As of last Friday (August 11), the Illinois Department of Ag had 214 official misuse complaints related to suspected symptoms or damage from dicamba application.  It will take some time for IDA to fully investigate all the cases.  IFCA stays in contact with IDA and as we learn of any trends or commonalities from the investigations we will keep you informed.  For our ag retail members, if you have questions about the misuse investigation process, please give us a call and we can assist you.  Bear in mind it can take weeks before IDA makes any final determinations on a case being investigated.   The result could be a case closed with no action taken, a warning letter or a monetary penalty depending upon the severity of the circumstances of each case.  

 

IFCA Dicamba Management Survey:  We want to thank our members who responded to the survey on dicamba management that we made available to our ag retail members.  We received over 120 responses to the survey, and closed the survey this morning.  We are very pleased with the response rate and also the time everyone took to add comments to the questions we posed.  The IFCA Board of Directors will evaluate the survey results, and will also sit down with the chemical manufacturers to determine what we've learned from successful and less than successful experiences with this new soybean herbicide technology, and where to go from here.  We will keep you posted and provide our members with a summary of the survey results in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, USEPA continues to evaluate the situation as well, and expectations are that they will provide some kind of indication of what may or may not occur with regard to the label on these products as the seed decisions for 2018 are beginning to be made by the industry.