While you’re filling planter boxes, dust from seed corn and soybean treatments may be blowing in the wind — into your eyes, nose, maybe mouth and onto your skin. Concern over what EPA calls “fugitive dust” that now contains small active ingredient combinations of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, growth regulators and more has been documented by numerous research studies for the Pollinator Partnership’s Corn Dust Research Consortium, but for pollinators, not humans.
While you’re filling planter boxes, dust from seed corn and soybean treatments may be blowing in the wind — into your eyes, nose, maybe mouth and onto your skin. Concern over what EPA calls “fugitive dust” that now contains small active ingredient combinations of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, growth regulators and more has been documented by numerous research studies for the Pollinator Partnership’s Corn Dust Research Consortium, but for pollinators, not humans.
You may be more directly exposed to seed treatment dust than bees are, confirms Greg Roth, Penn State Extension agronomist. “It’s one of my worst exposures,” he adds.
That may be another reason why Bayer Crop Science, BASF and Syngenta are involved in the consortium and are developing new seed coatings. Talc and graphite are routinely mixed with treated seed to ensure uniform seed drop by planters. But these lubricants don’t necessarily reduce fugitive dust, according to the CDRC report.
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