On Aug. 14, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the release of the Pesticide App for Label Mitigations (PALM), an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly tool to serve as a one-stop shop that helps farmers and applicators use EPA’s mitigation menu to reduce pesticide exposure to nontarget species from agricultural crop uses. Quickly accessible in the field, at users’ fingertips, PALM will make mitigation information from the final Insecticide Strategy, Herbicide Strategy and other strategies readily available in an intuitive, user-friendly format. This action supports Administrator Zeldin’s Powering the Great American Comeback Initiative Pillar 1: Clean Air, Land and Water for Every American.
EPA has released multiple resources to assist applicators in determining what mitigation options are available to them, including the spray drift and runoff calculators. PALM now saves time for farmers and applicators by combining the functionality of both of these calculators in a mobile-friendly and easy-to-use web interface. This nimble application incorporates information from the Ecological Mitigation Support Document to Support Endangered Species Strategies Version 2.0 (published in April 2025), as well as the Insecticide Strategy and Herbicide Strategy. PALM also provides a useful summary to show how users can calculate their runoff and erosion mitigation points or ecological spray drift buffer reductions and what field characteristics or application parameters are applicable to their individual applications. As an on-the-go solution, the tool will help pesticide users understand available mitigation measures without the need for redundant data entry or any additional software or models.
This is the initial version of PALM that EPA is sharing with stakeholders and is part of the agency’s larger information technology improvement goals. In the future, EPA intends to expand the functionality of the application and include access to additional information on labeling and bulletins. EPA welcomes public feedback to improve both subsequent versions of PALM and other available tools that help communicate how to comply with the runoff and erosion point system and the ecological spray drift buffers as they begin to appear on pesticide labeling. To provide feedback on and suggest future enhancements to PALM, please contact us.
