Kim Erndt-Pitcher has been the director of ecological health at Prairie Rivers Network since 2023, and she has worked with the non-profit for the last 14 years. Her work at the non-profit, which started in 1967, includes biodiversity, ecosystem health, pesticides, and pollinator habitat conservation.
"Well, I've always wanted to be an ecologist or biologist and my love for nature and growing up in Appalachia mountains has made me amazed at the world that we live in, wanted to study it and work to protect it," Erndt-Pitcher said in a phone interview with WVIK on Tuesday. "I've been working in conservation my entire career."
In 2018, the non-profit formed the Tree and Plant Health Monitoring Program. Through the program, they studied the damage to non-target broadleaf plants, meaning net-veined leaves and trees in over 40 Illinois counties.
"For tissue analysis, we have collected over the past six years a total of a 127 samples of leaves," Erndt-Pitcher said. Almost all the samples tested positive for traces of herbicide.
She was joined by Martin Kemper, co-author of their study called Hidden in Plain Sight, a retired Illinois Department of Natural Resources biologist.
He started noticing changes in trees in 2015 when photographing oak trees.
"I began running into some problems finding leaves, specifically
oaks, that were not damaged," Kemper said in a phone interview with WVIK on Tuesday.
Kemper joined Prairie Rivers Network back in 2018 to assist with their work on the matter. He says the leadership, guidance, and funds for tissue analysis piqued his interest in collaborating with the non-profit.
"Being a biologist was sort of a natural fit for the kinds of things I was trained to do over the years," Kemper said. "I had the photography equipment to do photo documentation of the foliage and some database skills that also helped, [such as] compiling and analyzing the data and summarizing the data later on. So those things came together to help be useful in this regard."
Kemper and other PRN volunteers noticed that the broadleafs at the 280 sites they visited were curling, signifying a chemical change. He says that out of the 40 counties visited, all but one tested positive for herbicide damage.
The herbicides include 2,4-D, dicamba, atrazine, and others. They are used to kill broadleaf plants sprouting in agricultural fields, and atrazine is used to maintain cornfields.
The samples they collected were sent to South Dakota Agriculture Laboratories.
"They have really low levels of detection for certain herbicides, mainly for dicamba, which can be a little bit tricky to catch residue on," Erndt-Pitcher said. "By the time you're seeing symptoms of dicamba injury, a lot of times the herbicide itself has degraded and disappeared and you're not able to detect it on analysis."
Kemper expected little herbicide drift in most samples collected as they degrade over time, but he was surprised that over 90% of samples tested had one or more traces of herbicides.
The non-profit held a press conference on Monday, August 5th, to discuss its research and provide a platform for a few residents personally affected by the herbicide drift.
One of those speakers includes Urbana, IL, organic farmer Patsy Hopper, who bought farmland with her husband over 40 years ago. They planted a thousand trees along with other plants.
"Twenty years later, we were harvesting 50 gallons of cherries, countless apples, peaches, pears, and persimmons," Hopper said. "I was canning, drying, and freezing vegetables, fruits, and herbs. I took apples to the homeless shelters. Friends and neighbors came by and picked fruit and vegetables. A lot of people ate the produce."
Unfortunately for the Hopper family, the harvests started to dwindle.
"This year, we had enough cherries for one pie," Hopper said. "Last year, there was not enough produce to can. We did everything to protect our garden."
Another speaker at the conference was Patsy Hirsch, an Elgin resident whose backyard is filled with various trees. She says seven years ago, someone notified her that her trees had symptoms of herbicide damage, and she sent a complaint to the Illinois Department of Agriculture.
"By the end of the second year, I realized that regulations
are powerless against chemical trespass," Hirsch said. "Damage to our property continues to this day from repeated lawn and field applications, even when applied according to the law."
She says samples of her fruit have been taken for testing over the last eight weeks, and she is still waiting for the results.
Erndt-Pitcher and Kemper call on the Illinois legislature to adequately fund the Illinois Pesticide Act to enhance its enforcement actions. They're also calling on the state to update regulations addressing herbicide drift.
"It's really important we understand this issue because our trees and our natural areas are critical for building resiliency and maintaining healthy communities," Erndt-Pitcher said. "Trees and plants are the food for our native insects and our pollinators. There are these relationships that are critical and when we see widespread injury like we've been observing around the state to key species like many of our oaks. These oaks are host plants to hundreds of species of moths and butterflies, and they feed our migratory birds, and they fall into the creeks and feed our fish. This is a really important issue for us to understand and try to deal with. It is something that we can find solutions for."
Prairie Rivers Network will continue its research into herbicide drift.
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