Atrazine and Water

First, a little perspective. Think for a moment what it would be like to drink 21,000 gallons of water a day.

What?

If a person drank that much water laced with 3 parts-per-billion atrazine (the EPA maximum limit), every day for 70 years, he or she still wouldn’t reach levels of exposure shown to have any effect in laboratory studies. That’s because the 3 parts-per-billion threshold has a 1,000-fold safety margin, meaning it would have be 1,000 times stronger than that to risk posing a danger to people. Any discussion of finding traces of atrazine in water should be seen through this.

So any atrazine that gets in water has been measured repeatedly as being so miniscule, that it is not a health risk. And make no mistake—atrazine is measured constantly by federal and state authorities, university researchers, advocates of various descriptions, and especially by us, the farmers who use it.

There isn’t a more thoroughly examined crop-protection product on the market that we know of.

And when you think about it, why wouldn’t a farmer want anything they have invested their hard-earned money in to stay on the field and continue to work for them – rather than running off of it? Of course they do.

The AMP program shows that atrazine levels in raw water, atrazine concentrations declined significantly between 1994 and 2006 at 103 frequently monitored sites. This is due in large part to farmers’ use of best management practices such as buffer strips (plantings used to separate crops from waterways).