Oregon farm regulators wrongly calculated a $160,000 fine imposed on a radish grower who sprayed his crop with a prohibited pesticide, according to the state’s Court of Appeals.

The appellate court has determined the Oregon Department of Agriculture didn’t properly support its conclusion that Paul Kuehne of Creekside Valley Farms committed eight pesticide violations in distinct fields.

“The department did not supply a rational connection between the facts on which it relied and its legal conclusion that there were eight separate violations,” the ruling said.

According to the ODA, Kuehne owes $10,000 for each of the eight radish fields that he sprayed with an herbicide that wasn’t registered for the crop at the time.

His company, Creekside Valley Farms, was separately ordered to pay $10,000 for each of those pesticide applications under the ODA’s decision.

Under state law, a farmer and his company are considered individual persons who are separately liable for pesticide violations.

Kuehne challenged the civil penalty before the Oregon Court of Appeals, arguing the spray operations all occurred within a contiguous radish field of about 460 acres in Linn County.

The chemical was sprayed at the same concentration on the same crop being grown by the same farmer in May 2019, which runs counter to the ODA’s claim that Kuehne made eight distinct decisions to violate pesticide regulations, according to the farmer.

The ODA countered that Kuehne and his farm each committed eight separate violations based on physical barriers between fields, including trees, a slough and a road, as well varying stages of crop growth and different pieces of irrigation equipment.

The eight fields varied in size from 7 acres to 170 acres and each involved a separate “decision point” to use Witness herbicide, which wasn’t labeled for use on radish, according to ODA.

The Oregon Court of Appeals has now rejected ODA’s argument that the “physical characteristics and layout of the acreage” provides sufficient evidence that eight distinct violations were committed by Kuehne and Creekside Valley Farms.

The appellate court doesn’t go so far as to agree with Kuehne that the spray operations amounted to a single violation, but instead remands the matter to ODA for reconsideration.

The agency “assumes too much” in claiming the attributes of the 460 acres necessarily require them to be managed as eight distinguishable fields that are each separately treated with pesticides, according to the appellate court.

“The department did not explain how the presence of multiple watering systems, providing water to a contiguous, irregularly shaped farm, led it to conclude that areas within the farm were separately managed,” the ruling said.

Similarly, ODA’s reliance on landscape features was “inherently inconsistent” and “failed to rationally support” its interpretation of the acreage consisting of eight separate fields, the ruling said.

“This disparate treatment renders the decision to find eight violations unsupported by substantial reason,” according to the appellate court.

For example, the agency claimed that a row of trees and a roadway marked the border between fields in some cases but not others, the ruling said. “There are inconsistencies in the department’s use of topography in different ways at different points across the acreage with no explanation for why it did so.”

While the majority of the three-judge appellate panel found the ODA didn’t adequately shore up its conclusions, Judge Ramon Pagan filed a dissenting opinion in which he said the agency’s reasoning didn’t fall short of legal standards.

Requiring the ODA to better explain how a row of trees affects its rationale is more than the court should demand of the agency, he said. “In my view, such an inquiry necessarily oversteps the limitations of our review and spurns the deference we are supposed to provide agencies.”

Neither the ODA nor Kuehne responded to requests for comment.