hello I'm Shannon Farrell with the OSU
Department of Agricultural Economics
today we're going to be talking about
managing pesticides in Oklahoma
agriculture as part of our environmental
regulatory compliance for agriculture
project now this presentation is going
to be fairly short but there are a lot
of things that we could talk about with
pesticide safety we're really going to
talk about just the regulatory
requirements under fifra but if you'd
like a lot more information there's a
ton of resources available for you
through the OSU pesticide safety
education program and access those
resources all you have to do is go to
our website pests ed ok state edu a lot
of resources love information if you'd
like to get your certification to be a
pesticide applicator all that
information is available for you right
there pesticides and pesticide
applications are regulated under the
federal insecticide fungicide and
rodenticide act also called FIFRA and
what fit has is basically two big
requirements number one all pesticides
they're going to be sold or used in the
United States have to be evaluated by
EPA for their potential environmental
impacts their efficacy and dealing with
what they're supposed to deal with and
to help us understand the potential
impacts both to human health animal
health plant health and the environment
to their active ingredients once those
have all been analyzed and found to be
within the acceptable tolerances the
pesticide is registered by EPA part of
that registration process is that EPA
approves the labeling of the pesticide
and the labeling is very important
because the label is basically legally
binding upon the person using the
pesticide vivir makes it a violation of
its rules to use the pesticide and a
manner inconsistent with its labeling
and there are fairly significant
penalties and even potentially criminal
penalties if you don't follow those
label directions now the positive side
is that if we do follow label directions
and especially if we're applying a
pesticide on or near water and it's
labeled for that use we probably don't
have to have an npdes permit for that
application we talked about in DPA npdes
in another video module in this series
but we don't necessarily have to apply
for an environmental discharge permit
for the applique
pesticide and that can be a defense to
liability if there's potential dangers
or harms caused by that application but
that's not necessarily an affirmative
defense that we can totally rely on now
for you to be a pesticide applicator you
have to have one of two things in mind
number one if you have a non-restricted
pesticide and that will be indicated on
the pesticides label the general public
can use those as long as they follow the
label directions but there's a large
class of what we call restricted use
pesticides those pesticides are a little
bit more hazardous to handle and use
restrictor use pesticides can only be
handled by one of three classes of
applicators number one a commercial
applicator somebody who applies the
pesticide for other parties a service
technician the service technician can
apply the pesticides with the
supervision of a commercial applicator
and then we have a private applicator
that's someone who's applying the
pesticide on their own property for
their own uses now as we've mentioned in
other videos in this series unused
pesticides can be considered a hazardous
waste under both FIFRA and CERCLA not to
mention the ricker act as well so
whenever we have wastes that we need to
handle in terms of wastes one thing we
can do is triple rinse those pesticide
containers and again go to the pest ed
website for more information about how
you can properly triple rinse your
containers before discarding them
another very beneficial program that
we've got is the OSU unwanted pesticide
disposal program if you've got
pesticides that you've no longer need or
that may have gone past their effective
date you can use the unwanted pesticide
disposal program to make sure that those
pesticides go to the hands of a properly
licensed hazardous waste disposal
company and make sure that that absolves
you of environmental liability for those
disposals so fifra is both very simple
and very complex basically all that we
have to do under fifra as pesticide
users is make sure that we follow label
directions bearing in mind that those
label directions might indicate we need
to be a commercial applicator a service
technician or a private applicator and
then the other thing we need to do that
ties between fifth and Rick bruh is that
we need to make sure that we have proper
disposal of those unused or unwanted
pesticides so that we don't unwittingly
dispose of a
a substance and violation of rib rub
with that if you need more information
just go to our website at ok state edu
slash AG econ and you'll be able to find
these and more references in our
environmental regulatory compliance
project section thanks for watching
today
