- Author: Cheryl A. Wilen
I think there's enough blame to go around on this one.
http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_c2#/video/us/2012/07/11/pkg-mn-lawn-accidentally-killed.kare
1. Employees should have asked the guy about what he needed to do
2. Employees should have some idea about the herbicides they are selling (or pesticides for that matter)
3. Customer should have read the label before using
4. Ferti-Loam should have put the information in a more visible place on the OUTER label. I'm sure other manufacturers don't do either. However, see #2 and 3 above.
Here are some tips so it doesn't happen to you:
Pesticides: Safe and Effective Use in the Home and Landscape
Also see the Pest Notes on Managing Lawn Weeds and Managing Weeds in the Landscape and Quick Tip about Weed Control using Herbicides. These are also available in Spanish.
From my perspective, the video was very short on any real information about what actually happened. The narrator and homeowner didn't mention any specifics about the herbicide in question. For the record, the two active ingredients in the herbicide product discussed in this video are glyphosate and prodiamine. Prodiamine does provide premergence control of many annual grasses and some broadleaf plants. However, glyphosate (which is also the active in Roundup)is a postemergence product that acts on a broad weed spectrum and kills emerged plants. The label on the bottle states right under the product name "Pre-Emergent & Post-Emergent Weed & Grass Control" - that seems pretty straightforward to me.
The video interview made the homeowner sound like a victim of circumstance but I see a person who didn't read the label and applied an inappropriate pesticide and killed his lawn. That's too bad for the lawn but the herbicide worked exactly as it was intended by the manufacturer. I thought tying this story about herbicide misapplication to cystic fibrosis (the guy had to cancel a CF fundraiser due to his terrible looking lawn) was poor journalism and a shameless misdirection from the main story.
I agree with Cheryl's main point "read the label". I would add that herbicides can be very effective weed management tools but they only can work as well as the the applicator allows them to.
"Read the label" does not seem to me to encompass the social and cultural expectations involved. The fellow did have an expectation that the product would be safe to use within that social context. He was mistaken, and good for the news service for taking a critical look at this case.
Regards
Dr David Low
The Weed's Network
weedsnetork.com
Your points about toxicity are tangentel to this story and perhaps a discussion for another time. I very respectfully disagree with your "social and cultural expectation" point because this was not about a social context - it was about a guy who sprayed glyphosate on his grass and killed it.
This really does seem like a case of "read the label" to me. The analogy that I see is the same as a person who puts gasoline in a diesel engine. Just because they have an expectation that all fuels are the same doesn't make it so. That gasoline will damage a diesel engine is not the fault of the fuel, the refiner or the car manufacturer, it just is - whether you've read the warning on the fuel tank or not.
Herbicides have different modes of action, use patterns and application requirements. If an applicator's performance expectations are based on the chemical and biochemical data that has gone into the label (a legal document), the chance for successful and safe weed control is very good. On the other hand, if he/she is uninformed but has performnace expectation based on something else, the results may be dissapointing and inconvenient (like this case) or something worse.