For retailers wanting to sell dicamba-based products and for crop producers who want to use them, 2024 final sale and use dates are quickly approaching.
In some states, key dates have already passed.
May 13 was the last day for sales and distribution of existing stocks of over-the-top dicamba products for Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota. More insights available here: Monday Is Last Day To Buy And Distribute Dicamba In 2024 For Four States
The sales and distribution deadline for these products in South Dakota is May 21. For all other states and counties with registrations, the sales and distribution deadlines are May 31 for soybeans and June 30 for cotton.
No dicamba-based product can be applied to soybeans after June 30. For cotton, the final cutoff date for application is July 30.
Verify The Details In Your State
“The dates do vary state by state,” said Brigit Rollins, a staff lawyer with the National Agricultural Law Center (NALC), a unit of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
The dates were set by the EPA’s existing stocks order issued on February 14, just one week after Arizona federal court decision vacated product registrations for Monsanto (now Bayer) XtendiMax, BASF Engenia and Syngenta Tavium.
“So if you are planning on applying any of those three pesticides this year, I would strongly recommend looking at the existing stocks order before you do so to make sure that you are in compliance with the cutoff date for your state,” she added.
Rollins addressed some of the recent legal developments for dicamba-based products in a webinar on Wednesday.
A Murky Outlook For 2025
Rollins said the future for the three dicamba-based herbicides is unknown at this time.
“Unfortunately, this is sort of a prognostication situation. But suffice it to say, the future of over-the-top dicamba use after 2024 is pretty much up in the air,” she said.
Some manufacturers are looking to re-register over-the-top use of their dicamba-based products, but the path forward is likely to be difficult.
A new Endangered Species Act-FIFRA policy in the works by EPA is aimed at adding more use restrictions to most if not all pesticide use labels.
“Very likely, this is going to mean additional restrictions on any future over-the-top dicamba label,” Rollins said. “But we don’t really know yet what that’s going to look like.”
Bayer has submitted a new label request for XtendiMax/dicamba but the request does not include over-the-top application of the product in soybeans.
“This label would allow up to two applications to soybeans, either before emergence, or up to June 12. So that pretty much eliminates over the top applications to soybeans…and that change to soybeans would be pretty substantial,” Rollins said.
For cotton, the new XtendiMax/dicamba label would retain the cutoff date of July 30 for postemergence applications.
The label Bayer has proposed is currently available for a 30-day public comment period. Rollins said there “is a strong chance” the comment period will get extended.
The label request, docket EPA-HQ-OPP-2024-0154, is available for public comment here: Dicamba: New Use on Dicamba-Tolerant Cotton and Soybeans.
EPA will review public comments as part of the proposed application process and incorporate any feedback into the registration decision.
To date, none of the other manufacturers/sellers of dicamba-based products that are applied over-the-top have resubmitted label requests.
A 17-Month Review Process Likely
While Bayer has indicated it would like the new dicamba label to be approved for the 2024 season, the likelihood of that is slim.
Rollins said the company submitted the label request to EPA for consideration coded as an R170, an additional food use label. Under FIFRA, such a proposed label carries a statutory review time of 17 months.
“So just kind of doing the math there, it’s kind of hard to see how this label would be approved before the 2025 growing season; it could be approved as early as fall 2025,” Rollins said.
However, she noted that any additional consultation EPA might do, with regard to the Endangered Species Act (ESA), is likely to extend the time needed for label review and approval.
“If EPA does go and do a full consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, that could take a significant amount of time,” she said. “It’s not clear how long it would take, but that’s something to kind of be aware of.”
Rollins said EPA has been working on what she referenced as a new herbicide strategy. “These are new mitigations that would apply pretty much across all herbicides. The mitigations would be targeted at reducing spray drift, reducing erosion and runoff,” she explained.
“I would expect that we would see this manifest on any new over-the-top registration of dicamba. Again, something could happen, and this might not occur,” she added. “But this is something we need to take into consideration as well.”
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