### N AFO - pesticide pe rmit development Steen, Ellen

to: Allison Wiedeman, Jack Faulk, Jordan Page

02/11/2010 04:17 PM

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A llison, Jack, and Jordon:

Thank you all very much for your time last week to meet with th e National Alliance of Forest Owners (NAFO) to discuss the pesticide permit development as it relates to silvicultural pestic ide use. The NAFO team found the discussion very informative and useful. I hope it was helpful to you, too.

The NAFO team is working on two "action items" to follow up on that discu ssion. The first is that we will provide you with a narrative description of the practical reas ons why pesticide deposition into ditches is often "unavoidable" in order to effectively target the "pest" (veget ative competition) during herbicide application to managed forest land s. We hope that this will remove any lingering qu estion that silvicultura l herbicide application, in addition to insecticide use, should be covered under the general permit (that is, coverage should be available for forest landowners who conclude that, for their operations , a "discharge" is likely and coverage is desired). The second "action item" is that we are gathering data from the largest NAFO member companies on how many application sites would be captured if site-specific information (e.g. in an NOI) were limited to application sites above several hypothetical acreage thresholds. We sugge sted an application site thre shold of 250 acres in our meeting, and we believe that most if not all of the larger landowners wo uld have sites of this size, but we will provide more specific information. As we discussed at our meeting, our goal is to find some way to limit the number of application sites for whic h a landowner would need to provide site-specific information (location description, map, etc.) in an NOI and other submissions, to avoid situati ons in which landowners must provide dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of maps and other records along with their permit submissions.

I also made a note that we should provide you with good sources of information on fore st land ownership. You will find some good information at the Forest Inventory a nd Analysis Program website: http://www.fia.fs.fed.us/

, including a downloadable pdf copy of the National Report of Forest Res ources 2007 (which is undoubtedly too large to attach to this email). Th is report, particularly pages 19 to 22 (on Forest Ownership), 58 to 66 (on Timberland Area), and 67 to 69 (on Planted Forests and Pl antations). These sections provide a lot of data on acreages of various types of forest land and the type of ownership (public, corporat e private, and noncorporate private) in which those acreages are held. I don't see any specific discussion of pesti cide or herbicide use in the report, but it certainly gives a good pi cture of the acreages and numbers of la nd owners involved. Tables at the back of the report provide good back-up numbers for the narrative discussions in the text.

A nother useful resource is: Brett J. Butler, Family Forest Owners of the United States, 2006: A Technical Document Supporting the Forest Service 201 0 RPA Assessment. Here is a link/URL: http://nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/gtr/gtr_nrs27.pdf . This includes a lot of information on family forest owners (a subset of noncorporate private owners), including numbers of owners with various si zes of land holdings. One interesting statistic here, for example, is that 928,000 family forest owners reported hav ing applied chemicals to their lands within the past five years prior to the survey. Our NAFO team tells me th at they understand the reference to

"chemicals" to mean pesticides.

We have already had one follow-up meeting among the NAFO team, and we are working to have our homework back to you by the end of February. When we provide th is additional information to you, would you also like to have any additional information from us on silvicultural "best management practices" for pesticide use? We have provided you with a compendium of State BMPs. I know EPA's current thinking is that BAT would be quite general and would not specify particular control measures. But please do let me know if it would be helpful for us to provide details on the particular cont rol measures that are typically used (and that we would expect to see in 

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A gain, many thanks for your time and for all your ha rd work to come up with rational permit requirements.

Ellen

Ellen Steen
Crowell & Moring LLP
1001 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20004
Direct: (202) 624-2539
Mobile: (202) 236-1300
Fax: (202) 628-5116 

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