Eighty-two farmers received Restricted-Use (RU) Pesticide Certification training this program year at six Todd County Extension pesticide educational programs.  (One training meeting was cancelled due to the Covid-19 ban on face-to-face meetings.)  As always, safety when handling chemicals was a major emphasis of these sessions, along with proper pest identification so that appropriate control methods may be utilized.  In these trainings, farmers were reminded about the importance of the pesticide label and how to read it to get the information they need to safely and effectively use a given chemical.  Other topics emphasized included the environmental concerns related to farm chemical use, and the importance of proper spray calibration.

     A special focus of this winter’s Pesticide meetings was educating farmers about changes that have occurred in the Federal Worker Protection Standards (WPS) affecting farm laborers.  Most of the changes took effect on January 1, 2017 and the rest took effect January 1, 2018. In Todd County, tobacco and vegetable farmers are those most impacted by these changes.  WPS rules now mandate that field workers receive WPS training every year, prior to their starting work.  In the past, they were only required to have training once every five years, and they could work five days before being trained.  Under the new rules, the number of topics that have to be covered for workers has expanded from 11 to 23; and farmers must now keep records of the training they do for their workers.  Employers must now also provide workers access to labels and safety data sheets (SDSs) for the chemicals that they are applying on the farm.  These are just a few of the dozens of WPS rules that have changed in the past three years.  My goal is to continually utilize the opportunity of Pesticide Certification Training to keep farmers up-to-date on WPS requirements.

     Another topic that we spend extra time on in the Todd County trainings is rotating pesticides to slow or avoid the development resistant pest populations.  Kentucky (and Todd County) already has significant populations of resistant pests--particularly weeds.  Glyphosate-resistant marestail is probably our most common resistant weed; but we also have resistance issues with Italian ryegrass, Palmar amaranth, waterhemp, etc.  Farmers tend to be pragmatic--they like to use what works.  But the increase in herbicide-resistant weeds is helping many of them understand how their chemical choices can be a factor in the development of resistant pests.

     Todd County has several hundred acres of fruit and vegetable crops.  Specialty crop growers could easily see resistance issues develop with insecticides and fungicides.  These crops generally require numerous applications of pesticides, and if chemical group rotation is not practiced on fruits and vegetables, pest resistance to crop chemicals could rapidly develop.   

     Once the Covid-19 meeting ban took place, farmers with expired Pesticide licenses were informed that licenses that expired on Dec. 31, 2019, would be extended through December 2020.  Producers were also informed about the new process for how to acquire a special license to buy and use Paraquat if they intend to use that chemical.