CropLife Retail Week: ESA Discussion, Grower Income in 2024, and MACA’s Bonnie McCarvel Announces Retirement
September 6, 2024 Eric Sfiligoj and Lara Sowinski talk about ESA rules, grower income, and the retirement of the long-time head of the Mid America CropLife Association.
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*This is a partial and edited transcript:
Eric Sfiligoj: Hello. Welcome to another edition of CropLife retail Week. I’m Eric Sfiligoj, Editor, CropLife and CropLife IRON. I am here again with Lara Sowinski. Lara, how are you doing today?
Lara Sowinksi: Well thank you. How about you? Welcome back.
ES: I’m doing good, as you may be able to tell from my shirt with the MACA logo on it, I was this week attending the Mid-America CropLife Association annual meeting, which took place in Bloomington, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis at the mall of the Americas.
I’ll have you know, and, that was that was an interesting walk. I don’t think there’s a store that is not represented at that place. It’s really quite fascinating, big. And your feet are very sore after walking around, for I probably did maybe a fifth of the mall, in my time there, but that was enough.
LS: Well, between, MAGIE and, you should have, logged about 100 miles or thereabouts.
ES: Right. I’ve got my steps, and that’s for sure. So, hey, one of the things I wanted to talk about, and again, I will share, I’ve got a couple of video clips from the MACA meeting, the annual meeting. But, one I’ll share next week, which is basically going to be talking about new opportunities for the ag industry, which and I got a nice clip for that one.
But the one that I wanted to highlight this week, again, I’m sure a lot of people in industry have been talking about the Endangered Species Act. ESA, and the new rules and regulations that have come down in the last month or so, from the government regarding what growers and their partners ag retailers are going to have to be doing going forward to be in compliance with all the new regulations coming into play.
So one of the speakers was Jeffrey Smith from Valent, and he was kind of talking about how ESA and of course, regulation that everybody in the industry is familiar with fifth row kind of, how they, how they kind of go together in this equation, but how they’re sort of, you know, opposites and, and have different, different motivations for being.
Jeffrey Smith: That in this case with ESA, the impacts go directly to the bottom of the rules. And they can be severely impacted. Also, there’s a competitive, scenario here where you’re on the cutting edge of these new mitigations. I’m going to talk about your new product coming out on the market.
And there’s 95% of all the other products don’t have any of that stuff. So all the new technology is getting hammered with new regulation, while the existing technologies are pretty much out there without any of those considered burdens. Right. So that’s a that’s a consideration you have to do as well. So I’ll just start quickly by saying, how did we get here?
So really what we have here is a conflict of tools okay. So first there’s the fifth row by rolling six seven points. So Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act which is administered by EPA. Okay. That basically gives EPA statutory authority to register pesticides, assuming they don’t have any, unintended adverse effect to the environment or human health.
They have to consider benefits, you know, because it benefits society benefits to yields. They have to do it in a timely manner where they’re supposed to. If what you prefer. And then you have the Endangered Species Act. The two laws were written without each other, that that law is administered by the US services we call them, and that is U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and also the National Marine Fisheries Service.
We call them services. So two different agencies, different intentions, different outcomes, different, different. Different really, you know, requirements. So what that that law is not a benefits based assessment. So hazard assessment in these words if there’s risk to any species and I say any species, any critter may be harmed by another agency’s action over the course.
In our case, 15 years of one individual listed species could be harmed by a pesticide application. In 15 years, they have to consult. EPA has to consult with the services. There’s two kinds of consultation. There’s informal, which is a few emails, phone calls and agreements verbally, and there’s formal consultation where the services have to right go through a long process.
They write what they call biological opinion. This is thousands and thousands of pages. Opinion. And then they come up with mitigation. The relief takes a long time. So there was litigation. There’s been a lot of litigation. The simple fact is that when it comes to section 72 of the Endangered Species Act, EPA simply, admittedly has broken the law for 50 plus years.
And there’s reasons for this. But think about if you’re in a courtroom and you’re the defendant, and the first thing you have to say in that courtroom is, yeah, we wrote law. I mean, that’s kind of a weak position to be starting out. So in most of these cases where these products have been litigated for not following the procedure of consultation with the services, we’ve been lucky in that the night court, someone might not courts in California has remanded that back to the DEA to do an assessment.
So it’s been kind of sued. So we’ve had products get sued. You go to court. Court said you have to take it back to EPA. Do we need to say, well, you can’t do that for over 1200. It’s it starts to get ridiculous and it’s in and the, courts are starting to say, you know, enough of that EPA.
You’re not changing your rules. We’re going to vacate. We’re not going to send it back to EPA to to fix it. We’re going to just take that registration. That’s what we do.
ES: So that’s what Jeffrey Smith had to say at the MACA meeting regarding the ESA and what it could mean for the industry. And then Lara, one of the other speakers in that tract was Stanley Culpepper from the University of Georgia.
I’m sure some of our viewers are familiar with Stanley, and he kind of talked about how, you know, individual growers are going to have to deal with some of these new rules and regulations coming down with the EEOC decision. And basically he said, you know, his the one takeaway quote he had was that this will require a decision by farmers on every field, not every farm.
So every single field they farm is going to have to require decisions tied to the EASA, mandate. And that is going to be, you know, is, as the industry adjusts, I mean, his takeaway overall was that the industry will adjust eventually, but that, you know, there going to be some growing pains over the next, you know, a few years is things start to come into focus.
LS: So the finalized herbicide strategy, as you mentioned, lots of questions still. And I’m glad you’re talking about it. I mean, obviously internally here, you know, we’re all, learning more about it and trying to determine, how people are going to respond to it. But exactly what you just said right now about it’s a a field by field, plot by plot type of, scenario versus a farm setting.
So, I think that alone and that’s it’s funny that you mention that because that’s exactly what I, I’ve been hearing. I’ve never heard as well that, yeah, it’s going to take a while to grow and growing pains indeed. Yeah. And and again, luckily some of this stuff looks like it’s going to be coming into play sort of year.
ES: But, you know, year by year over the next couple of years. So, you know, depending on if it’s a herbicide or insecticide. So there, there’s hopefully fingers crossed time for people to adapt but and adapt. But we’ll we shall see. And again always as always folks out there, you’re our viewers, you know, listen to our videos, pay attention to our website, and I’m sure life will be all over this as we move forward here in the upcoming months.
Just on that note, we’ll be having some guests drop in, a couple folks from CPDA. In fact, I’ve already been speaking to them. They’ve agreed to kind of drop in for our retail league recordings and, give us the latest and greatest as we go along. Yep. Very good. So here I’m going to kick it to you before we come back to me to share some other maca news.
LS: This past week, this was in the Des Moines Register, reported by, Danielle Eller. Somewhat of a bright spot, if you will. She writes that, the USDA has revised their forecast for U.S farm incomes.
It’s not going to be as steep as initially projected by the USDA. In particular, the USDA said this past week that it expects farm income to fall 6.8% to 140 billion for this year. Of course, corn, soybean and other commodity prices are, largely to blame. So the USDA’s revised projection for farm income, projects, a downward, reduction of 25.5%.
So, again, this was in the Des Moines Register. So, Iowa is the leading producer in the nation for corn, hogs and eggs, second in the nation for soybeans. And seventh, when it comes to cattle and turkeys. So, corn and soybeans or soybeans? Yeah. There’s no way to sugarcoat it. They’re going to be hit hard.
It’s, the livestock, segment. The is showing a little bit of, an improvement, even the price of eggs, for instance. Is going to kind of help offset. So, even with the improved forecast, however, the USDA said this year’s farm income will be 27.6% below the 2022 record high of 182 billion. Despite the decline, farm income this year, will remain above the 20 year average of 121.5 billion.
So, that’s, you know, some somewhat good, I guess, unless you’re, you know, in the corn and soybean business and, you know, we just had our late Labor Day break. Congress is heading back to D.C. They’ll have about ten days or thereabouts to pass the farm bill when they return. Oh, yeah. Let’s just hope they at least extend it.
So, you know, again, that was mentioned not only in this article from the Des Moines Register, but other things that I’ve written this week that that is just compounding. You know, kind of the paying for, for farmers that this, this farm bill is not, not being passed. And just one last item. Census statistics say that over the last five years, 140,000 small farms have closed.
So again, more, more reason to hopefully get lawmakers, together and resolve some of these outstanding issues that are preventing, passage of a new farm bill.
ES: Yeah, I know, I know that, a friend of yours, actually, Alex Dunn, the new head of CropLife America, was one of the MACA speakers, and she talked about what’s going on in DC and the level of concerns among growers in the agricultural community.
And, you know, she did mention that, you know, the 2024 election for president was a big concern. However, the need for a new farm bill outweighed that, like by a 2 to 1 margin, but based on their survey data. So, yeah, most people in the industry want a new farm bill. It just doesn’t seem like it’s very likely, given the climate in the Beltway at the moment.
So, you know, we’ll have to we’ll have to see if anything gets done. And or the very least if they extend it for another couple of months. But, you know, I know I had talked to someone earlier this year that, it would probably be spring of next year before we actually saw some definitive movement on a new farm bill.
So we will see that prediction comes to pass. Yeah, that probably sounds like the likely scenario. So yeah. So hey, I do have some I guess we call it melancholy news to share with everyone. For those again who attend the Mac meeting regularly, of course, we’re used to seeing the same folks that we’ve seen year in, year out who have always attended that meeting and been a part of this organization.
And of course, spearheading it all has always been the president of Mac, a Bonnie McCarvel who’s been heading up that association for, at least two decades. More so, I know I’ve been working with her for my 24 years in the industry, so, she has always been a fixture at that meeting. And when she was giving her annual state of the Association report at this year’s meeting, she announced that, she’s going to be calling it a career.
She is going to be retiring from MACA. This is going to be her last annual meeting. While she is going to be in charge of things. And I know again, for those of us who have worked and known Bonnie over the years, I mean, she is a very, very classy lady. You know, she’s helped that organization grow and continue to be relevant in the marketplace.
Everyone who is on the, you know, helps out is on the board. Those folks are very active in keeping the association moving forward. And, you know, those folks then take part in meetings years after that. They have, you know, retired from the board. They still attend the meetings because they want to be involved with the association.
And, you know, you know, a lot of that is because of Bonnie and her leadership, you know, and she saw a problem back in 2013 with, you know, recruiting young people into the agriculture. So with her, you know, with her motivation, MACA started the Young Leaders Scholarship Program, where they’ve been recruiting students from the land grant universities to come into the ag industry.
As a matter of fact, this year in the golf tournament, one of the gentlemen that I happen to golf with was, young leader scholarship winner last year. And now this year, he’s actually working at MFA, one of the largest ag retailers in our in our business. So, that program has shown definite benefits for companies looking for new talent, new blood to come into the marketplace.
So, and myself, you know, and and on a personal note, I know Bonnie’s been one of my best industry friends. I know when my son was born, she not only sent along a congratulatory email, but she also mailed me a farm book. That my son, basically read to shreds over the course of a couple of years when he was between the ages of five and eight, because it was one of those one of those children’s books on how farms worked.
And, he, he enjoyed looking at the tractors and the farmers and the farm animals. And he really, he really enjoyed that book. So, you know, from myself, you know, Bonnie, it has been a joy working with you these last two decades. I certainly, I on one hand, I’m very happy for you. You’re going to be able to enjoy some time to yourself and, you know, some time with your family and friends doing what you want to do.
But I know for those of us who are left behind, we will miss our, regular interactions with you. And certainly going to miss seeing you, you know, being the the leader at the annual MACA meeting. So, again, folks out there, if you know Bonnie McCarvel, we’ll drop her a line.
Bonnie, it’s been a joy working with these many years, and I hope I hope we continue to stay in touch down the line. Wow. Oh, gosh. Yeah. I don’t know if you remember Eric Bloom. I you did introduce her to me. We ran into her at a show, last year, so I did, thankfully get a chance to say hello and meet her and certainly wish, wish her the best.
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