Glenn Grothman: Safe use of herbicide is anti-farmer.

Hi folks,

This week's puzzler.

Looks like a win for Glenn Grothman and Monsanto this week. Our boy will not let go of this herbicide business.

Here, chopped to the bones, is his argument:

1) Glenn believes the DNR is being too careful because it wants standards placed on the use of a particular herbicide

and

2) he didn't see anything wrong with letting Monsanto, the manufacturer, set the standards and run tests to see how much of own herbicide is safe to use

and

3) the DNR wrote a rule, based on its science, that would try regulate the amount of bad chemicals that could end up in well water,

4) Because the DNR wants these standards, Glenn believes the DNR is "anti-farmer."


THEREFORE: Glenn's assertion means that the DNR's attempt to protect farmers from chemicals in their well water is "anti-farmer."


You just can't make this stuff up.

I included a bit more of the article than usual in case some of you were tired of doing sudokus. ;^)


hiho
Mpeterson

Here it is:

The Capital Times
Herbicide rule killed
By Anita Weier
September 6, 2006

As expected, the Legislature's rules committee killed a rule proposed by the Department of Natural Resources that would have regulated the amount of the herbicide byproduct Alachlor-ESA in groundwater.

"We automatically object. We don't have to do anything," Sen. Glenn Grothman, co-chairman of the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules, said today.

The committee had favored a peer review funded by Monsanto Co., the manufacturer of the corn soybean herbicide Alachlor.

The chemical changes after it is used and breaks down into a byproduct that is more persistent, said Bruce Baker, deputy director of the DNR's water division. The byproduct has been found in 28 percent of wells around the state randomly tested by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture.

State scientists have said that Alachlor-ESA (ethane sulfonic acid) could cause anemia.

"No state in the country except Minnesota has any regulation of this chemical, and Minnesota allows twice the amount that Wisconsin proposed," said Grothman, R-West Bend. "The DNR has taken an extreme anti-farmer position."

A letter from Natural Resources Board Chairman Gerald O'Brien to the committee co-chairmen said that the board "continues to believe the standard for Alachlor-ESA is needed and appropriate."

"We are also concerned that the option presented by the committee will not allow a standard to be set, and needlessly leaves families and their children who get their drinking water from a well with no allowable groundwater standard for a chemical byproduct that has been shown to have adverse health impacts in lab rats," O'Brien wrote. "We already have wells that exceed the standard the board proposed."