It’s all about dust — red dust.

That’s the focus of a dispute between some Waimea, Kauai, residents and GMO seed producer DuPont Pioneer, the residents’ lawyer said Wednesday in opening statements of a civil trial.

The residents filed two lawsuits against DuPont Pioneer’s predecessor, Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., in state court on Kauai in 2011 and 2012. The lawsuits say that dust and pesticides from DuPont Pioneer’s Waimea seed farm were preventing nearby residents from using and enjoying their homes and were damaging their property.

DuPont Pioneer had both cases moved to federal court.

P. Kyle Smith, the residents’ lawyer, told the jury that dust from the farm settles on and puts a red stain on everything and forces residents to stay inside.

He made no mention of pesticides.

U.S. District Judge Leslie Kobayashi ruled before trial that the residents can introduce evidence regarding pesticides only to support their property damage, loss of enjoyment and emotional distress claims.

DuPont Pioneer’s lawyer, Clement Glynn, told the jurors in U.S. District Court in Honolulu in his opening statement that no resident has made a personal injury claim.

He said Waimea, and all of southwest Kauai, has been dusty for hundreds of years. That’s why the town is named Waimea, which literally means "red water" in Hawaiian.

"This area is dusty, dusty, dusty and there’s nothing anybody can do about it," Glynn said.

And he said not all of the dust that finds its way into the town is from DuPont Pioneer’s farm; other GMO companies have farms nearby.

Glynn said longtime area residents remember what the dust was like when sugar was grown there. He said a number of plaintiffs built their homes in Waimea and invited visitors to rent out portions after DuPont Pioneer was already farming there.

Smith said what DuPont Pioneer does is nothing like what sugar growers did on the land.

"This is a different kind of farming," Smith said.

He also said sugar growers took steps to minimize the spread of dust and even paid for cleanups when dust did reach homes.

Smith said DuPont Pioneer uses its farm as an outdoor laboratory to test new strains of crops. In doing its research, he said, DuPont Pioneer uses a small portion of the farm’s acreage at a time and leaves the rest bare and susceptible to erosion.

He said DuPont Pioneer took steps to address the dust only after the residents filed their lawsuits.

Glynn said DuPont Pioneer already had in place measures to reduce the spread of dust when a severe drought hit southwest Kauai in 2009 and 2010. He said the company then went beyond the generally accepted practices by putting up 12-foot-high dust nets, planting trees and shrubs as windbreaks and taking 42 acres of the farm closest to the town out of production.

The residents filed their lawsuits before the Kauai County Council approved legislation to regulate the use of the kind of pesticides used by GMO research farmers. A federal judge ruled last year that the ordinance is invalid.