Scoular Facility Manager Phil VanCourt said they received some good news Wednesday afternoon — the state lifted the embargo on wheat brought in to their facility.
    Officials tested pesticide residues after discovering the late application of Quilt, a fungicide that requires a 45-day waiting period between application and harvest. 
    Its active ingredients have a low toxicity in humans and the state issued an embargo on wheat at Scoular Grain to prevent it from being moved or mixed with other grain and enter the food supply.
    Kansas Secretary of Agriculture Adrian Polansky announced Wednesday afternoon that embargoes on 20 wheat fields and three grain elevators in south-central Kansas were lifted based on test results that showed no detectible traces of fungicide residue on the wheat.
    "This is good news for the affected farmers and for the Kansas wheat industry," Polansky said.
    The Kansas Department of Health and Environment had issued embargoes for wheat fields in Butler, Cowley, Harper, Kingman, Reno, Sedgwick and Sumner counties late Monday at the request of the Kansas Department of Agriculture.
    KDHE later embargoed wheat at three elevators, including Wellington’s Scoular Grain, after Department of Agriculture employees traced grain to them from three fields that were harvested before the embargoes could be delivered.
    Quilt applications were made on the south-central fields between May 13 and 21, meaning the 45-day waiting period expires between June 27 and July 5.
    "These test results are an indication of how effective the waiting period is to ensure that chemical residues are at acceptable levels at harvest," Polansky said. "I expect we will find similar results from samples we collected in other parts of the state."
    The Department of Agriculture is now testing samples from several northern counties, and results from some of those tests could be available as early as tomorrow afternoon.