management Regulatory Authority (PMRA) testing and regulatory authority decides which products will be sold. The provincial government licenses applicators and determines pesticide classifications, which she said is more important that it might seem on the surface. Finally, local governments have broad powers to pass laws laying out what pest control products can be used within their borders.
It started in Hudson, Quebec
The Canadian situation didn’t come about by accident.
Yamada recounted how, in 2000, the small community of Hudson in Quebec Province passed legislation to become a “pesticide-free” community. Two lawn care companies challenged the law, and the case eventually ended up being heard by the country’s Supreme Court, which ruled in Hudson’s favor. The court ruling didn’t focus on the safety of lawn care products; it focused on a community’s right to make it own regulations under Quebec’s Cities and Towns Act. “The right was strictly jurisdictional,” said Yamada.
That single decision the opened the floodgates to a well-funded and well-organized coalition of anti-pesticide groups that started pressing local lawmakers to adopt draconian restrictions on home and commercial pesticide use, and the retail sales of pesticide products, as well.
Towns and cities, and then provinces (first Quebec, then Ontario, the country’s most populous province) took it into their hands to pass provincial laws forbidding the use of the most popular and effective pest control products on home, commercial and public properties.
For a variety of reasons, including being more organized, the golf management industry avoided the most stringent restrictions and bans. Even so, golf course superintendents in much of Canada are now subject to strict IPM usage and reporting rules, including, in some cases, posting their pesticide usage on Web sites and holding annual meetings open for public comment.
Denying science?
“The issue has blown up behind science,” said Yamada, obviously not pleased that lawn care firms were not given the same right to use pesticides under the nationally recognized IPM certification program. “Science would tell us that by implementing an IPM program we do reduce pesticide use.”
While pesticide laws in the United States offer applicators broad protection against a hodge-podge of regulations, this is not the case in Canada, where regulations can vary significantly from province to province.
The Province of New Brunswick, for example, allows the use of some popular chemical products by IPM-accredited professional applicators in golf, lawn care and sports turf care. By contrast, the Province of Ontario allows only the use of what it classifies as “low risk” or “biopesticides,” even by professional applicators. Ontario’s list of approved herbicides is a short one — corn gluten meal, acetic acid, fatty acids, minor air and the biopesticide sclerina minor.
Since the Ontario ban on the “cosmetic use of pesticides” (a popular rallying cry for anti-pesticide activists and politicians) is not yet two years old, it’s difficult to judge its effects on the quality of home lawns and public grounds yet. But some rumblings from the public are starting to be heard.
“Now they’re (homeowners) starting to see the results on their lawns,” said Yamada. They’re seeing that the loss of popular and long-used chemical products means more labor and more expense, and that they may have to accept less acceptable results, particularly when it comes to weed control.
(Side note: because the population and the size of the Canadian market is 1/10 th that of the United States, Canadian turf managers have historically have had access to far fewer chemical lawn care products. As a rule manufacturers do not register chemical products for grounds care unless there’s also a market for them in agriculture, said Yamada.)
Calculating the damage
To date, nobody has polled professional lawn care providers to gauge the economic impact of the pesticide regulations on their industry, but Yamada pegged the loss of revenue of anywhere from 15% to 50% percent in Quebec and Ontario.
Can this happen in the United States? Yamada, who served 18 years as the head agronomist and Managing Director of Communications and Government Relations with the Royal Canadian Golf Association, insisted that it could. She warned turf managers to expect increased regulatory scrutiny of pesticide use in the States.
In wrapping up her “cautionary tale,” Yamada urged the U.S. turfgrass industry to:
• Proactively develop an IPM accreditation program, including appropriate government agencies as part of the process “to prove you’re doing IPM and not just talking about it.”
• Develop or update a national and separate state economic impact studies for the landcare industry. The results will alert (and likely surprise) government and regulatory agencies to the size, scope and economic importance of the industry.
• Provide learning and educational opportunities for communities, and particularly school age children, to visit properly maintained properties to learn about the environmental benefits of urban landscapes – edible landscapes, birdscaping, green roofs, etc. The golf course industry has been doing this for years, much of it through Audubon Society programs that have resulted in the adoption of sustainable practices and allowed them to become recognized as environmental stewards, even in much of Canada.
“Now that we’ve been pushed to the wall, we have to prove that we use IPM and not just say we do,’ concluded Yamada.
