LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – If a farm chemical is good enough to be used on one side of the 49th parallel, it should be good enough to be used on the other, say U.S. wheat growers.
At the urging of farmers from border states like North Dakota and Minnesota, the U.S. National Association of Wheat Growers approved a resolution calling on Canada and the U.S. to co-operate more in getting farm chemicals into the hands of producers.
The new policy says the two countries should share crop registration data to reduce the time and expense of product registration.
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Duane Grant, a wheat grower from Idaho and chair of NAWG’s crop protection committee, said it makes no sense that the U.S. does not recognize chemical registration data gathered by other countries.
“It’s all the same science,” he said in an interview. “It’s just a difference in governments and it really shouldn’t be that way.”
A number of farmers from the northern tier states complained to the crop protection committee that Canada uses a number of farm chemicals that aren’t available to them. When they see wheat that has been grown with the aid of those chemicals being imported into the U.S., they get annoyed.
Farmers end up paying
Grant said it’s wasteful for the registration data to be duplicated by regulatory agencies on both sides of the border and those additional costs are passed on to farmers.
“Our growing environments are pretty much identical, our markets are pretty much identical and our varieties are pretty much identical,” he said. “So couldn’t we share the cost of registering those chemicals and have the same list available on both sides?”
While the resolution doesn’t say that the same chemicals should be available on both sides of the border, Grant said the association would like to see moves in that direction.
