- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension,
and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television,
Wisconsin Alumni Association
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you
Russ Groves from the Department of Entomology.
He was born and raised in Oskaloosa, Iowa,
where he went to high school.
He went to Ames at Iowa State University
for his undergraduate, went to Fayetteville
to University of Arkansas for his Masters,
and then went to North Carolina State University
in Raleigh for his PhD.
He did a post-Doc at Cornell,
and then spent several years
working for the US Department of Agriculture,
otherwise known as the Agricultural Research Service
in Kearney, California,
working on the sharpshooter.
And then he came to Madison
where he's both in the UW-Madison Department of Entomology
and a State Specialist with UW-Extension
Cooperative Extension.
Tonight he gets to talk with us about pest management
in Wisconsin's specialty crops.
And if you wanna know what a specialty crop is,
go beyond corn and soybeans and alfalfa
and that gets you into things like potato
and winter wheat and barley and oats
and corn, sweet corn,
cranberries,
peas for packing, splendid things like that
that make life a lot more pleasant.
They may not be huge in acreage,
but they're really important to our culture
and to our tables.
Please join me in welcoming Russ Groves
to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
(applause)
- Well, Tom, thanks a bunch.
And it really is a pleasure to be here,
and I appreciate you all coming out to,
to listen to this presentation.
As I told Tom when we just visited,
what I'm going to talk to you about today is
a bit of a work in progress.
I wouldn't have said three or four years ago
that I would've been moving down this,
this trajectory or this research line,
but I think it's an important topic area
to talk about.
And I think for our Wisconsin specialty crop producers,
It's something that I think they understand too is
an important message to convey.
Before I go too much further,
I really wanna focus on the people
that actually do the work in my lab.
So, as Tom had indicated,
I'm an appointment between UW-Extension and CALS.
As an integrated position,
my title as 'State Specialist'
is vegetable entomologist.
So I have responsibility for vegetable pest management
here at the UW.
And my research area of emphasis,
primarily, has been vector-born disease.
So we focus largely on insects that transmit pathogens.
Viruses, bacteria, phytoplasmas.
But as part of my work
as the vegetable extension specialist
and learning how to control insects,
we sort of went this direction.
And one of the people that I wanna highlight tonight
is Ben Bradford, which for you,
is the gentleman wearing the goofy hat in the upper left.
Some of Ben's work,
and then a person who is currently
a postdoc at NC State University, Anders Huseth
who's actually grew up in Rio, Wisconsin,
and received his PhD here at the UW.
Another individual whose research we'll highlight.
But before we start,
and I should say, really what I wanna do is
I kind of wanna talk you through a little bit of
Wisconsin's specialty crop, agriculture,
why it's important.
I wanna kind of take you or segue into
a little bit of the work that I would do
on a day-to-day basis,
and that is learn how to control an insect pest
that is sort of
causes us issue, if you will.
And then, kind of lead you along the
sort of the path that I was lead
as far as learning about the consequences
of the management of that pest.
But at least out of a text, I think it's important
This gentlemen, Dr. Marshall Johnson,
is an emeritus faculty
at the University of California-Riverside.
Marshall is actually a personal friend of mine,
and he's a colleague and also a collaborator of mine
who published in a book titled
Challenges Within Entomology: A Celebration of the
Past Hundred Years and a Look to the Next Century.
And Marshall writes,
"Military metaphors are often used to
"describe our attempts to suppress
"or manage arthropod populations.
"Titles of both lay and scientific articles
"relating to arthropod suppression
"often include military terms such as battle, campaign,
"defense, enemy and war.
"L.O. Howard was probably one of the best known
"entomologists to commonly use these military metaphors
"in his writing.
"And recently in a book titled
"Nature Wars: People Versus Pests,
"Winston stated that,
"Pest management has become a modern war
"against nature.
"But it is time to reconsider the terms of engagement."
And I think that's a little bit relevant to
some of the things that we'll talk about here today.
And I'll try to conclude politely and respectfully
with a bit of a perspective that, I think,
is also somewhat near and dear to Tom's heart.
So this is kind of
Wisconsin specialty crop agriculture.
I'd like to say that Tom underestimated
Wisconsin's specialty crop agriculture.
Yes, it is not corn, cotton, rice, wheat and beans,
and by beans, I mean soybeans.
But it is this reasonably significant outlay.
In fact, Wisconsin is the second largest
vegetable processing producer in the country.
We are the leading producer of crops
including green beans,
sweet corn, cranberries.
We are third, nationally, behind,
in potatoes rather, behind a few states
which will remain nameless because I just don't think
it's worth mentioning their names.
Interestingly enough,
we are the world's leading producer of ginseng
in Marathon County, probably many of you knew this.
And not mentioned there,
but we are the world's, or rather the national leader
in the production of sauerkraut.
And that comes out of Bear Creek or Shiocton,
the Shiocton area.
In fact, Ryan Downs, I'll depart just a moment
if you'll allow me.
Ryan Downs, the proprietor, would say
that every time he sees a hearse go by,
he says, "There goes another customer."
Is how he would describe that.
He would then turn to me and say,
"So Russ, where do you think the majority of
"sauerkraut is consumed in the country?"
And I would then erroneously say,
"Well, Wisconsin, of course!"
And he said, "You didn't hear me."
He said, "Every time I see a hearse go by,
"there goes another customer."
I said, "Oh, that's Florida and Arizona."
And he said, "Precisely."
So...
but that is Wisconsin specialty crop agriculture.
This is what the USDA NASS describes
as specialty crop agriculture.
And I don't think it would be any surprise to you that
you would know California, of course,
is a fresh and processed center.
It is number one in vegetable production.
But we have historically had significant production in the
Winter Garden area of Texas, South Texas,
Florida, the Delmarva area,
lots of potatoes growing
in those unnamed states in the Pacific Northwest.
But then you can see there's lots of blue dot-ish
in the Upper Midwest.
In fact recently,
the current executive branch of the government
has identified the Upper Midwest
as an area of national security for food production.
And some of the reasons for this,
there really is a sort of a changing economic ground.
There are retailers that can shape or reshape production.
And even through public policy
with respect to even sustainability standards,
retailers that are jumping in front of each other to,
I would hazard to say,
'green' themselves up a bit,
are making claims about what they can do to a buyer,
or what they can offer you as a buyer.
And we then respond to that.
You've probably heard in the news of late, unfortunately,
even access to water is becoming a huge issue
with respect to food and food production
and where it will occur.
And even fuel prices.
Fuel prices in 2008 when diesel had reached
about five and a half dollars
was really having a huge impact
on our ability to move fresh-cut greens and lettuces
from the West Coast to the East Coast
and moving these at a loss.
So these are just some of these issues
that are affecting production.
Some of the other issues that actually affect
Wisconsin pest management.
And specifically, my recommendations can even be
the major retailers.
You probably understand that,
that about 75% of us are fed by
about four principle retailers.
And number one, do you know who number one is?
- Walmart.
- Yes.
And since we're being taped,
I won't make any comment further.
(laughing)
But...
and when Walmart speaks,
growers will respond.
And so, if a major retailer says
that their now competitive advantage is
no detectable residues,
then the days of our ability to use an organochlorine
or a carbamate or an organophosphate
or an older insecticide
is generally done, is over.
So in many ways, that's not a bad thing.
And we have to learn how to use
reduced-risk insecticides or even biopesticides.
We export a lot of commodity.
And even a lot of our export buyers are
expecting and demanding safe products.
So again, our choice as far as a recommendation
is guided by the endpoint and the endpoint market.
And as I mentioned before,
water quantity and water quality is now becoming
a very significant issue.
It's becoming a very significant issue even in Wisconsin.
Interestingly enough,
a lot of the targeted water delivery systems
through drip irrigation and so forth,
afford us the opportunity now to even deliver
a novel pest management
through these types of devices,
which is actually a very good thing.
So this is really IPM.
IPM is the integration
or the approach that we take to managing a pest
is something we would call 'Integrated Pest Management.'
And it is the integration of
some or all of these approaches
to achieve a level of pest prevalence
at or below an acceptable level, right?
And the components of an IPM Program are,
first and foremost, that someone is out there
actually looking at the crop
and seeing that there's a pest present;
identifying that pest;
making a decision about what we should do;
then, intervening.
And thankfully, the majority of pest managers
in this country don't do the last three
and then I can have a job.
(laughing)
But in fact, they should follow-up.
They should learn whether or not
what course of action they took was appropriate
and then educate oneself.
And Vern Stern in 1959,
an entomologist, indicated that,
that IPM is really just an approach that applies
ecological principles in utilizing
biological and chemical control against insect pests.
Now Vern was probably the,
the instigator or initiator, if you will, of IPM.
But it has become more contemporary.
And now the Council on Environmental Quality
has gone so far as to say, it is an economically efficient
and environmentally preferable approach to pest management
that is regarded as a decision aide.
And by that, I mean
it's our choice to decide along that pinwheel
what components we put together to choose,
that are sustainable, environmentally safe
and socially sound.
So, that is really sort of what IPM is.
And I kind of want you to think about that,
and we'll come back to that later in the presentation.
So, now let me take you sort of
through a day in the life of a vegetable entomologist.
And when we manage a pest in a crop like potato,
we don't focus on every pest that's there.
We typically focus on the key pest.
And the key pests in potato are the
Colorado potato beetle, a potato leaf hopper
and colonizing aphids.
And we fashion our program around managing the key pests.
And we're gonna focus on one of those today,
and that is the Colorado potato beetle.
One of the first things that somebody has to do,
to some extent, as in this dialogue,
again, our war with insects,
is know your enemy.
So, we have to know the life history
and biology of this pest.
So right now, Colorado potato beetles are digging deep.
They're burrowing into the soil right now.
They're burrowing into areas outside the field under mulch,
under tree lines and going anywhere from maybe,
20 to as much as 30 inches deep.
Now they can average 6 to 12 inches deep,
but there are certainly insects that are getting that deep.
The reason being they're wanting to get ahead of
the frost line that develops.
If you try to over winter in the middle of that field,
you probably won't make it past
about the middle of January.
But, so most of the insects over winter
outside the field is adults.
They then emerge out of the ground
when the frost disappears
and they feel the warm rains
moving through the soil profile.
And out they come as adults.
And those adults really don't have
that much of an appetite.
They've been in the ground for all winter,
and they have just a little bit of energy.
And they have just enough energy to find
either a girlfriend or a boyfriend,
and then they lay the majority of their eggs.
And then once they've done that, those adults perish.
Those eggs hatch into small larvae,
and they feed for a period of about 20 to 25 days,
going through four larval development stages
which we call 'instars'.
And what you don't want them to get to is that
latter third or fourth instar stage.
Because that latter third or fourth instar stage
is very challenging to control.
And then, after they've fed a bit longer,
like all holometabolous insects
that undergo four metamorphic stages,
they pupate in the ground
and then they'll graciously re-emerge as adults
to continue that cycle.
Now, unlike their parents
who weren't that hungry,
these adults are hungry as the dickens.
And they will feed quite voraciously,
and they'll feed through July.
And then they'll finally continue feeding until
they see enough environmental stimulus,
declining daylight and declining temperatures,
and down in the ground they go again.
So we've learned about
the seasonal ecology of this insect.
They overwinter, in the spring they emerge,
they walk to the crop, they have,
it depends on the year, a couple of generations per year,
and the larvae have historically been the principle stage
that we have used insecticides to target.
But more recently, and since 1994
which was the registration of the first
neonicotinoid insecticide
which has very successfully killed almost all stages,
with the exception of an egg stage,
which is a non-feeding stage
this set of tools have been very successful.
So, I might ask the audience,
has anyone heard of a neonicotinoid insecticide?
Okay.
And keep your hands up if you've heard of it
in a good light.
That's what I thought.
And so, this is another way to look at this.
The above panel is the phenology of the adults.
The middle panel is the phenology
of the eggs that they deposit.
The lower panel is the phenology of the
small and then later, large larvae,
and then pupa in the ground.
And really,
the value of the neonicotinoid insecticides were
such that they could place them in the ground
at planting.
They would become water soluble,
systemically mobile, and move throughout the plant
and provide almost season-long protection.
In fact, they were registered in 1995.
And on this illustration you can see, here's 1995.
Well before 1995, this insect,
which on the poster children for resistant insects,
it sits next to diamondback moth
and Colorado potato beetle are
probably the two insects in the world
that have the highest potential
for developing insecticide resistance.
You can see that
before the registration of the neonics in '95,
growers might have been putting on as many as
10 to 12 insecticide sprays in a season
with an environmental impact quotient score of 4.7.
More is bad.
When the neonics were registered,
one single application in the ground,
problem solved.
Our EIQ score plummeted to 0.3.
So now, I was hired in 2006,
and I could argue that all hell broke loose,
because here we were
emerging back to using more pesticides.
And the reality is that we are having resistance
to the neonicotinoid insecticides.
But because of their broad-spectrum nature,
they're still a very valuable tool to have in place
for control of the other key pests.
And we're actually now able to fashion
pest management programs more contemporarily
that use these foliar-reduced risk insecticides
that can drop our EIQ score even further.
But I will say that a neonic is still
part of that program for the reason I just described.
So here's the group.
This is the Insecticide Resistance Action Committee's classification.
They are a group for a neonicotinoid.
And there are, well, you can see
even nicotine is in that group, loosely.
But the neonics principally comprise
about three principle uses,
or three principle registrations.
Clothianidin, Imidacloprid and Thiamethoxam
constitute the majority of national uses.
At the time they were registered,
they were unquestionably considered reduced-risk
because they were organochlorine,
organophosphate and carbamate alternatives.
And there is no question,
from acute and chronic deem analyses,
which are the manner in which
EPA evaluates the impacts of these,
these were by far worlds better.
They are effective and long-lasting systemic insecticides.
And in fact, right now,
this class constitutes as much as 25%
of the national market of pesticides.
Pesticides, not insecticides.
Pesticides.
A very used class.
So, what I mean by,
when we talk about systemic insecticides,
my point here is that
if you put this insecticide in the ground,
it will move acropetally.
It will move up the vasculature.
And the illustration on the right is just a label
that illustrates where the compound
is generally distributed.
And you can see it's not terribly evenly distributed.
But it is generally distributed through the plant.
So that's what I mean by an 'ease of use' is
that these compounds, again,
we went from 10 to a dozen sprays
down to one.
One at-plant spray.
1994 until now.
So we've had twenty years of use.
These in-furrow management approaches
have now been adopted
on over 85% of the acres in Wisconsin.
That's a very conservative estimate.
And I would say that, unfortunately,
there are really no products on the horizon
that have the same spectrum of activity or ease of use.
There's not that many products that are systemically mobile
and have that kind of residual activity for an industry.
These growers were seeing 85 to 90,
in some cases 95 or 100 days
of residual activity out of one application.
But because resistance is prevalent,
we're now having to switch away
from their use for targeting this insect.
But they are still in the system, remember?
Because they're successful against the other
key pests.
And I mentioned that, part of the reason is
just because of the decorated history
of the Colorado potato beetle.
This is just an illustration
showing you what the Long Island, New York populations
of Colorado potato beetle are capable of
when the initial carbamate carbaryl,
which you might know as 'Sevin'
was initially registered in 1957,
you can see it lasted quite a long time in New York.
It's a joke.
It lasted a year.
You can see actually Guthion,
which is azinphos-methyl, an organophosphate,
whoo-hoo, five years!
But other members that were registered
just in the few years that follow
had no chance.
And remember, the concept of sort of island
biogeography.
If you are isolating all of these genetics on one island
to have no opportunity for having susceptibles
come back into that population,
this is what you get.
And in fact you can see now down here at the very end,
the neonics, Imidacloprid and Thiamethoxam
lasted quite a long time, in fact,
on Long Island, against this insect pest.
This is just an illustration, if you go to this URL
of what the USGS has as far as
proposed estimates for use for one of those neonicotinoids,
and that's Clothianidin.
The leftmost panel is 2003.
The rightmost panel is 2009.
In a six year time frame you can see
that the extent of use of these insecticides,
I might go so far as to say, has skyrocketed.
Principally, these are seed treatments.
And I apologize if you can't see.
The lower panels show you by year and crop ID
what they're principally used on.
And the yellow bar there is corn,
and that is a corn seed treatment.
This is Thiamethoxam that has
a bit more of a broad registration.
And it is labeled on corn, soybeans,
and the red is cotton.
But potatoes and other veggies, I would say, pale in comparison
as far as the extent of use of these neonicotinoids.
And you can see they have a fairly extensive use,
nationally.
So, remember these are water-soluble
and systemically mobile insecticides.
And in Wisconsin, we're now having issues
with respect to groundwater quantity.
Groundwater quantity.
These conversations are going on even
in the Central Sands production area
about reductions in our water resource.
And there are many users, there's no question.
And we do have to ask the question about
how sustainable this resource is.
And really the focus that we have here.
And they will probably, or likely,
require complex solutions,
because water is a critical component
of the history and the future of Wisconsin.
There is no question.
And this is, if you were to Google
'water in Central Wisconsin',
some of the first hits that you might find.
And this is the Little Plover River in Central Wisconsin.
There's no question, this is unfortunate.
The industry is making attempts, make no mistake,
to remedy this.
And they recognize that they are in part liable for this.
And they are making those gestures.
But it was in about the third or fourth year of
my time here at UW
when we began the process of working more closely
with the Department of Agriculture,
DATCP, more specifically, the Wisconsin Department of
Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.
And with their laboratory, the analytical lab,
and I have to thank them significantly
because they were
initially the first set of individuals
that helped us to start to analyze these data.
We started to see in static water,
in static wells, the detection of these neonicotinoids.
And the detection at levels that ranged from
at the level of detection, which is about
0.05 part per billion,
upwards of about, I think here you can see
there is one that's at 9 part per billion.
These are low concentrations, there's no question.
But we began to see the contamination in the static wells.
And do understand that the Department of Ag
has set up over the years,
static monitoring wells for groundwater height,
but also for groundwater monitoring
associated with spills or exceedances.
So these are out of those groundwater monitoring wells.
These are some of those levels.
And you can see that some of these are
squarely in the area of
diversified vegetable production.
Some of these are squarely outside
of those areas, as well.
So, one of our research projects,
and I did not put Anders's mugshot here.
But Anders in the lab started to work on the question,
Can we change this?
Can we consider different use patterns
of these insecticides that limit
or abate the flow-through through the water column?
In fact, we thought that our ability to detect
soluble insecticide moving out of this system
might take as many as one or two years,
just because of the,
we didn't know anything about the solubility of these,
or not, nothing,
but we knew less about the solubility and
mobility of these compounds.
And what our interest was is that,
are there ways we can deliver these tools
and limit off-site movement?
And so, we were looking at things like
foliar applications, seed treatment applications,
the direct in-furrow application
which the majority of users will use or apply.
They don't do it by hand, by the way.
And then we were actually trying to
consider the use of a polymer that could,
whereby we could impregnate these compounds
and hold them in place.
And so, that was the first half of this experiment.
So, we were applying them in this way.
But in at the same time we were burying lysimeters,
burying lysimeters below the soil profile
to see if we can capture
the soluble insecticides
as they might be moving out of this system.
And so, that's the picture on the right
just to illustrate our experimental setup.
A potato plant and then a lysimeter
in which we hold it under a vacuum to draw,
you know, free water in the soil into or through it.
And then we would collect the water
at regular intervals over time.
I thought about not showing this figure,
but it's one of those situations where, like,
graduate students will always show you extraneous data.
It's almost like the,
"Look at what I did! Look at all of this stuff I did!"
Well, this is what I wanna show.
Digging these damn holes
and burying them three and a half feet
in the ground underneath potato hills was no small task.
A soil scientist would probably laugh at me at this point.
But this was a randomized complete block design.
Again, imposing these different delivery systems,
and trying to see if we could limit or abate movement.
So, these are the actual
in-plant concentrations of a Imidacloprid.
This is one of the neonics here on the left.
And Thiamethoxam, another neonic on the right,
applied in these different manners
as the impregnated polymer,
the in-furrow application, the seed treatment,
a side-dress application or an untreated control.
And thankfully,
our untreated controls were nearly zero.
That's an important point, nearly zero.
But you can see that in two years of this study,
2010 and 2011,
when you put a slug dose of insecticide in the ground
and the plant picks it up,
you initially get a high concentration.
And then as the plant grows
and there's less and less compound to pick up,
it slowly trails off.
So these are the in-plant concentrations
above ground that we would see.
I'd love to say that that polymer just shown out
as one that yielded the highest concentration
throughout the season.
But unfortunately, it didn't.
Again, remember the untreated control here is not zero.
I don't wanna say you could ignore the panel on the right,
but the panels on the right are just showing you
the cumulative inputs of water,
whether it was irrigation water or rainwater,
and then relative to vine-kill.
The inputs of water in both years were normal,
were normal for the production season.
The unfortunate part about this experiment is
over here on the right.
This is, again, Thiamethoxam and this is Imidacloprid
in two years, 2011 and 2012.
And the dashed line is the time of vine-killing.
That is when we kill the potato crop.
And these bars indicate the detection levels
in mean concentrations
in part per million of recovered pesticide.
And as you can see, they stayed somewhat low.
And about the time we vine-killed,
these came out of that system.
And they came through those lysimeters
within 115 to 120 days
and arguably surpassed it.
So, we did answer one question.
We know these compounds can move
more than 75 centimeters in a season.
And so, our question then was,
"Well, this might be a problem."
And in fact, this is now the emerging hypothesis.
And that is that the majority of loss
is later in the year,
not earlier in the year that we had originally thought.
And a lot of the product moves out of the system late.
And so, I'll go back to my comment about
the untreated controls not being zero.
Well, how could that be?
I mean, the untreated controls not being zero
would mean that "Oh, well. Okay, Russ.
"You've set up this experiment in a field soil
"where they've used these insecticides in the past.
"And what you're detecting is residual concentrations
"that are coming out of the system."
And that could have been the case.
So I asked Anders. I said,
well one other control that we should check
is that, this is in a commercial field
where we have an operating pivot.
I said, "We better check the operating pivot
"and make sure that that's a zero."
Unfortunately it was not a zero.
So, the Department of Ag continued their pursuits
after some of this work.
And they have now looked at
87 static well sites
where they've detected now
three of these neonicotinoids at, again
107 positive site year combinations.
45 Clothianidin, 90 Imidacloprid
and 138 detects for Thiamethoxam.
Maybe there's a little bit of good news here.
So, the Wisconsin Department of Ag would set up
a groundwater protection standard
as part of law in the state
and enforcement based on the
establishment of an enforcement standard.
And that is, again, based on
a daily consumption of about a liter of water
per 10 kilograms of body mass.
Think about that.
That's drinking a lot of water in a given day.
But this acceptable daily intake
would lead us to an enforcement standard of
120 part per billion of Thiamethoxam.
We're nowhere near this.
We're nowhere near these concentrations
in the groundwater.
And in fact, they would set up a preventative action limit
which is 20% of that enforcement standard.
So, the Department of Ag will not really react
to these concentrations until we reach or exceed
24 part per billion.
So from a human health standpoint,
maybe we can say that we're okay, now?
This is a question.
So, you probably are aware of the
geomorphology of Central Wisconsin.
I mean, the reason we grow veggies on sand
is because when the glacier receded,
it left this great inland lake.
And you probably do understand that
the Wisconsin Dells, right down here,
were created when this lake broke through
and drained.
So, veggies are grown on the
east side of the Lakeshore,
and cranberries are grown on the western shore
of the Central Sands.
This is a distribution of the high capacity wells
in Central Wisconsin associated with
most of our vegetable production.
And so,
because our untreated controls were not zeros,
we decided to ask the question,
"So, how extensive are these contaminants below ground
"in our operating pivots?"
And so, that's what Ben, again, in the goofy hat,
has undertaken to work on.
So he has actually, with consent, and this is important,
with consent of the Wisconsin growers.
I would hope to impress upon you that actually
Wisconsin agricultural producers are probably
some of the most forward thinking individuals,
I would say, nationally.
They recognize that there is a potential issue here,
and they are not trying to abate this work.
And so our question is, how much spatial variability
exists in these detects?
And how much annual variation exists?
So here we are, looking at three test areas.
The Antigo flats,
which is where we grow seed potatoes,
the Central Sands production area,
which is where the majority of intensive
vegetable production occurs.
Sweet corn, peas, carrots, onions, potatoes.
And then, the Lower Wisconsin River Valley also,
where some vegetable production occurs.
Here again, is a distribution of the high capacity wells.
It's to me, just looking,
it's amazing to look at this figure, I think.
And, but it is a testament to the extent to which
agriculture is an important component in Wisconsin.
And so, here's really our test areas
and where we have assayed these well clusters.
So, beginning in the fall of 2013,
we assayed 48 operating pivots;
in July of last year, 53 pivots;
in September of last year, 26 pivots;
and now in 2015,
that number is up around 75 pivots.
It's not 65, when Ben created this figure.
And so, this is just an illustration of
some of those detects.
Interestingly enough,
we have about an 85% detection rate.
So, out of about 90 operating pivots,
about 85% of those have detectable
concentrations of a neonicotinoid insecticide
moving through them during every irrigation cycle.
We have higher concentrations in
some of the northern production areas.
We have a mean that's a little bit less
in the central production areas,
and a mean that's even slightly less
in the southern Wisconsin production areas.
I would say the first principle of
being a plumber applies here,
and that is that poop runs downhill.
It's probably operative here.
We probably do have a dilution issue here
that is contributing to these lower overall detects
as we go down into the drainage basin
of the Wisconsin River.
If we even look a little bit further,
we can see that there is some
inter-annual variation associated with season.
We get a slightly higher concentration
during the production season.
In September, it's a little bit less, again.
But one thing important to note here is
we have clusters of wells that we're looking at.
And we can see a lot of variation
among or between clusters of these wells.
It's not homogeneous below ground,
which is somewhat interesting.
And then if we even look further, again,
with seasons superimposed
and the individual well IDs,
you can see there's a lot of well-to-well variation.
And to some extent, some seasonal variation
in those detects.
And really the next step in this investigation
is now to use what you maybe don't,
or what you're seeing over here on the left panel
is actually the USDA cropland data layer.
It is CropScape,
which gives you 30 meter resolution on crop ID
or parcel ID of 114 different land classifications
that can--
We will now begin the process of seeing
if we can see relationships between
the detects that we have
and the cropping history that we have.
This will be the starting
to get to a bit more of the punitive nature of
this kind of investigation,
because you might start to point at some crops
more than others.
And again, it is interesting
that seasonally, we see some variation.
I mean, individual wells from one season to the next have,
you can see one, and in some cases,
two orders of magnitude change in these concentrations.
So again, that might lead us to believe,
well, either there's dilution
that's washing the compound away,
or there's variation in the magnitude of input
of new concentrations of insecticide into the system,
which we don't know at this time.
So again, just to summarize Ben's work,
these insecticides have been, unfortunately, detected
at very low concentrations
in a vast majority of wells.
We do see some regionality with respect to those detects.
Somewhat higher in the, say,
the upper Wisconsin River watershed,
somewhat lower in the southern region
or the lower Wisconsin watershed.
Again, we need to learn
what sources of variation contribute to that,
those range of detects.
And again, our first approach will be to
look at the crop IDs.
And then temporally, we see a lot of variation
just from one season to the next of an individual well.
So, I'm gonna,
we're getting close to the end here,
but I want to tell you that these are
data that are provided by the Wisconsin Department of Ag
Trade and Consumer Protection.
This is an illustration of their exceedance
surveys that they've conducted from the mid '80s until now.
And I guess what I'd like you to understand is
that the legacy of agriculture is right beneath our feet...
...as far as the inputs that have gone into this system.
The herbicides, the nitrates,
the insecticides that we've talked about today,
and to a lesser extent, fungicides.
Do understand, this is not
an unbiased survey.
This is the Department of Ag's survey,
again, based on a spill or an exceedance.
And they only have certain protocols
for certain chemistries.
So I'm going to say this is a fraction of
what's actually down there.
So, to me, this is a bit of a challenge.
So, I said from a human health standpoint,
"We're in good shape."
So those of you that had your hands up
when I asked you about the word neonicotinoid
and then I asked you to keep your hands up
if you heard of it in a, maybe a good light,
all the hands went down.
This class of insecticide is being implicated
as far as issues with colony collapse disorder,
or bee disappearance.
Unfortunately, the feeding bio-assay studies
that can result in bee disappearance,
that phenotype results with feeding bio-assays
of one part per billion.
So, this is a challenge.
This is a challenge.
When the EPA reviews and evaluates
new insecticides and new registrations,
as they've always done,
they've historically looked at the acute
and to some extent, the chronic effects,
if they have the tools in hand to do that.
It's only now that we're realizing
the potential chronic effects.
The Deputy Administrator of EPA, Jim Jones,
has said that this could be the legacy issue of his time,
as far as these issues with bees.
And for sure, the EPA is reacting because
any time that insecticides are registered,
they go through a re-evaluation process
on some schedule.
The moment that the neonics were starting
to be implicated in bee declines,
they moved that schedule up.
And they moved that up, and they're under review now.
So, remember, we looked at this picture
at the beginning of the presentation.
I'm gonna argue that vegetable production
and specialty crop production in this country
is at a time where it's getting ready to change.
There's just not much water out here anymore.
There's increasingly changes in precipitation patterns
that are influencing the Pacific Northwest.
The boon or bust
meteorological patterns that South Texas faces
is a challenge.
Urbanization and salinity
are unquestionably affecting production in Florida.
And urbanization in the Delmarva
is quite a challenge.
Again, almost all of the canned vegetables
in the grocery store
come out of this area of the country,
and likely will continue.
And this is an issue that we have,
I'm going to say.
This is a point in my presentation
where if I'm talking to growers,
I'm going to say, "Well, call me, consult me.
"And we'll figure out better options."
I am gonna say that
solutions to these problems
have existed for decades.
With tools such as transgenic crops,
cisgenic approaches,
genome editing approaches now,
would completely have revised
that environmental profile,
those level of contaminants that we would have seen
associated with potato production.
Remember, 1992
was when new leaf potato was registered in Wisconsin.
1994
was when McDonald's declared it 'Frankenfood'.
And it was stopped.
So, there are solutions out there.
There are solutions that could have
some of the single greatest impacts
in changing sustainability,
I think, in agricultural production.
And still, we will not entertain their use.
These are the growers in Central Wisconsin.
These are the growers that
have to face the issue
of what to use based on what's currently registered.
And they are trying to do the right thing.
So, with that, I'll leave you.
And if there's time for questions, I'll take them now.
(applause)