Atrazine Water Information

First, a little perspective. Think for a moment what it would be like to drink 21,000 gallons of water a day . . . for 70 years.

What?

If a person drank that much water 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.
Click here to view an article that puts this into perspective.

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 causes, including farmers who want to ensure safe and continued use of atrazine.

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 the field into the water? It is in the farmer’s best interest to use best management practices to ensure atrazine stays out of surface water.

The AMP program (an atrazine monitoring program) shows that atrazine levels in raw water, 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).