Travel woes akin to “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” could not stop our Principal and Manager, Environmental Modeling and Risk Assessment, Amy Ritter from reaching Piacenza, Italy and the XVII Symposium on Pesticide Chemistry on September 4th. According to Amy Ritter, "it was wonderful to be back in Piacenza, Italy and be able to interact in person with European friends (modelers from industry, academia, and regulatory)."

One of the hot topics of the conference was reduction of off-target drift and runoff using precision agriculture. Amy presented two posters on rice modeling: “Higher tier alternative for rice paddy modelling of agrochemicals in southern Europe” and “Mitigations and higher tier rice paddy modelling of agrochemicals in Europe.”

Prior to the conference, a VFSMOD workshop was held in which approximately 70 participants attended. Amy Ritter was on the panel and presented “Overview of North American VFSMOD use” and served as the Rapporteur during the Plenum discussion (see Agenda below). The Plenum discussion was very lively and allowed for questions and recommendations from the participants especially regulatory agencies.