Hundreds of Idaho farmers face BLM in lost-crop lawsuit

BOISE — When his beets came in patchy, pushing through the soil with misshapen and discolored leaves, Perry Van Tassell did what most farmers would do.

He watered more.

And more. And more.

"They looked like they were thirsty," said Van Tassell, who farms outside the small, southern Idaho town of Paul. "They looked like they were in a frozen state."

It was 2001, and Van Tassell, like most farmers, had hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in his crops. His corn fields stood shorter than his toddler son when they should have been stretching 12 feet high.

He came to believe his land had been tainted with Oust, a potent herbicide that kills plants by attacking their roots and leaves.

The pesticide had been spread across more than 100,000 acres of nearby public land at the direction of the Bureau of Land Management, which was hoping to prevent the spread of invasive weeds on land that had been scorched by wildfire.

But no rains came to melt the herbicide into the soil. The wind picked up. And Van Tassell and more than 130 other Idaho farmers — stretching from Paul east to Aberdeen — claim the powdery herbicide blew across their crops, leaving them with warped plants, barren soil and millions of dollars of debt.

Now a federal jury will decide if the federal government or herbicide maker E.I. DuPont de Nemours and Co. is to blame for their misfortune.

Beet leaves are supposed to open to the sky, spreading out from the center of the plant. The farmers say most of the beet seeds they planted never grew, and the ones that did were small, with leaves that pointed upward and were shaded purple instead of green.

Hay, potatoes, corn, wheat and other crops were also badly affected, the farmers claim.

Van Tassell, who runs a dairy in addition to his farm, used to grow corn and hay to feed his cattle. On Monday, he showed pictures to a federal jury of how his crops looked in those years.

"You could see some hay was growing through, but only in strips," he said. "You'd get maybe 15 to 20 percent of the plants that would grow."

By fall of 2002, so much dirt was blowing off the Oust-treated land near his farm that his hay bales were contaminated with dirt.

"We were scared to feed it to the cows," he said.