- Welcome, everyone, Wedne I'm Tom Zinnen. e Lab.
I word 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,
the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and UW-Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at The Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Paul Koch
of the Department of Plant Pathology here at UW-Madison.
He was born in Rochester, Michigan
but soon thereafter moved to Grafton, Wisconsin
where he went to high school.
He got his undergraduate degree here at UW-Madison
in horticulture and soils.
He also got his Master's degree here in plant pathology
and his PhD here in plant pathology.
Tonight he's gonna be talking about something
near and dear to a lot of us here in Wisconsin
and that is that lovely green apron
around our houses and schools and public buildings,
the lawns and urban landscapes
that make our place a little more enjoyable
to live in and around.
He's gonna be talking about a greener future,
Strategies for Developing Reduced Pest Management Plans
for Urban Landscapes.
Please join me in welcoming Paul Koch
to Wednesday Nite at The Lab.
[applause]
- All right, thank you for the introduction, Tom.
This is great to be here talking with everybody here tonight
about some of the research and the extension
that we do in my lab.
I have a three way split in my appointment.
I have 70% Extension appointment,
a 20% teaching actually and a 10% research,
but just because I have a 10% research
doesn't mean 10% of the time is devoted to research.
Obviously, we have a lot of research going on,
but that Extension component drives a lot of what we do.
A lot of the research that we do,
we want to make sure that we have
a direct outreach component,
so I'm looking forward to talking to you
all about some of the different things
that we do in my program.
Tom told me this is a group that likes data.
Unfortunately, I'm in my third year.
We don't have a lot of data
to present to you in my third year
so we'll talk some general data from EPA tests
that have been done, and then we'll get into
some more of targeted field research,
and then at the end we'll talk about
one of our Extension initiatives
that we are in the process of developing.
I can't tell if tonight's crowd is truly interested
in this topic or just will do anything
to get out of watching the debate at 8 o'clock tonight.
[laughter]
Speaking of debate though,
this topic, pesticide usage in lawns,
is oftentimes a controversial topic
and certainly it's very emotional to different people
and what we try and do in my program
is take the emotion out of it as much as we can
and focus on the science and focus on the data.
With that, I know, I've already had conversations
with people in the room who just flat out
don't like turf grass.
That's fine.
I don't have any personal connection to turf,
but turf grass landscapes
do make up some of out iconic places
both here on UW campus, obviously Bascom Hill,
centerpiece of the college game day show,
centerpiece of campus.
When people, when alumni leave this campus
and they come back 20, 25 years later,
they probably think of two place.
One is the Terrace and two is probably Bascom Hill.
This is an iconic spot on campus
and you can go to 100s college campuses
around the country, around the world,
you go to cities all around the world, those urban centers
where turf grass plots and urban landscapes.
I don't want to just focus on turf grass.
We'll focus mostly on turf tonight,
but urban landscapes in general, so turf, trees, flowers,
all that is important for well-being.
Obviously, they play an aesthetic role
but there is reams of studies that show
increased mental well-being, decreased crime,
increased oxygen production, decrease noise,
increased cooling as it relates to parks,
especially as we get into urban centers.
So, we're gonna go throughout most of this talk
assuming that attractive
and functional turf grass landscapes
are an important part of urban centers.
I know everybody doesn't quite agree with that 100%,
but that's what the beginning point that we're going to make
in the talk tonight.
What do I mean by functional?
Functional means that they need to be used for something.
So, I fully support, in certain environments,
putting in natural systems, prairie plants,
other plants like that, but for our purposes here tonight
we're looking at something
that can be used by the general public.
So, obviously we have a lot of these sites around campus.
In Wisconsin, Wisconsin has a booming golf business as well
and obviously those are made up of turf grass as well.
This is a picture of Erin Hills, which next year is going to host
the U.S. Open Golf Championship which is a huge,
one of the biggest golf tournaments in the world.
It will be an economic engine.
You're gonna be hearing so much about it in the next year
that you're gonna be really sick of it by next June.
Then of course, we also have sites like this.
Some of the most iconic sports sites in the world
are made up of turf grass here in Wisconsin.
Unfortunately, the team isn't living up to the billing
as much as the iconic frozen tundra here at Lambeau Field,
also represents some of those turf grass landscapes
and urban landscapes here in the state,
and it's not just the huge iconic ones.
It's also the sports fields that our kids
and our grandkids play soccer on,
that our pets run around on and that sort of thing.
I think for most of us, though, it's not those city parks.
It's not the golf courses and it's not Lambeau Field
or Miller Park or whatever
that really are the sweet spots related to turf grass.
Really, it's these sorts of pictures.
So, I make two priorities whenever I give a talk.
I try and provide accurate information to our clientele,
and I try and get my dog in every single talk that I give.
So, here's Steve hanging out in the backyard
and I think this is what most people value
their urban landscapes for the most,
is having an attractive, a functional place
where they can hang out with their family
and certainly, we moved into our new house
just a couple blocks west of Madison High last summer
and one of the reasons we bought the house
is we loved the backyard, and obviously as you can tell here
Steve loves the backyard as well.
Even though these are important places to us
they do carry some causes for concern related to inputs.
So, I know this doesn't play well
on Wisconsin Public Television
but we're gonna play a little bit of a game here real quick.
Everybody knows the association game, right?
I'm gonna have a word come up here very shortly.
I want you to all respond with the first thing
that pops back in your head.
Just feel free to go ahead and yell it out.
Everybody ready? Everybody ready?
All right, so here it comes.
Bad, I think I heard poison in there.
So, when I give a talk to the general public,
and I've given something related to this talk
to a lot of general public groups around the state of Wisconsin.
That's typically the first thing that pops out,
some sort of toxin or poison,
something that is very bad and very harmful.
But, if I give this talk or some relation of this talk
to some sort of industry group,
usually the first thing that pops in their head
is some sort of protection.
So, protection from disease, protection from a weed pest,
protection from an insect pest.
A lot of these pesticides are important
for how they do their job whether it's producing food,
or in my case, whether it's producing
these attractive functional landscapes
that many people demand.
With relation to pesticides, I think for the most part
most of our modern pesticides
do not have a high acute toxicity.
When I talk about acute toxicity,
if you have a single exposure to them
you're not going to be significantly injured.
A lot of those older pesticides,
we'll talk about some of those older pesticides that were very harmful.
You have one exposure
and you'd have significant neurodevelopmental damage
or pass out or start vomiting.
Most of those have been taken off the market,
so I think the largest concern
with the pesticides on the market today
as far as fear from the general public
is related to more chronic exposures,
things like cancer development
or things like neurodegenerative disorders,
that sort of thing.
And so, one of the tests that the EPA has put into place
to try and get at some of that
is related to endocrine disruption.
We'll talk a little bit more
about the dose making the poison in a few slides,
but endocrine disruption is basically hormone disruption.
So, the endocrine system is analogous to the hormone system
and very small perturbations in this endocrine system
can result in very large injury to the body,
both in the short term and especially in the long term.
This is especially true in developing organisms,
so typically children have an outsized impact
when their endocrine system is perturbed,
and this endocrine disruption was brought to wide publicity
following the release of the book Our Stolen Future in 1996.
Our Stolen Future did for endocrine disruption
really what Silent Spring did
for more general environmental chemicals back in the 60s.
So, we'll just kind of focus on endocrine disruption here
for a few more minutes.
So, the Food Quality Protection Act was passed in 1996
unanimously by the Senate, if you can believe that,
100 to nothing.
The Food Quality Protection Act was passed in 1996,
was the largest shuffling of how pesticides
regulated in the United States since the 1970s.
One aspect of that Food Quality Protection Act
was that it mandated all pesticides
be tested for endocrine disruption.
So, that was in 1996.
The testing is just been getting going
in the last couple years, so it really took almost 20 years
of work by toxicologists and endocrine specialist
to develop the sort of testing that would be
both practical and they could test chemicals
at a somewhat reasonable rate, and also impactful,
that they could make a difference
by the results of these tests.
They listed, in 2007 or eight I believe,
an initial list of chemicals, 52 chemicals.
Now, these are not all pesticides.
There are a lot of other environmental chemicals
that are on this list, and just in June of 2015
they released the tier one results
for that initial list of chemicals.
What do I mean by tier one result?
There's so many chemicals out there that they want to test,
they want to do some sort of prioritization,
so the Tier 1 test is a series of relatively cheap
and relatively quick tests that they are conducting
to see which are the ones that have the highest likelihood
of impacting the endocrine system.
They use a weight of evidence approach.
What I mean by a weight of evidence approach
is they have several different assays that they run
on each chemical.
These assays have particular redundancies,
so there's not just one assay they run
for the endocrine system.
For Tier 1 they have eleven different assays they run,
and multiple tests test for disruption
to the estrogen system or estrogen pathway,
multiple tests for disruption to the androgen pathway
and the thyroid pathway.
So, they're trying to not just use one test for each one
because those of us in any biological system know
that you can oftentimes get conflicting results.
If you have just one test,
one chemical might test positive for it,
or that same chemical might test positive on a related test.
They want to have all this different sorts of assays
providing feedback and then using that feedback
to try and give a high confidence result
and if these chemicals should then go on
to do Tier 2 testing, and then Tier 2 testing
is the more stringent, more expensive,
more involved testing that will get even deeper
into whether some of these chemicals
truly do have endocrine disruption.
The full results of all 52 chemicals
can be found on the EPA's website.
I'm not gonna expect everyone to remember that website
but if you just Google EDSP, which is the abbreviation
for endocrine disruptor screening program
and Tier 1 results, it should be one of the top hits
that come up, and there's a big long sheet of pages
for each one of these chemicals on that website
and they can give you the full results,
and there is of course,
they provide a nice little summary page
so you don't have to read all 65 pages
for each individual chemical.
You can just read the summary page
that gives some of those results.
So, I do want to touch on
that weight of evidence approach again
before I move into just a couple of the results.
So, this is the full list of the Tier 1 assay results
that the EPA conducts for their EDSP, the Tier 1 EDSP.
Some of them are very simple.
This ER Binding assay, all that is
is does a pesticide or does another environmental chemical
bind with an estrogen receptor?
They're testing for both agonism and antagonism.
An agonist would be a chemical that would bind
and increase the rate of production of estrogen
from this estrogen receptor.
An antagonist would do just the opposite,
so they want to test for both,
but this ER Binding assay very simply just tests for
whether the chemicals bind to the receptor.
Same thing for the AR Binding assay,
that's the androgen receptor
related to testosterone production.
So, then we have all these series of assays further down
that are little more what I would call end-point based.
So, I'll focus for just a minute here
on the Hershberger assay.
What that is, that is an assay
that is related to the androgen receptor.
It's related to the androgen pathway
and it's not just a simple receptor based-assay.
What it is, though, is it's an end-point assay
so they would administer whatever chemical
they're trying to test, typically to rats,
and then after a certain period of time
they would harvest and weigh some of the organs
that are related to the androgen receptor.
These are typically referred to as accessory sex organs.
These can be things like the ventral prostate,
seminal vesicles, similar organs to that,
and if they see significant changes in weight up or down
related to their non-treated controls,
then that might indicate that that particular chemical
is a disruptor of that particular endocrine system.
So, they do all these tests.
Some of them are yeses. Some of them are nos.
Some of them give conflicting results,
and then they take the results
from all those eleven assays together
and they make their final recommendation.
So, for some of our important or widely used chemicals
in the urban landscape market,
one of the most important ones is 2,4-D,
widely applied as a selective herbicide.
This is the herbicide that gets rid of the dandelions
in the yard but doesn't kill the grass.
The results from their tier one testing
is there's no convincing evidence of interaction
with the androgen, the estrogen,
or the thyroid system.
They recommended no further testing
as far as endocrine disruption.
This does not mean that 2,4-D
does not have any toxic properties
or that it's a completely safe product; it is not.
As far as endocrine disruption is concerned, though,
this particular chemical does not have any concern
from the EPA's point of view.
Glyphosate, Round-Up, huge product,
been in the news a lot lately after IARC's characterization
as probably causes cancer.
They're a group 2A classification.
Again though, from an endocrine disruptor standpoint,
no convincing evidence of interaction
with androgen, estrogen, or thyroid systems,
did not recommend further testing with Tier 2.
What about Imidacloprid? This is a neonicotinoid insecticide
getting a lot of press along with
the other neonicotinoid insecticides
because of pollinator mortality and pollinator toxicity.
From an endocrine disruptor standpoint, though,
again there's no convincing evidence
of interaction with androgen, estrogen
or the thyroid system,
did not recommend further Tier 2 testing.
All right, so you might think
well, theses assays just don't work.
They're saying everything's fine. That's not the case.
If we go to another insecticide, Carbaryl, the brand name Sevin,
this is one that did have some interactions.
It's not as widespread as we might think.
No convincing evidence with estrogen
or thyroid pathways in mammals or wildlife,
but there is evidence that there's potential interaction
with the androgen pathway in fish.
So, there's some clear evidence that this particular chemical
does have some interaction with the endocrine system
especially in fish.
They do recommend further Tier 2 testing
with this particular chemical.
It's on a chemical by chemical basis.
This Tier 1 testing, if it doesn't have any interaction
or has very low interaction,
it goes through this Tier 1 testing,
it does not go on to further testing.
In some cases they did have interaction
with Tier 2 testing and now they're going on further.
There's another list of chemicals
that they're in the process of testing.
I haven't seen that the results
from that second list of chemicals was released yet.
So, you might think, then,
that I think that pesticides are totally fine.
This is gonna be a pro-pesticide talk
and that's not what it is.
I don't think pesticides are fine.
I don't think pesticides are horrible.
I think each pesticide should be judged individually.
In my opinion is I've talked with more and more people
about pesticides.
There's a bit of a disconnect.
So, I go to the Society of Toxicology annual meeting
every year, and a couple years ago they had a symposium
and the symposium was titled
Impact of Pesticides on Neurodegenerative Disorders.
I do a lot of pesticide work.
This sounds like a highly interesting symposium.
So I go to this symposium, it was a half-day symposium.
There was three or four researchers presenting
extremely compelling evidence that this pesticide
did cause significant neurodegenerative complications,
but the entire four-hour symposium was on one pesticide,
and that one pesticide was DDT.
Now, DDT is an important pesticide,
but it was banned in 1972 or 1976.
Now, this chemical can last in the environment
for a very prolonged period of time,
but has not been used in the United States since the 1970s.
So, the general public though,
if there was a journalist at this symposium
that was gonna write up an article for the newspaper
on this symposium, they certainly wouldn't title it
DDT Causes Neurodegenerative Disorders, they would title it
Pesticides Cause Neurodegenerative Disorders.
And so, I think that's a little bit unfair
because DDT has been around since the 1940s,
product of World War II research,
and we know that it has horrible environmental consequences
and we know that it also has significant human
and mammalian toxicity as well.
I think the disconnect is people see any pesticide today,
let's take for example Heritage.
Heritages is a fungicide that is typically sprayed
a few times on a golf course in a given year.
It's also used in fruits and vegetable production as well.
The active ingredient is azoxystrobin.
This is a chemical that is an analog of a natural compound
that's produced by mushrooms in the environment
to basically fend off other mushrooms.
It's a natural based fungicide.
It has been labeled as reduced risk
by the Environmental Protection Agency
but when people see that Heritage is a fungicide,
meaning that it's a pesticide,
the initial inkling, the first gut response
is that it's no different than DDT.
It's as toxic as DDT.
It's gonna cause all the same problems that DDT cause,
and in my opinion this is as misguided
as saying that a 1956 Buick Skylark
is gonna produce the same amount of air pollution
as a 2015 Toyota Prius.
We have older pesticides that do have
significant environmental and human toxicity problems,
but we also have newer pesticides
that don't have a lot of those same problems.
Now, I'm not saying Heritage can be sprayed everywhere
and has absolutely no problems at all.
It does have some environmental concerns,
but to group modern pesticides
that go through some of the modern testing regimes
with the ones that have been around for a long time
I think doesn't make toxicological sense
and I think leads to some of these large-scale bans
that we're seeing over continents, over countries,
and increasingly coming in to the United States.
So, Canada for the most part has banned synthetic pesticides
on amenity turf grasses, so mostly lawns.
They have not banned them for the most part on golf courses
although they are restricting pesticides,
at least fungicides for their use on golf courses.
Connecticut is a state that has banned
synthetic pesticide usage on any public school grounds,
so public school playing fields,
and the most recent large or high profile one
was Montgomery County outside of Washington, D.C.
banning all synthetic pesticide usage
on lawns in Montgomery County.
Again, my point here is not that all pesticides are good
or that all pesticides are bad,
that there are some pesticides
that are less harmful than others
and we want to make sure that we're focusing
on using some of those lower impact pesticides
as opposed to the older ones.
So, I don't promote the wide-scale ban of all of them.
If you talk to people in Canada
where this ban has been in place for a few years,
they're having difficulty maintaining
the level of landscapes that people had come to expect up in Canada.
I haven't heard any word from Connecticut
or from New York state which is another one
that has a lot of pesticide bans in place
on those landscapes, because those bans
have just gone into effect in the past year or two,
so we'll see what the impact is moving forward.
So, this all comes back then
to this sort of dilemma of the modern American lawn.
If we look at some stats, 83% of Americans
felt having a lawn is important.
It's tough to get 83% of Americans to agree on anything.
This Harris Poll in 2015, same poll,
71% of Americans felt that maintaining a lawn
helps maintain a community standard.
I know I talk with people almost every day
that do not agree with this
as far as it relates to a turf grass lawn,
but there are a large majority of people in the country
that do feel this.
Paul Robbins is the head of
the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
here at the University of Wisconsin.
He wrote an excellent book called Lawn People.
I don't agree with everything that he wrote in the book
but I do agree with a lot of what he wrote in the book,
and one of the points from his book
is that the majority of surveyed respondents
felt that neighbor's lawn care practices
had a positive impact on neighborhood pride.
A lot of that actually, when you delve into it,
a lot of that comes back to property values,
but it is a point of this sense of community,
that we want our neighborhood to be this sense of place
and the lawn comes into that
just like other parts of a house do.
I don't see the lawn as necessarily
anything terribly different than keeping the house painted
or if the window breaks making sure that window is fixed.
I think the lawn plays into the overall aspect
of how the home relates to the rest of that community.
A couple more points from Paul Robbins' book then,
a different survey that he did in the book,
he noted that people have significant anxieties
about lawn chemicals, but it does little to change
their behavior as it relates to chemical use.
I like that term anxiety because I pick that up
when I talk to people as well.
People want their lawn to look nice.
Most people want their lawn to look nice.
That does not mean most people don't want
every single possible weed taken out of that lawn,
but they want that lawn to look nice
and it's very difficult in many cases to do so
through organic or no pesticide practices.
The easiest and the cheapest way to do it
is to typically apply some sort of synthetic pesticide.
So, they realize that these pesticides
can have some significant environmental
and human health or pet harm if applied improperly,
but they still want their lawn to look nice.
There is this anxiety here, and they give three reasons,
or Paul give three reasons in the book
about why it does not change their behavior.
One, they have trust in professional applicators.
In many cases, this trust is valid.
Most of our professional turf grass applicators
are highly effective and are good at what they do.
We do have, as in any profession, we do have some bad apples
that don't really know what they're doing, to be perfectly honest,
and they misapply some of these products
and I think it's important that moving forward
we have some way to make sure
that those who are applying chemicals improperly
are corrected in what they're doing.
Two, obviously, have hectic lives.
There's not a lot of time to go out there
and spend time pulling weeds
or going and spaying stuff ourself.
Tom was talking about rushing around
picking up his kids from hockey practice today.
Everybody has a different aspect to their life
that is highly hectic
and if they can put the lawn care away
and have somebody else do it, that helps free up time
for other things, and again that third point,
it comes back to maintaining this neighborhood norm,
maintaining this sense of place
that a lot of people feel that their lawn
is an important part in maintaining this community.
All right, so in my mind after I read Paul's book,
I thought this offered up an opportunity.
The opportunity was we start with
people want to have high quality lawns, not perfect lawns,
but most people want to have high quality lawns.
That's important to people, but they also want--
There's a desire to do so
with a lower environmental impact.
In my mind, that's where the opportunity is.
So, the title of the talk today then
was how do we set up reduced risk strategies
for pest management and urban lawns,
and if we're gonna talk about reducing risk
we first have to define what risk is,
and so risk is a toxicological equation.
It's the foundational principle of toxicology.
I think many people have heard of the risk equation,
and risk is equal to hazard times exposure.
So, hazard would be analogous to toxicity,
so the more toxic a compound is
the higher the risk for injury is.
The more exposure to a particular chemical,
the higher the risk for injury is.
This comes back again to where toxicology was founded,
and the father of toxicology is Paracelsus.
I think he lived in the 1500s
and he came up with the statement,
"Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison.
"The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy."
If we Twitterify that, we come down with
the dose makes the poison.
So, this is a very well-known phrase
and so if we want to reduce risk then,
we have to do one of two things
if we're gonna use that equation.
One we have to reduce exposure.
So, these guys are doing a poor job of reducing exposure.
This is a picture from I believe the 1920s
of Bordeaux Mixture being sprayed on a golf course,
very poor job at minimizing exposure.
We can minimize exposure in my mind in two ways.
We can spray only when we need to,
and only where we need to.
Those are the two easiest ways to reduce exposure,
or not spray at all.
Then, the other part of that equation
is the hazard part of that equation.
We want to spray compounds that have a lower toxicity
or a lower impact, so how do we go about doing both
of those things?
So, very briefly, how do we go about reducing exposure?
Again, we want to spray only when we need to and only where we need to.
This comes down to what we generally call
integrated pest management, or IPM.
This is a concept that has been around for several decades.
It comes, gets a different name every now and then,
but basically it's managing the plants the right way,
making the plants as healthy as possible
so they are better able to fend off pests
and we don't need to spray pesticides often.
So, this lawn right here has not had pesticides applied.
It is a very healthy, dense lawn.
This lawn is not gonna have any weeds.
There's nowhere for a weed to come in,
very unlikely that this lawn, if properly managed,
will have many insect problems.
Also very unlikely that this lawn
is going to have a lot of disease problems as well.
If we manage the lawn the right way
and if we manage our plants in general
if you're talking about potatoes,
if you're talking about cranberries, apples,
manage those plants the right way,
you can significantly reduce the amount of pesticides
that are applied.
Of course though, when we're talking about
lawn care management, it's really impossible for us
to go around and talk to every single homeowner
around the country and make sure
they're managing their lawn the right way,
so that's why pesticides, again,
are usually the most effective
and the most efficient and the cheapest way
to manage some of these pests that come in.
The other important thing to do
is to know the biology of the pest that you're managing.
So, if you are managing a particular insect pest,
let's say a white grub, you need to know the biology
of that insect pest.
If you are gonna use an insecticide,
and pesticides are a part
of integrated pest management, IPM,
if you are going to use an insecticide,
you apply that insecticide at the proper time
so it does its job.
The worst possible thing you can do when using a pesticide
is to not know what you're doing with that pesticide,
apply it at the wrong time
so that you put a pesticide into the environment
and you haven't done anything to control the pest.
So, that's really the worst possible thing
that we can get out of this, and then we want to make sure
that we're not having residues rub off of the lawn
onto people that are enjoying the lawn,
and that's why these signs are up.
These signs are up, these landscape signs are up
to try and keep people off of that lawn
until the pesticide one, has dried on the leaf,
and after a period of time
will become what we call dislodgeable.
So, typically over a period of time
the pesticide absorbs more and more
into the leaf blade itself.
And even if you roll around in it all you want
you're just not gonna get that pesticide off there.
That's what we call a dislodgeable residue.
So, within 24 hours a lot of that pesticide is dislodgeable.
Within 72 hours the vast, vast, vast majority
of that pesticide is dislodgeable.
On home lawn landscapes, this sign needs to be kept up
'til sunset the following day,
so that is typically almost always at least 24 hours.
On school grounds that pesticide sign
needs to be kept up for 72 hours.
All right, so if we sort of implement
as many of those practices as we can
to limit our exposure as much as we can,
that addresses the exposure part of the risk equation.
We also want to address the hazard part of the equation.
This is actually a tougher thing to measure,
a much tougher thing to measure.
One way we can do it is we can go by
the actual amount of active ingredient
that we're putting out in the environment.
So, we have two insecticides here.
One is Merit.
The active ingredient is Imidicloprin.
It is a neonicotinoids insecticide.
The other one we have here is Acelepryn, that's another insecticide.
Acelepryn came out in the last few years.
Merit came out I believe in the 80s or the 90s.
Merit is not a particularly acutely toxic product
to mammals, has a high bee toxicity,
but not a particularly acute mammalian toxicity rating,
but it does have a much higher level of active ingredient
that we're putting in the environment
in a typical application than compared to Acelepryn.
So, Merit's formulation contains 75% active ingredient
whereas the Acelepryn contains about 18%.
So, we can't just measure a compound's hazard
by the amount of active ingredient,
because getting back to that risk equation
there's both the hazard and the risk exposure.
So, even if you put out a very small amount
of the product into the environment,
there still can be some hazardous component of that product
and that's where we get into some of these other models.
So, pesticide toxicity is very complex
as we take into account leaching, impact on fish,
impact on birds, all this sort of different things,
and it's difficult to sort of calculate
exactly where the toxicity is.
So, a certain compound might be toxic to fish
but not to mammals.
Another compound might be a significant leacher
into groundwater.
Another one might reside up in the thatch,
so it's difficult to really give
one description of toxicity of a compound.
There's some of these models that try
and incorporate several different factors of toxicity
into one number.
IPM Prime out of Oregon state is one.
It's site specific so it's not really gonna be of use to us
in some of our work.
The pesticide load index is what the European Union uses
to calculate the tax on pesticides, especially in Denmark.
The Environmental Impact Quotient is one that was developed
out of Cornell University that tries to
take into account everything, and then the Hazard Quotient
was developed by some weed scientist,
and this focuses specifically on acute mammalian toxicity.
So, we have worked mostly with
the Environmental Impact Quotient,
which is EIQ, short for that, and then Hazard Quotient,
which we abbreviate as HQ.
All right, so whatever we do with any model that we use,
there's always some level of criticism.
So, we were trying to find models
that would be effective for us
and we're still always looking at new models
that might provide some benefit to our operations
and I kind of chuckled when I came across this tweet
from Jessica Rutkoski.
She's a plant breeder from Cornell University.
She put this out last spring.
I especially like the bottom quote.
Remember that all models are wrong.
The practical question is how wrong do they have to be
to not be useful.
So, keep this in mind as we try to use these models.
Every model that we've been looking at
has some sort of drawback, but I do think
they do provide use in trying to assess
the level of toxicity of some of these compounds.
I told you before that we've just been going
for a couple years.
We're just starting to gather some preliminary data
into some of our deeper, in-depth research
and I'll just touch on what some of that research is
in a minute, but we have gone about conducting
some very quick, applied research
using some of these products that we labeled
as lower risk, lower toxicity products,
and if we're gonna control pests in the lawn
we have three that we're gonna focus on.
Three weeds, creeping charlie, dandelion, and crab grass.
Those are the three weeds that the majority of people
would like to at least see suppressed in the lawn
and then we have one primary insect pest, white grubs,
that can cause some significant damage as well.
If we can suppress these four pests,
we're gonna go a long way towards providing
high quality landscapes for the public.
We did do what we called
our reduced toxicity herbicide trials.
We looked at several different herbicides
and herbicide mixtures and tried to assess how effective
they would be out in the landscape,
and so it's a pretty small study.
We started this in the fall of 2015.
Fiesta is an iron chelate product.
It's really the only pesticide that's available
for landscape use in Canada.
Tenacity is a reduced risk herbicide from Syngenta.
Quicksilver is another compound that has very low AI usage.
A.D.I.O.S is actually just sodium chloride which is salt.
At 20% or less it is an OMRI certified herbicide.
Defendor is another low impact product
that we've been testing.
Turflon Ester is a product that's been around for a while
but is one that does have
comparatively relatively low impact,
and sort of the positive control in the study
is the three way mix, Trimec 1000, which contains a mixture
of 2,4-D, dicamba and MCPP, and if we go over here
and look in the right two columns,
if we focus on the hazard quotient
we see that with some of these products,
sort of the more natural compounds,
the sodium chloride and the iron chelate,
this HQ, this hazard quotient rate is actually quite high
and the reason it's quite high is the hazard quotient
takes into account rate of application
and both of these have very high rates of application.
They also have some decently high acute toxicities.
But if we look at some of these other products,
to the synthetic products, and they're not OMRI certified
but these are synthetic products.
They have both a low hazard quotient and also a low EIQ
especially when we compare it to this three way mixture.
So, how then have these performed?
We're still collecting all the results
and analyzing the results,
but just a real quick visual show
of how some of these products performed.
On the left we have the non-treated control
which is filled with dandelion and clover
and creeping charlie and all sorts of weeds,
and then we have our positive control,
the one we would expect to do quite well,
that three way mixture of three different herbicides,
but if we go and we look at
some of these other lower impact pesticides,
some of them worked and some of them didn't.
Here's Fiesta, that iron chelate.
This one did not work terribly well
and if we talk to our counterparts in Canada,
this product is not very effective
at suppressing weed pests in lawns in Canada,
and we see the same results here in our trial.
If we look at Turflon Ester,
this is another lower impact chemical
and this one is performing well.
Again, we're not getting complete 100% control of all weeds.
We are suppressing weeds to the point
where we still have a decent landscape
that will be suitable for most people's situations,
certainly compared to this where eventually over time
this one will continue to thin out
and eventually will probably down to
some very thin, creeping weeds
and probably quite a bit of soil involved in that as well.
Defendor is one of the product that has worked very well
in our trials and other trials as well.
Again, this is working quite well,
almost as well as that three way mixture,
and the environmental impact of that chemical
is significantly lower, so there are some options here.
I'm not the only one that's done this research.
My colleague here at the University of Wisconsin
in soil science, Doug Soldat,
has worked with the same product, Defendor
with specific action on dandelion,
and as you can see the product is effective.
It's a low impact product.
It's still effective.
For those that want to suppress
some of the major weed pests on their lawn in Wisconsin,
not eliminate every single one, but suppress them,
this is a potential option for doing so.
All right, if we look at grub control then,
really our major insect pests, we have two.
I've kind of presented a case-by-case,
a side-by-side comparison of Merit,
that Imidacloprid product, and then we have Acelepryn
which is the chlorantraniliprole
is the active ingredient of that product.
So, the pros of Merit, you have flexible application timing.
It's a highly effective product against grubs.
Acelepryn, also highly effective.
It's also effective on other insect pests as well
even though white grubs are gonna be
certainly our most significant pests.
That EIQ rating that we talked about before,
Acelepryn is a much lower impact product.
It's also a much, much lower acutely toxic product.
Perhaps, one of the most beneficial aspects of Acelepryn
is that it is not labeled as highly toxic to bees,
whereas Imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid,
has been labeled as highly toxic to bees.
I talked to an etymologist just today
and he said the only way
that you're gonna kill a bee with Acelepryn is if you take the jug
and you hit the bee over the head with it.
It is a relatively, essentially non-toxic chemical
as it comes into contact with bees.
The downfall with this product, it's expensive
and that's what we see.
A lot of these lower impact products are more expensive.
They're newer products and it's a trade-off
if you want to pay that premium
to have the lower impact pest control.
So, what are we doing about it in my lab,
this sort of how do we produce quality landscapes
and at the same time reduce the environmental impact
of those products used?
Here's my Motley Crew of my lab.
We did get a little bit done at this lab meeting,
I guarantee you, despite it being on the terrace.
We did get five minutes of work
and then we moved on to other things
and some of the things that we're focusing on
that maybe Tom will invite me back in a few years
and we'll talk about some of the results
and have some really nitty gritty data up there
and we can all debate the graphs and all that sort of stuff.
I don't have the results for this now
because we're just starting to collect preliminary data
that we'll then use to generate some larger grants.
One of those studies is looking to the fate
of applied pesticides in varying environments.
This is mostly pesticides applied to golf courses
and how they react during the winter,
so that's one area that we're focusing on.
The impact of various lawn pesticides
on the soil microbiome.
We know that microbiome is sort of a hot area in biology
and medicine in general, and so we're getting into that
with what impact these various lawn pesticides have
on the soil microbiome.
Do they have a negative impact
on some of our beneficial microorganisms,
and if so, how can we mitigate that impact
so we protect the beneficial organisms in the soil?
Another area that we're working on is then
kind of almost the opposite side of that same coin,
the impact of soil microbial activity
on pesticide metabolic production.
So, if we change the microbiome
by putting down a pesticide,
how does that changed microbiome then feed back
and break down the pesticide?
Do we still get the same metabolites? Do we get different metabolites?
If we do get different metabolites
are they more or less toxic than what we're seeing originally?
So, those are some areas that we're just starting to get into
and I think they'll be fun pieces
to talk about in a few years.
As I mentioned earlier,
I do have an Extension component as well
and as part of my Extension program
we are in the process of developing a new initiative.
We're calling this initiative The Common Ground Initiative.
So, just a couple pieces about what this initiative is
is it is still in the development phases,
but what we're looking to do is we're looking to calculate
the average level of pesticide usage on Wisconsin turf grass
and when I say average level of pesticide usage,
we're gonna calculate the average level
of pesticide usage and the level of environmental impact
with some metric, whether it's EIQ,
whether it's Hazard Quotient, whether it's something else.
We haven't come up and determined that yet.
We'll split up golf, athletic turf and home lawn
because they're very, very different aspects
of the turf grass industry, and again,
we're gonna go ahead and calculate
that total active ingredient and environmental impact.
Then, what we're gonna do is we're gonna come in
and we're gonna use science based research
to create a target parameter in both active ingredient
and environmental impact relative to that statewide average.
So, when I talk about science based research,
I'm talking about some of the direct trials that I just showed you,
research that we've done at Wisconsin,
research that other places have done
that show that some of these products, these lower impact products
can provide effective landscapes.
We don't want to make sure that we're only promoting
products that are not gonna perform well
out in the real world.
That doesn't do them, us, or you any good,
so we want to make sure
that we're still producing quality landscapes.
Then, after we have that target parameter set
we will invite turf grass managers to participate
in our initiative.
So, this will be people like golf course superintendents.
This will be people like lawn care operators,
potentially public city park managers as well
if municipalities are interested in joining up as well,
and we'll help them promote their efforts.
So, the more specific goals of the initiative
are to provide incentive to use
some of these reduced toxicity products.
Right now, products are selected
on the basis of two factors, price and efficacy,
so how much does it cost and does it work?
We want to add in sort of a market-based incentive
to take into account toxicity and impact
of that product as well.
We also want to help the industry market and document
their reduction efforts.
If every company does this on their own,
I feel that's less impactful if the industry as a whole
is banding together to show their efforts.
We also want to help the public
find turf managers that are using reduced toxicity programs.
So, if you want to hire a lawn care service
and it is important to you to have a lawn care service
that uses reduced-toxicity products,
what we would plan to do then is those turf grass managers
that are participating in our initiative
and that have a program that meets our target parameters,
we would publicize their efforts on the website
so all you have to do,
rather than call individual lawn care companies
is you would go to the website and you'd see
this particular company is participating in this initiative.
This is the name of their program
that meets their target parameters.
I'm gonna call them up
and ask about that particular program.
And then we also want to keep the public well informed
so they aren't swayed by misinformation.
We are not gonna post a whole lot of new information
on pesticide toxicity and research and all that.
There's a lot of great resources online.
We want to make sure that we are pointing people
to the right ones, the ones that include
science based information and results.
So, we are working with a group called Sustainable Stoughton
down in Stoughton, as you might guess,
and they have a park down there called Racetrack Park.
Anybody familiar with Racetrack Park in Stoughton?
They're a group that contacted us.
They were worried about pesticide usage in their community
and they wanted to see some sort of change
so they actually contact their city park manager first
and the city park manager came and contacted us
because he knew we were working in some of this reduced toxicity work,
and so at Racetrack Park they have this complex
of four softball slash baseball fields.
So, what we talked to Sustainable Stoughton
and we talked to the Stoughton park department
about letting us use this park as sort of a demonstration,
so we kind of numbered these four fields
and we managed them in four completely different ways.
So, we have one that we agreed that we would manage
as an organic field, so we only used organic fertilizer.
We used a chicken manure fertilizer, Chick Magic,
and we used this Fiesta herbicide,
this iron chelate herbicide
which is OMRI-certified as organic.
We also have field number two,
which we consider our IPM plan
was sort of our recommendation for how we would recommend
Stoughton manage their parks and manage these fields.
Use a slow release, natural fertilizer,
and then one of these lower impact products, Confront,
which is the same product as that Turflon Ester
that we showed in that one trial.
Then, field number three was
what the city of Stoughton currently does
which is fast release synthetic fertilizers
and that three way mixture of herbicide.
This was called TruPower 3.
There's a lot of different types of that three way mixture.
And then field four was nothing.
Don't do anything. Just mow it.
So, we're just finishing up the second year of this study.
We're just starting to get more and more results in.
Again, I don't have graphs or pictures to show you.
I will say there are some significant differences
developing between this plot.
I will just tell you that
the organic plot does look pretty good,
but we also need to take in cost of management
into account when we're talking about public facilities,
and the cost is prohibitive for that organic management
according to the city of Stoughton.
The IPM plan and their current plan
for the most part are fairly similar.
We do see some more weeds in the IPM plan
than with what the current plan is
but again, it's a trade-off.
What do the Stoughton city residents want?
Do they want absolutely no weeds?
Do they want the highest quality?
Are the willing to give a trade-off a little bit
by using some of these other products?
And that's not something
that we are trying to sway people either way.
Our job, in my opinion, is to provide individuals,
families, municipalities, lawn care managers,
golf course superintendents with the conditions they want
and try to get them to that point
using the least impactful products that are possible.
So, more information will be coming out
on this demonstration and this initiative
in the next couple of years.
So, just a couple of summary points here.
I feel that reducing the toxicity of the compounds
that we currently use is important
for reducing non-target impacts.
So, if you are somebody who is concerned about that,
if you're anxious about that chemical usage
and you want to go a different path
then there are opportunities for you to do that
and there are tools that exist
to help accomplish that right now.
It's not some far off future thing
where we need to develop brand new chemistries
and breed new grasses and all that sort of stuff.
That stuff would be great and that'll be important for us
moving forward, but there are some tools that exist
to help right now.
I also feel that environmental impact
should be taken into account along with price
and efficacy when selecting a product
and with that, this is my contact information.
Feel free to email me at any time with any questions.
Every time I give this talk,
whether it's to a professional group
or to a public group, I get some great feedback,
so I welcome any feedback that you have,
positive, negative, ideas on stuff that you'd like to see
as part of the initiative, please do go ahead
and either give me a call or write me an email.
I do have one of our websites up there.
I also oversee a turf diagnostic lab.
This turf diagnostic lab, in my mind,
is a great IPM tool for managing landscapes.
If you have a problem with your lawn
and you want help figuring out what it is,
rather than just kind of going and spraying
a bunch of different pesticides seeing if that will work
you can submit a sample or call up
our turf grass diagnostic lab
and we'll help you work through that problem
and typically with no pesticide recommendations,
unless that's what best fits your needs.
We are also working on a Common Ground Initiative website.
We're hoping to have that up in the next week or so.
With that, I thank you again for attending tonight
and for your attention.
I'll sign off here and then I'll stick around
if anybody has anymore questions.
Thank you. [applause]