Project Overview

Reports

Commodities

Target Pests

Practices

• Pest Management: pesticides

• Natural Resources/Environment: drift/runoff buffers

• Sustainable Communities: public participation, public policy

Agriculture in Oregon and Washington is exceptionally diverse, producing over 200 specialty crops. The diversity of the agricultural landscape provides unique challenges for EPA’s development of pesticide mitigation measures for protecting species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In 2022, EPA developed a workplan to comply with ESA requirements by implementing new approaches and requiring measures to reduce off-field movement of pesticides for protecting non-target species, including ESA-listed species. These required measures largely focus on conservation practices and activities that physically alter the landscape to reduce runoff and erosion, including vegetative filter strips, terraces, and contour buffer strips, or change production systems, including conservation tillage, cover crops, and contour farming. Landscape changes typically require land ownership, substantial investment, and time to install these practices; production changes require investment in new equipment and are not easily adaptable to all cropping systems. As EPA continues to produce new strategies to fulfill its ESA obligations, there is growing concern among stakeholders on how proposed mitigations will be implemented on a local level. 

While Oregon and Washington share implementation challenges with other parts of the US, these states are unique because of the diversity of specialty crops and growing regions coupled with the diversity of endangered species and habitats within these states. Over the past year, stakeholders in Oregon and Washington have begun discussing the challenges to implementation and a growing consensus is emerging that success depends on regionally focused efforts. We propose bringing these conversations together through a workgroup project to gather stakeholders (e.g., farmers, conservation practitioners, species biologists, pesticide applicators, regulators, researchers, and tribal representatives) and outline the key components for balancing resource conservation, species conservation, and agricultural production by leveraging the learnings of successful Integrated Pest Management (IPM), conservation, and stewardship programs. The goal is to promote local solutions for national pesticide registration and regulatory decisions by uniting stakeholders in a collaborative effort to advance conservation, IPM, and sustainable agricultural practices. 

We propose to hold four regionally focused 1-day workshops across Oregon and Washington. These workshops will identify areas of confusion and workable components of EPA’s proposed national mitigations and compile regional knowledge around existing conservation programs, best management practices, stewardship activities, and IPM programs to inform the need or format of tailored mitigations. A fifth workshop will then bring together the learnings from the four regionally specific workshops to help stakeholders characterize needs, develop evaluation criteria for incorporating local efforts into a regional approach, and identify the key knowledge gaps to implementing regionally tailored mitigations for compliance with ESA labeling. 

These workshops will leverage existing IPM and conservation practices to protect and promote ecosystem services in managed and natural landscapes. By fostering collaboration and establishing a framework for integrating local conservation efforts, we aim to develop resilience-based strategies that simultaneously support species conservation and sustain agricultural productivity through IPM. The framework developed through this workgroup project will serve as a template and have broad applicability for other regions, localities, and agricultural production systems.  

The overarching goal for the work group is to promote local solutions for national pesticide registration and regulatory decisions by uniting stakeholders in a collaborative effort to advance conservation, IPM, and sustainable agricultural practices. Local solutions can only be achieved when local stakeholder knowledge informs the process in a “transdisciplinary environment with regular interactions between scientists and practitioners” and with “a participatory approach involving communities to gain public support for policy and implementation.”⁴ Therefore, regionally tailored workshops will gather local stakeholders to compile existing conservation, IPM practices, and other production activities along with stakeholder needs to develop an evaluation criteria framework for assessing the applicability of regional efforts to inform FIFRA ESA mitigation requirements. The work group will utilize four regionally focused 1-day workshops to achieve the following objectives by the end of each workshop:  

1. Clarify and align our understanding of EPA’s proposed national mitigation requirements seen across recent pesticide decisions and strategy documents (e.g. the Draft Herbicide Strategy) to identify areas of confusion. 
2. Document which components of EPA’s proposed national mitigations (e.g., spray drift buffers, runoff, and erosion reduction options, geographic mitigations) are workable and which components are not workable for each stakeholder and why. 
3. Compile regional knowledge around priorities, successes, learnings, and barriers to adoption of existing conservation programs, best management practices, stewardship activities, and IPM programs and how these can inform the need or format of proposed national mitigations.

Adaptive management also highlights the need for “long term commitment to the process”, “top-down endorsement”, and “alignment across stakeholders on objectives and pathways.”⁴  A fifth workshop will therefore seek to reach alignment across stakeholders and outline the process for building out local solutions that maintain or enhance agriculture productivity and sustainability while also protecting listed species and critical habitat. Work group leads will compile resources and summarize key discussions generated from each workshop prior to the fifth 2-day workshop where work group leads and stakeholders will gather to review the results of these workshops, with the following objectives: 

4. Compare and contrast the outcomes from the regional workshop objectives to identify key regional differences and commonalities.
5. Develop an evaluation criteria framework for assessing the equivalency and efficacy of current regional programs, practices, and plans to inform how national mitigations can be adapted to site specific or field level needs through regionally tailored programs.
6. Identify key questions, knowledge gaps, and outreach needs for successful adoption and implementation to guide extension and outreach activities, particularly those related to conservation programs and IPM.