A short time after a Lincoln County farmer sprayed the insecticide carbofuran on his 95-acre sunflower field on the Colorado plains in 2006, birds started turning up dead. [...]
Now, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is trying to ban the pesticide — a first in 20 years — after determining that even legal uses are likely to kill birds.
But the agency, which banned DDT in 1972, is facing resistance from the one company that produces carbofuran and from congressional champions in agricultural states.
- from the Denver Post.
Seth Anthony is a graduate student in chemistry at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.