Drift Complaint and an Inspection at a Pick-Your-Own Orchard
In late June a 45-acre pick-your-own apple orchard in Addison County sprays a restricted-use pyrethroid for plum curculio. The owner's new employee, hired three weeks earlier, mixes and loads at 6:00 a.m. and sprays the block nearest the property line while a 6–8 mph breeze blows toward a neighbor's cut hayfield. The employee has had no handler training, wears a long-sleeved shirt but no gloves, and posts re-entry signs only at the farm stand, not at orchard entrances. By afternoon the neighbor calls the Vermont Agency of Agriculture about cupped, distorted leaves along his field edge. The owner has product application records but no training documentation. The label requires gloves, a 12-hour restricted-entry interval, and posting or oral notification of the REI for workers.
1. Sort the facts into (a) apparent label or regulatory violations and (b) poor practice that is not automatically a violation, and explain the basis for each call.
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Apparent violations
- No gloves. The label specifies gloves; any use inconsistent with the label is a violation under FIFRA, and state law adopts the label as the standard. This is the cleanest violation in the file.
- Untrained handler. Mixing and loading an agricultural-use product makes the employee a handler. Handler training must be verified before the work, and the owner's own certification does not substitute for that. The employer failed to verify training.
- Notification of the REI. Posting only at the farm stand gives no notice to workers or pickers entering the block. Where the label or the notification option requires posting or oral notice, that duty was unmet.
- Off-target movement causing injury. Even if the label has no drift clause, an application that damages a neighbor's crop supports a negligence finding, and many labels prohibit application under conditions that allow drift.
Poor practice, not automatically a violation Applying with a breeze toward the property line, starting at 6 a.m., and not calibrating are not per se unlawful - but they are the facts an investigator will use to show the applicator failed to exercise reasonable care. Do not confuse the two lists when you respond to the agency.
2. The inspector asks for records. What can the owner properly be required to produce, for how long, and what does the absence of some records mean for the case?
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Produce, for the block sprayed: product name and EPA registration number, amount and rate, date and time, location, target pest, applicator identity and certification number, and the equipment used. Restricted-use application records must be kept for two years under federal rule, and WPS-related records (handler training verification, application and REI information) carry a similar retention period. Vermont may add requirements - confirm with the Agency of Agriculture rather than assuming the federal minimum controls.
What the file shows is uneven. The product records let the agency reconstruct rate and timing, which may actually help the owner if the rate was correct. The missing training documentation, by contrast, is not a paper problem: it converts a defensible 'we followed the label' position into an admission that the handler was unqualified on the day of application. Records you cannot produce are treated as work you cannot show you did.
Practical point: retain the label in force on the application date, the weather record, and the sprayer calibration log. Those three documents are what separate an unavoidable drift event from a careless one.
3. What should the owner do in the next 48 hours about the neighbor and the investigation - and what should he not do?
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Do: secure the block so no one re-enters before the 12-hour REI has run, and post the entrances at once for any later application. Write down everything while it is fresh: start and stop times, wind speed and direction, temperature, nozzle selection, pressure, boom height, the exact block boundary, and the distance to the neighbor's edge. Photograph both sides of the property line. Pull and file the label and the calibration record. Cooperate fully with the inspector, and answer questions about facts, not about fault.
Do not: contact the neighbor to negotiate silence, offer payment in exchange for dropping the complaint, or ask the employee to sign a backdated training form. Each of those turns a civil drift complaint into evidence of obstruction or falsification, which is far more serious than the drift itself.
Then think forward: the neighbor's hay crop may be salvageable or not, but the applicator's exposure is mostly about the untrained handler and the absent notice. Get the employee trained properly before any further work, re-brief the crew on posting, and add a wind-speed cut-off to the spray decision so the same set of facts cannot recur.