About pesticiderisk.org The Pesticide Risk Tool

Pesticides are critical tools for food and fiber production. Pesticide risks are real but can be carefully managed to minimize adverse impacts. Much progress has been made to reduce pesticide risks, including many new reduced-risk products and proven mitigation strategies, and ready access to this information will help reduce adverse impacts and improve environmental stewardship.

The Pesticide Risk Tool is a user-friendly, innovative online tool that ranks pesticide products for impacts on birds, earthworms, small mammals, aquatic ecosystems, worker/bystander health, consumer health and pollinators. This tool applies best available science to permit producers, advisors and regulatory professionals to compare different pest management scenarios for any commodity and select options with the fewest potential environmental and health hazards.

The Pesticide Risk Mitigation Engine (PRiME) (now The Pesticide Risk Tool) project began in 2008 with primary funding from the NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant program. Due to the growth in interest in PRiME and the broad scope of potential users, the Integrated Plant Protection Center at Oregon State University and the IPM Institute decided to each lead efforts to address the needs of specific sectors. Oregon State predominantly focuses on meeting the needs of the public sector including governments and agencies and Extension delivery to farmers and will continue to run at ipmPRiME.org. The IPM Institute runs pesticiderisk.org to primarily focus on applications for food industry supply chains and other commercial sector uses.

The Pesticide Risk Tool’s product database contains nearly all pesticide products registered for agricultural use in the US and we plan to incorporate new products and active ingredients every 3 months. The current version of our tool does not account for site-specific soil characteristics, mitigation features or sensitive sites. These features are currently in development. Keep visiting this website for more updates.

See our Frequently Asked Questions for more information.

Guided Tour

Acknowledgements:

This project is made possible by contributions from:

• USDA-NRCS Conservation Innovation Grants Program
• Unilever
• General Mills
• US EPA Region V
• US EPA Region X
• USDA-North Central IPM Center
• USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture
• Great Lakes Protection Fund
• USDA-Risk Management Agency

The following collaborators have provided in-kind support in the development of the Pesticide Risk Tool:

• Oregon State University
• BCS-Ecologic
• Environment Canada (2008 - April 2012)
• Natural Resources Defense Council
• Oregon State University Agricultural Experiment Station
• Pesticide Research Institute
• The Organic Center