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Dec. 10, 2025
This month, you’ll be hearing directly from Jennifer Bamberg, our Illinois government reporter based in Springfield.
Illinois has hundreds of schools and parks next to crop fields, yet pesticide applicators are not required to warn them before spraying. Jennifer’s investigation shows how drift has sent children indoors, how sharply herbicide use has climbed, and why state regulators have struggled to keep pace with complaints. Here, Jennifer explains what she learned while reporting and what questions remain.
Thanks for reading.
— Lauren Cross, assistant editor & audience engagement manager at Investigate Midwest
Q&A with Jennifer Bamberg
What did you hear from educators and others that stuck with you while reporting on this story?
I was really shocked to hear the executive director of Bluestem Hall Nature School talk about how much chemical spraying affects her students. The school prioritizes outdoor education, and she said that the spraying is devastating, especially in the springtime. They’re outside nearly all the time, she told me, but “it’s not the rain, it’s not the snow that drives us in. It’s the chemicals.”
What did your geospatial analysis reveal about how close children are to active agricultural fields?
Agricultural fields can be massive. If a school is right across the street from a 1,000-acre cornfield, the edge could be only 20 feet away, but the center of that field might be a half a mile away. My analysis could be used for lawmakers to determine which schools need to be notified, if this law passes.
Also, I was shocked to see that even though 50% of the schools in Champaign county are within a half mile of an agricultural field, 100% are within three miles.
Can you explain the concept of a “chemical treadmill" and how it can result in farmers being forced to use chemicals whether they want to or not?
Farmers seem to be locked into a losing battle with weeds. After just a few decades of use, hundreds of species of weeds are now resistant to some of the most widely used herbicides, which just means that farmers have to use those chemicals in greater amounts or switch to other chemicals. Pesticide use has shot up in the past 20 years, and it shows no signs of going down.
Robert Hirschfield, water policy director at Prairie Rivers Network, and the parent of two students at Bluestem Hall Nature School, described in my story how this plays out in practice:
“If I’m a farmer, and I know my neighbor is planting dicamba-resistant soybeans, and I know that farmer is going to spray and I know that it’s going to drift onto my property, I might not want to plant those dicamba-resistant soybeans, but I might feel compelled to, otherwise I’m going to take a loss.”
Why do you think this issue has flown under the radar for so long, even as pesticide use continues to increase?
People I spoke with described it as something that is just so common that it seems normal, something they have to put up with. Farming is the dominant industry in much of rural Illinois, and modern farming relies heavily on pesticides to maximize yield. Everyday citizens sometimes feel like they don’t have a say over these practices, but they should.
When you examined the state’s enforcement capacity, what did you learn about how complaints are handled in practice?
The Illinois Department of Agriculture investigation process seems incredibly thorough — investigators make site visits, interview people, and find the farmer or applicator to see what was sprayed. IDOA inspectors collect data on the weather and wind speed, analyze flight logs and spray paths, and test potentially contaminated items in chemistry labs. But by their own admission, these inspectors are stretched thin, and the infrastructure they have today isn’t built to handle the amount of complaints the department gets annually.
The penalties for misuse are also too small to act as an actual deterrent, according to many advocates pushing for stronger pesticide use regulations, and some custom application companies have been listed and fined multiple times in the complaint data.
As a reporter who covers agribusiness and food policy in Illinois, what do you see as the next big thread connected to this story that you want to explore?
Even with advance notice, the increase in pesticide use is going to continue to be a problem in rural communities. I’d love to follow up with people who have shared their own stories of being drifted on.
If you have a tip for me, especially about any health impacts you have experienced that may be linked to pesticides, please contact me at jennifer.bamberg@investigatemidwest, or by phone at (312) 757-1374. You can also send a secure message or call my Signal: @imw.46
