(Jan. 24, 2020) - Each year brings new or changing regulatory requirements that keep almond growers on their toes. To help growers better understand how changing requirements impact them and their operation, experts covered the latest, most important developments related to crop protection materials and worker safety at The Almond Conference 2019 in Sacramento this past December.
Attendees of The Almond Conference 2019 had the opportunity to hear from California DPR Director Val Dolcini as well as AgSafe President and CEO Amy Wolfe on regulatory changes.
Among key things shared with growers was a warning to expect continued pressure – from both inside and outside the state – to reduce reliance on chemical pesticides, pressure that will mean losing some pesticides and more restricted use for others.
Panelist Val Dolcini, director of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, said the state is pursuing policies to “allow California to become significantly less reliant on chemical tools as the first line of defense against agricultural and household pests.”
“I’ll be using Integrated Pest Management [IPM] as a means of organizing the work of the department and as the foundation for closer collaboration with stakeholders, such as the Almond Board,” Dolcini said. “It’s important to stress that we can and will continue to deploy appropriate chemical pesticides. In fact, chemical pesticides are an important part of IPM. But we also need to include more biological controls, new cultural practices, softer chemistries and safe alternatives into our arsenal.”
Gabriele Ludwig, director of Sustainability and Environmental Affairs at the Almond Board of California (ABC), said the global landscape is increasingly limiting which pesticides California almond growers can use. She said growers need to be ready to meet the standards of every country importing almonds.
“The issue growers face is they have no idea where their nuts are going to go most of the time,” she said, explaining that the product of a single orchard can end up in several different countries after it is sorted for size and quality, intermingled during processing, or handed off to a broker.
A particular pain point for the industry is the European Union (EU), a major market for California almonds, which has been reviewing registrations of pesticides within the EU using hazard, not risk, criteria. Whenever the use of a pesticide is cancelled for use by European growers, a reduction in the tolerances (aka MRLs) to the limit of detection follows, affecting imported products. And, the EU does not account for how long a food product can be on shelves when making tolerance changes.
“Politically, they’ve made the decision that if it can’t be used by European growers, they don’t want the competition to be able to use it either,” Ludwig explained.
After discussing pressures on chemical use, the panel switched gears to cover trends in enforcement related to worker safety, new rules for reporting injuries and plans for new requirements involving lighting for night-time agricultural labor. Leading the discussion on worker safety regulatory developments was Amy Wolfe, president and CEO of AgSafe, a nonprofit that provides health and safety training to the agricultural community.
Wolfe said the most common citations issued to almond growers by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA) between September 2018 and October 2019 were related to heat illness regulations. Cal-OSHA cited 26 growers for heat illness compliance, more than quadruple the number of any other category, resulting in $112,785 in fines. In half those cases, the problem could be traced to not having a written safety plan on site, Wolfe said.
She urged growers to make sure they have written heat illness prevention plans, and that they post numerous copies of the plans conspicuously at worksites.
She also reported on passage of new laws, which went into effect on January 1, 2020, that change reporting requirements related to workplace injuries, such as requiring employers to report injuries that lead to hospitalization within 8 hours of the injury occurring. Growers can learn more about these new laws in this article from Wolfe published in West Coast Nut in Nov. 2019.
Growers interested to learn more about the information shared at this session are invited to view the session presentation here.
