After winning a ruling against the federal grasshopper control program, environmental advocates want more public disclosures about insecticide treatments rather than spraying curtailments or prohibitions.

In August, a federal judge ruled that USDA violated the National Environmental Policy Act with its spray regime for grasshoppers and crickets in the West by focusing too much on direct suppression instead of preventing outbreaks with integrated pest management.

The environmental plaintiffs, the Xerces Society and Center for Biological Diversity, have now asked U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez in Portland, Ore., to order the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to release more information about treatments while reconsidering its spray program.

“Plaintiffs are not asking the court to limit APHIS’s activities in any way or conduct any new analyses; they are simply asking the court to order APHIS to notify the public of its spraying activities in a timely fashion,” according to a court brief.

The nonprofit organizations originally filed their lawsuit against the grasshopper and cricket spray program in 2022, arguing that widespread pesticide treatments are harming non-target insect species as well as the birds and mammals that depend on them for food.

At the time, the environmental plaintiffs asked for the judge to overturn the USDA’s 2019 re-authorization of the spray program and order unspecified “temporary, preliminary or permanent injunctive relief” as necessary to remedy the plan’s shortcomings.

Now that USDA’s program has been ruled unlawful, however, the organizations are urging the judge not to overturn the 2019 plan because that would only cause an earlier 2002 version to kick in, which would “do more harm than good” for the environment.

Instead, the plaintiffs want the USDA to conduct a new “environmental impact statement” analyzing how to carry out the grasshopper and cricket control program within two years while the current plan remains effective.

In the meantime, the groups have asked the judge to order “narrow interim injunctive relief” under which USDA would “notify the public in advance of planned pesticide treatments,” disclose its analysis of why treatment is necessary and then release post-treatment records and monitoring data once spraying has concluded.

“When plaintiffs and the general public are made aware of APHIS’s pesticide spraying activities under the program with sufficient notice, they can bring to APHIS’s attention information about sensitive resources that may be affected by those treatments,” the brief said. “This, in turn, can lead APHIS and its partner agencies to rethink, or even abandon, their spraying plans, avoiding or reducing harm to plaintiffs.”

The USDA and the state governments of Montana and Wyoming, which have intervened in the case, have until Dec. 20 to respond to the environmental plaintiffs’ request and make their own recommendations for how to remedy the NEPA violation.