I get to do some cool things in my job, things that would have been unimaginable to me seven years ago when I left the day to day of the lawn care industry for the National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP).
When I made the leap, I had been a certified pesticide applicator for 30-plus years, but I was shocked at the breadth and depth of the pesticide world that I had no idea existed. I was instructed to go to this meeting over here and that conference over there, all of which was very new to me and, quite frankly, very intimidating. You know that feeling when you don’t know what you don’t know? That was me in 2017.
I was a member of one of NALP’s legacy associations, the Professional Lawn Care Association of America (PLCAA). For most of its existence, PLCAA was led by Tom Delaney, an accomplished advocate for the lawn care industry. If your company enjoys state preemption of pesticide regulations, it is due in no small measure to the tireless work of Tom and other industry advocates.
Once the merger of the Associated Landscape Contractors of America and PLCAA formed the Professional Landscape Network (or PLANET, which would later be rebranded as NALP), and Tom departed in 2016, all his institutional knowledge left with him. And that is where I found myself when I started with NALP. I knew no one, and no one knew anything about our association. And that, my friends, is a huge problem.
When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) performs its risk assessments for the pesticides used in our industry, it uses the same models used for agriculture. Picture in your mind a 100-acre cornfield in Iowa. If Farmer Brown wants to spray his field, it’s fair to assume he is going to cover every inch of that 100 acres.
But you run into trouble when that same model is used for nonagricultural uses such as professional lawn care. For instance, if your customer’s parcel is one acre, the EPA assumes that you spray the entire acre, including the area covered by the house, the driveway, the garage, etc. In other words, officials overestimate our uses quite substantially. And that, my friends, is another huge problem.
So, how have we gone about educating regulators about our industry? One way is by hosting crop tours for the EPA and any other regulatory agency that touches upon our interests. Through crop tours, the EPA can get scientists out of their labs to visit the places where the pesticides they evaluate and register are actually used.
That is precisely what we did in August when we loaded a bus full of scientists at EPA headquarters in Washington and headed out into rural Virginia. Our first stop was the Manassas branch office of Virginia Green where we were treated to a demonstration of their state-of-the-art mixing and loading system. From there, we headed further west to the Northern Fauquier Community Park where we were joined by NALP-member volunteers from Weed Man, King Green, TruGreen, Lawn Doctor, Steel Green Manufacturing, Optix Technologies, Senske Services and Advanced Turf Solutions for demonstrations explaining the nuts and bolts of how we service our customers.
EPA is under court order to quickly comply with provisions of the Endangered Species Act to show that using a particular pesticide will not jeopardize endangered and threatened species or their habitats. To do this, the EPA is developing strategies for herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and rodenticides as groups to facilitate quicker review by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and/or the National Marine Fisheries Service. Unless we are front and center in advocating for our uses of these active ingredients, we could well lose them.
Long before government agencies were concerned about pesticide drift or runoff, the lawn care industry self-adopted our own mitigation techniques. You were in big trouble if you were spraying for dandelions and mistakenly hit your customer’s rose bush, so we strictly follow label directions and ensure that the pesticides we apply stay put and do not escape the turfgrass system.
It’s just one man’s opinion, but based on the questions we fielded from our guests, we are making progress.
