EPA Leadership States Movement Towards More Realistic Refinement and Use of Aerial Drift Model

EPA OPP Deputy Assistant Administrator Jake Li announced yesterday at the 2024 CropLife and Rise Regulatory Conference that EPA plans to schedule a workshop for growers and other stakeholders at the end of the year to explain its FIFRA risk assessment process. It will include a discussion of how EPA assesses off-target risks to endangered species. Li said that EPA is also looking at refinements to the process to reflect better real-world data. As part of those refinements, EPA plans to update how it assesses drift based on research and recommendations from NAAA to ensure that EPA’s AgDRIFT model reflects modern agriculture practices. This is welcome news to the aerial application industry from top leaders of the EPA office that registers pesticides. NAAA has been urging the agency for years to default to Tier 3 of the AgDrift atmospheric model used to calculate movement of pesticides in the environment applied aerially. Tier 3 of the AgDRIFT model takes into account more realistic conditions of pesticides applied aerially, such as larger droplet sizes, shorter boom lengths in proportion to wing/rotor span, and other variables that mitigate drift and increase the likelihood of a pesticide being available for aerial use sans overly burdensome and unnecessary label conditions. Hearing from top EPA political leaders that the default use of these more realistic conditions will be part of the calculus is promising and has been a long-sought goal of NAAA to benefit aerial application operations.