OUR DAILY THREAD: This Is One Drift You Don’t Want To Catch
FYI: Pesticides are poison
THE SET-UP: Dicamba is an herbicide designed to be sprayed on genetically-modified cotton and soybeans. It’s also applied to conventional corn, wheat, sorghum and asparagus, among other crops. And it can be used to control weeds and as a defoliant.
But it is also highly volatile.
It vaporizes easily, and it can do so for days after it is applied … particularly in hot and dry conditions. And when it does, it drifts. And when it drifts, it can drift for miles, damaging or destroying nearby crops, trees and other “non-target” foliage along the way. That bug, which a cynically-minded observer could plausibly regard as a feature that forces nearby farms to convert to GMO soybeans and cotton, has fueled a decade-long controversy over “dicamba drift” that’s been largely contained within the agriculture industry.
Until now.
The difference now is that pesticides like dicamba are drifting into classrooms and exposing non-GMO children to the same vaporized poison that’s withered neighboring fields for the last ten years. No doubt, pesticide drift has been going on for decades. Take, for instance, a potent poison called chlorpyrifos. Applied to nearly a dozen food crops, it is also a powerful neurotoxin that’ll shave points off the IQ of young people, which is a significant concern to parents of kids in farming communities. The schools they attend tend to be surrounded by fields targeted by chlorpyrifos and therefore run the risk of exposure to deadly drifts.
That said, a study published in 2025 by researchers from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and Keck School of Medicine at USC found chlorpyrifos newborns in northern Manhattan and South Bronx, New York. Obviously, the problem stretches well-beyond rural schoolhouses. Lead author Virginia A Rauh, ScD, MSW of Columbia University summarized their findings:
The 270 children and adolescents are participants in the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health birth cohort study and were born to Latino and African-American mothers. They had measurable quantities of CPF in their umbilical cord blood and were assessed by brain imaging and behavioral tests between the ages of 6 and 14 years. Progressively higher insecticide exposure levels were significantly associated with progressively greater alterations in brain structure, function, and metabolism, as well as poorer measures of motor speed and motor programming. Links between higher CPF and greater anomalies across different neuroimaging measures suggest that prenatal exposure produces enduring disturbances in brain structure, function, and metabolism in direct proportion to the level of exposure.
Study co-author Bradley Peterson, MD, Vice Chair for Research and Chief of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, said this:
“The disturbances in brain tissue and metabolism that we observed with prenatal exposure to this one pesticide were remarkably widespread throughout the brain. Other organophosphate pesticides likely produce similar effects, warranting caution to minimize exposures in pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood, when brain development is rapid and especially vulnerable to these toxic chemicals.”
Of course, Trump’s EPA reversed Obama-Era restrictions on chlorpyrifos at the start of this year. Similarly, Trump’s EPA has embraced dicamba, although with two new restrictions. One mandates maintaining a buffer zone around a new applications and the other is a ban on its use when the temperature hits 95 degrees to minimize vaporization. But, at the same time, the EPA dropped a ban on its use after June, when summer temperatures could “lead to more vapor drift.”
That’s a shell game.
Obviously, the 95 degree restriction is not nearly as effective as a summer-long ban. And, as a new report in the Chicago Tribune shows, buffer zones are easily rendered functionally irrelevant by a stiff breeze:
On her 43 acres of woods and reclaimed native prairie in rural Tazewell County, Katie VandenBerg walked the edge of her property, inspecting a line of oaks bordered by miles of corn and soybean fields.
The oak leaves are curled and stunted — damage she believes is tied to pesticide applications on nearby farms.
Since buying the land three years ago, VandenBerg, whose family has lived in Tazewell County for seven generations, said she has “gone down a rabbit hole” trying to understand how drifting chemicals are affecting her trees.
Then, this spring, that threat reached her 10-year-old daughter, Genevieve.
Hundreds of children had gathered outside Bethel Lutheran School in nearby Morton for a jump-rope fundraiser when a chemical odor swept across the parking lot. Across the street, according to Illinois Department of Agriculture records, farmer Mark Eigsti was spraying pesticides on his soybean fields as wind gusts topped 19 miles per hour. These kinds of conditions are known to increase the risk of drift — when chemicals move beyond their intended targets.
That evening, parents received an unusual message from the school principal: “Showers for All Tonight.”
For VandenBerg, the email was immediately alarming.
“Well, hold on. This is more than just showers for everybody,” she said. “This is a big deal. This is not OK.”
The principal’s recommendation made sense. Testing around the school and of students’ clothing found traces of two other herbicides—Glory 4L and Trifluralin 4EC—the EPA classifies as a possible human carcinogen. It certainly sickened those unfortunate enough to catch that drift:
In the days that followed, students and staff reported headaches, sore throats, skin irritation and red eyes, according to state Agriculture Department interviews. Investigators later concluded that more than 200 children and staff were exposed.
Although they didn’t find dicamba, the controversy around dicamba drift highlights a long overlooked problem with pesticides:
“Dicamba is a notorious bad actor, but so are a lot of the pesticides we’re using,” said Kim Erndt-Pitcher, director of ecological health for Prairie Rivers Network. “They’re traveling (farther) than most people think.”
Erndt-Pitcher denounced a “lack of routine pesticide air monitoring” in Illinois, which leaves citizens “without a clear picture of how frequently agrochemicals move through communities”:
“If the Department of Agriculture and EPA aren’t looking for it and no one is documenting it, how can you say it really exists?” said Erndt-Pitcher. “We’re documenting it, and we’re saying it does.”
They are not alone.
The controversy over dicamba—which has produced a few successful lawsuits against Bayer—has been driven by angry farmers who’ve suffered crippling losses. As Public Harvest Media noted:
Herbicide drift can be a big deal for a grower’s bottom line, he added. If a producer loses 5 percent of their crop and profit margins are around 5 percent, it’s hard to make money.
At the same time, soybean and cotton farmers who’ve made the leap to the GMO versions of those crops want to reap the rewards of switching to costly proprietary seeds … and that has led a stark divide:
The herbicide has been a topic of heated disagreement among growers in years past and can still be controversial, said Aaron Hager, a professor of weed science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The divide between farmers who use dicamba and those who don’t “was like the 2016 presidential election,” Hager said. “You were in one camp or the other. And if you weren’t in my camp, you were wrong — if for no other reason than you’re not in my camp.”
The reality that drift may occur leaves neighbors of those using dicamba in awkward or sometimes contentious situations, said Randall Vos, a horticulture specialist with Iowa State University Extension.
“You don’t want to be the squeaky wheel in the community,” said Vos, who advises Iowa fruit producers.
For the fruit producers Vos works with, reporting drift can also create a conundrum.
It may take the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship one week to investigate a plant that’s suspected of being damaged by drift. By that point, the herbicide levels may be undetectable, so the state agency may not be able to come to a conclusion — and that’s especially problematic for organic farmers, Vos said.
And that underscores the problem of all drifting pesticides. They are impossible to contain and by the time you catch on to the drift, it’s already too late. Only traces and dead plants will be left behind. But eventually, perhaps decades later, the drift will finally catch up with you. - jp
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