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EPA announces further dicamba restrictions

Mar 21, 2022

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The new rules pertain to farmers in Iowa and Minnesota

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Farmers in two U.S. states will have additional restrictions placed on their dicamba usage this year.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published further label amendments for soybean growers on March 15.

The changes apply to Engenia by BASF, Tavium from Syngenta and Bayer’s XtendiMax dicamba products.

The new labels prohibit dicamba application:

On dicamba-tolerant crops after June 20 in Iowa;
On dicamba-tolerant crops south of Interstate 94 after June 12 in Minnesota (the cut-off date for land north of Interstate 94 remains June 30); and
When the air temperature is over 85 degrees at the time of application or if the forecasted high temperature of the nearest available location exceeds 85 degrees in Minnesota.

“These restrictions are intended to reduce the likelihood of volatility and offsite movement of over-the-top dicamba by avoiding application on days with high temperatures,” the EPA said in its ruling. “Among other requirements, the product registrants must add the amended labeling to their training and educational materials and disseminate this information to pesticide authorities and agricultural extension services to assist users in their local area.”

In 2021, the EPA received about 3,500 dicamba-related incident reports.

Of those, about 711 originated in Minnesota and 528 came from Iowa.

The industry needs to do all it can to ensure dicamba remains available in a farmer’s toolbox.

“We want to keep the chemical because it is a great chemical,” Bob Worth, chair of the Minnesota Dicamba Task Force, told WNAX Radio. “We just have to make sure it doesn’t affect somebody that doesn’t have that dicamba trait in their soybeans.”

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids