GCSAA has joined landscape professionals, agriculture, and others in the fight to ensure that superintendents continue to have access to the plant biostimulants vital to golf course management.  Plant biostimulants help natural plant nutritional processes, which improves the health, growth and quality of turfgrass. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering efforts impacting how these important tools should be registered and brought to market.  If not done right, this could restrict access to valuable products such as seaweed extracts. That’s why GCSAA continues to work to ensure regulators get it right, including recent comments submitted to the EPA. 

As written, EPA’s Draft Plant Biostimulant Guidance has a number of concerns that could impact golf’s access to plant biostimulant products.  This includes the potential to classify biostimulants such as complex polymeric polyhydroxy acids and seaweed extracts as pesticides under the jurisdiction of the Federal Insecticide Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).  This could dramatically increase the cost of these inputs or even eliminate their availability altogether.  Our comments raised these concerns to the EPA. 

Review the Joint EPA Guidance Comments 7.25.19 submitted to EPA.

Congress, under the Farm Bill, required the US Department of Agriculture to also study biostimulants in order to recommend a responsible definition.  GCSAA supports this and will continue to fight to make sure that the feds get this right.

For questions, contact Bob Helland, Director of Congressional and Federal Affairs, at (800) 472-7878, ext. 3659.