The Environmental Protection Agency announced new measures to protect farmworkers from pesticide exposure, strengthening Obama-era rules by expanding restrictions to apply outside of farm boundaries.
A final rule published earlier this month reinstates rules from 2015 that extended the boundary for “application exclusion zones,” or areas where workers and bystanders aren’t allowed in when pesticides are being applied. Farmers are required to stop applying chemicals when members outside their immediate family are within the designated zone.
The new distance for “application exclusion zones” is 25 feet if farmers spray pesticides with medium or larger droplets from a height greater than 12 inches from the soil. For pesticides with fine droplets, the AEZ is 100 feet.
“Farmworkers help to provide the food we feed our families every day and it’s EPA’s job to keep them safe from pesticides,” Michal Freedhoff, EPA assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a statement. “No one should be at risk from pesticide related illness because of their job or where they live.”
The EPA also clarified that the AEZ can extend beyond a farm’s property. The boundary is based on distance from pesticide sprayers, and the AEZ is a sort of “halo” that moves along with equipment.
The proposal to extend AEZs beyond farm boundaries had received pushback from groups including the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, which called it an “unnecessary challenge to compliance and enforcement.”
By allowing individuals outside of farms to interrupt pesticide applications, farms could miss critical windows to protect their crops, NASDA added.
“[T]he pesticide handler will now become responsible for controlling the actions of individuals over which they have no control, or in some cases involving individuals harboring a specific intent to cause disruption to agricultural operations,” the group wrote in comments when the EPA first unveiled the proposal last year. “This can cause substantial enforcement challenges and is seemingly very unfair to the farmer or applicator.”
The EPA’s new restrictions, set to take effect at the start of December, revive several provisions of rules enacted in 2015 under the Obama administration. In 2020, the Trump administration looked to roll back many of those regulations by shrinking the size of the AEZ including for fine droplets, which tend to drift farther.
Courts halted implementation of the Trump rule following a number of lawsuits, and the EPA rescinded the rule in 2021 after determining the proposed regulation “weakened protections for farmworkers and nearby communities,” the agency said in a statement.