Pesticides | HealthyCal
 

Posts Tagged pesticides

  

Farmers slow to adopt new pesticide

Published: December 6, 2011 | No Comments

By Robin Urevich
California Health Report

A year after environmentalists lost a regulatory battle to keep the controversial pesticide methyl iodide off the California market, they appear to be winning the ground war against the chemical.

Only six California growers have used methyl iodide—marketed as Midas—to zap soil borne pests and weeds before planting crops like chile peppers, strawberries and walnut trees.

Methyl iodide manufacturer Arysta LifeScience Corp. paid for at least two of the fumigations. The company shared in the cost of a third, according to the grower.

By way of comparison, more than 8,500 soil fumigations took place in California in 2009, the last year for which data is available from the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation.

“Methyl iodide is a speck on the horizon,” said Les Wright, deputy Fresno County Agricultural Commissioner.

Growers and agriculture industry groups clamored for methyl iodide registration last year before the California Department of Pesticide Regulation gave the chemical its final approval.

They pointed to the coming ban on methyl bromide, one of the most effective and widely used fumigants in the state, and argued that without methyl iodide, California’s billion-dollar agriculture industry would hemorrhage jobs and profits. Methyl bromide is currently being phased out under the Montreal Protocol; it’s expected to be eliminated altogether by 2015.

Every year, however, the Montreal Protocol grants so-called critical use exemptions for growers who don’t have alternatives to methyl bromide. Methyl bromide is costly because of dwindling supplies, so many growers are also using other chemicals.

Many of them say methyl iodide is too politically risky to use. But now, some growers say methyl iodide is too politically risky to use.

“The people who oppose this particular chemical are really loud and effective,” said Liz Elwood Ponce, co-owner of Lassen Canyon Nursery in Redding. “If no one said anything, I think the chemical would be used more widely. But the objection has pretty much paralyzed the growers into no action.”

Methyl iodide use has been so rare that Arysta put out a press release last October to announce its first application on the Central Coast, which took place only after the Santa Barbara County Ag commissioner dismissed a challenge to the fumigation permit by environmental law firm Earthjustice.

The controversy over methyl iodide had simmered for years, but it erupted in 2010 when Department of Pesticide Regulation managers overruled both their own staff scientists and an agency appointed peer review panel to approve the chemical for use in California agriculture.

UCLA professor John Froines, who chaired the peer review committee, appeared at a state assembly hearing in Sacramento last April and said “science was subverted” in the state’s decision to approve methyl iodide.

“I would not want my family, my friends or anyone else to live or work or go to school near fields where this methyl iodide will be used,” Froines said after detailing the chemical’s properties that are known to cause cancer and damage nervous systems. “You had the best science you could have had and the fact that it was ignored is devastating.”

Earthjustice and California Rural Legal Assistance have sued the state Department of Pesticide Regulation on behalf of environmentalists and farm workers, arguing that regulators put politics before safety in approving methyl iodide, and demanding the decision be reversed. A Fresno County methyl iodide application last summer drew protests, and last month, Santa Cruz County Supervisors passed a resolution urging Gov. Brown to reconsider methyl iodide registration. Last March, the governor told a Ventura County newspaper that his administration would take a fresh look at the decision, but he’s taken no action since then.

So far no health and safety issues related to the six California applications have been reported.

But the political heat is too much for growers, especially those with recognizable labels, Elwood Ponce said.

“Big growers that market in all these stores can’t take a chance on a boycott”, said Elwood Ponce.

“Methyl iodide is indeed a political hot potato”, said Paul Towers of the Pesticide Action Network of North America, whose group is a plaintiff in the methyl iodide lawsuit. “But what made it a political hot potato is grounded in scientific reality.”

Dennis Lane, a sales manager for Trical, Inc. a Hollister-based company that markets and applies fumigants, said he thinks slow sales are normal for a new product.

“They haven’t seen it on their farm,” Lane said of California growers.

So far, at least one farmer, Tzexa Lee of Fresno County’s Cherta Farms, said his experience with an Arysta-funded fumigation was mixed. He lost 20 percent of the chile peppers he planted, and doesn’t know why. The company took soil samples, but representatives haven’t given Lee any answers yet. Still, he said the chemical was great at weed killing.

“No workers were needed for weeding,” Lee said.

The other Fresno County application was also a bust. But grower David Sarabian said the loss of the chiles he planted after the fumigation was due to scorching hot summer temperatures, not the chemical.

In Florida, the company reported 14 incidents of minor plant damage to the EPA in 2008 and 2009. Such post-fumigation problems are reportedly rare.

In California, the high cost of methyl iodide may be keeping some growers away. Lane also noted that state-mandated half-mile buffer zones between fields that are fumigated with methyl iodide and homes, schools, day care centers and other such sensitive sites also limit its use because of the proximity of agricultural land to neighborhoods, especially in coastal areas.

“It almost makes it unusable,” Lane said.

Arysta officials declined to discuss methyl iodide use in California. The company’s website says Midas has been successfully applied on more than 17,000 acres in the southeastern U.S.

However, in several of those states, including Florida, one of the nation’s biggest agricultural producers, officials say methyl iodide use has been light. In an email, Dennis Howard, chief of Florida’s Bureau of Pesticides, wrote that based on his discussions with Arysta and growers, “…my understanding is that very few if any applications are occurring in Florida.”
At North Carolina State University, plant pathologist and extension specialist Frank Louws said, “The Montreal Protocol has seen methyl iodide as a true replacement (for methyl bromide) but our growers have not gravitated that way.”

In California, the fate of methyl iodide is in the hands of Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch, who will hear the Earthjustice case in January.

“I think many people are waiting to see what is the outcome of this lawsuit,” said Rick Tomlinson, public policy director of the California Strawberry Commission.
“Farmers live in these communities. They’re not going to rush in and adopt something when there’s a concern.”

 

Organics go mainstream at Fresno State

Published: October 9, 2011 | 1 Comment

By Genevieve Bookwalter

Fresno State student Ryan Steward stands in front of rows of conventional tomatoes. Steward plans to use what he learned about organic farming when he joins his father's fertilizer business.

Ryan Steward looks forward to graduating from college and joining his father’s fertilizer business as a pest control advisor. His future job: teaching farmers around the world how to apply chemicals so crops will grow more food.

But after taking the only organic farming class offered at California State University Fresno, Steward, 28, said he knows now where he wants to lead the business’ expansion.

“I was all about synthetic fertilizer,” Steward said. But “a lot of customers come to us and say, ‘what do you have on the organic side?’”

Those prospects are what Professor Dave Goorahoo said he had in mind for students when he began teaching Organic Crop Production in 2007. Originally offered as a trial class to gauge student interest, it was approved by the university’s curriculum committee for the first time as a permanent class this year.

“We don’t really come here to debate organic vs. conventional,” Goorahoo said. “The end of the line is, they see it as a business opportunity.”

Organic eggplant grows on the Fresno State campus.

Conventional farmers use synthetic fertilizers and pest controls to grow greater quantities of food per acre, and often sell it at a cheaper price than organically grown food. Some advocates say conventional farming is the only way to feed the world’s expanding population. Until Goorahoo’s class, Fresno State only embraced conventional methods of growing crops.

Meanwhile, California is widely regarded as the birthplace of the organic farming movement. A way of growing food without petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides or other chemicals, organic farming has grown in recent years from a boutique hobby to a major industry. For an increasing number of shoppers, organic farming is important in reducing exposure to unwanted chemicals. Others believe organic produce just tastes better.

But when most people think of organic farming, they often picture the San Francisco Bay Area. There, small farms in Marin, Santa Cruz and other liberal coastal counties have existed for years, selling produce to community farmer’s markets. Fresno County, on the other hand, is the heart of California’s agricultural industry. It is a powerhouse of traditional farming, large agricultural corporations and conservative thinking. If there ever was a sign that organic farming has gone mainstream, it was the arrival of a permanent class on how to farm without chemicals being taught in Fresno.

Organic farming is “not a matter of debate,” Goorahoo said. “It’s coexistence.”

No matter what a grower’s personal philosophy may be, Goorahoo said, as agricultural giants diversify to offer both conventional and organic products — like Driscoll’s strawberries in Santa Cruz County, for example — Fresno State grads will find it harder to land jobs without organic training.

They also will compete against graduates from UC Davis, California State University Chico and other schools that have grown their organic curriculums in recent years, Goorahoo said.

According to the Organic Trade Association, an industry group based in Brattleboro, Vermont, organic produce accounted for more than 11 percent of all fruits and vegetables sold in the U.S. last year. Sales of organic food and drink in the United States have jumped from $1 billion in 1990 to $26.7 billion in 2010.

Fresno County was the leading agricultural county in the nation last year, with $5.9 billion in sales, according to county Agricultural Commissioner Carol Hafner. Of that, $81.7 million—just over 1 percent—was earned from organic crops. That’s nearly double the $47 million sold in 2006.

Ryan Jacobsen, CEO and executive director of Fresno County Farm Bureau, said he’s glad his alma mater is offering students the skills to seize on organics’ popularity.

“There’s a growing demand, and at the same time it’s a distinguishing factor that some use to market their produce,” Jacobsen said. For example, organic Sun-Maid raisins sold at Costco are grown in Fresno County, he said.

Still, Tom Willey, co-owner of organic T&D Willey Farms in Madera and a guest lecturer in Goorahoo’s class, called it a “baby step.”

“I don’t think Fresno State has really waded into it deeply enough where the program is going to cause a tremendous impact in how ag is produced in the (San Joaquin) Valley,” Willey said. Students interested in organic farming, he said, will attend a university that offers more of it.

Like Goorahoo, Willey said students without organic training could be left in a lurch when hunting for jobs.

“The greater exposure that they would have had to organic systems, that would make them much more ideal as an employee,” Willey said. “Some of the largest ag entities in the Valley now are, to some extent, involved in organic production,” he said. He pointed to Grimmway Farms in Kern County as an example, which sells under the Cal-Organic label.

Looming over Fresno State’s organics class is the state’s budget crisis. The university’s three acres of organic crops and 1,000-square-foot herb garden cost money to maintain and expand, and a grant of $250,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2008 is running out, said Sajeemas Pasakdee, soil scientist and garden advisor. Meanwhile funding to California’s public universities is being cut across the board.

Pasakdee said she hopes local organic growers see value in the Fresno State program and will help cover future costs.

“They’ve been waiting to hear when Fresno State will step up” and offer organic farming classes, Pasakdee said. Soon the school could need help keeping them.

For Steward, the future pest control advisor, the organic crop production class opened up a world of business possibilities—literally.

Steward’s Fresno-based family company, Custom Ag Formulators, operates plants in California and in Australia. The company distributes fertilizer to farmers across the United States and in Chile, India, Turkey and elsewhere, he said — markets that are ripe for organic fertilizers, too.

Goorahoo’s class “opened my eyes to a different side,” Steward said.

 

The Emerging Strawberry Crisis: Innovate or Else

Published: February 16, 2010 | No Comments

By Paul Towers

Paul Towers

Sitting before a panel of legislators, a Santa Cruz area farmer recently compared the potential fate of California’s strawberry industry to the current state of American automakers. He argued that if agriculture doesn’t innovate, it faces a bumpy road ahead. And, he argued, that the decisions of regulators today will create the roadmap for the future of farming. It’s no easy task–the direction of the state’s agriculture system is at stake.

One set of choices sets us down the road of producing food that continues to poison humans and contaminate our soil, water and air; the other turns a corner to widespread adoption of methods that, though they are more sophisticated and foreign to most conventional growers, produce safe and healthy food for all.

The strawberry industry is at this crossroads. It’s no doubt then that strawberries are big business in California and demand doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Each year, beginning in Santa Cruz and continuing down Highway 1 to Santa Barbara, black tarps are plastered to valleys and hillsides. When the tarps are removed, over 1.8 billion pounds of strawberries from over 32,000 acres are harvested. It’s what’s below those black tarps that is increasingly shaking up the entire industry.

The fields are wrapped in plastic tarp to curb the escape of highly toxic pesticides known as fumigants—chemicals applied as gases to sterilize the soil before planting. Yet the gases invariably escape through drift on to workers in the fields and children and other rural community members while at schools, homes and parks. California agriculture, especially strawberry growers, has become increasingly reliant on these pesticide fumigants in order to produce greater and greater yields.

The latest chemical that conventional strawberry growers want to add to their fumigant toolbox in California is called “methyl iodide,” marketed as the product Midas. It is intended by some to be a replacement for methyl bromide, a chemical banned under international treaty.

The toxicity of the potential new pesticide is well established. Methyl iodide is a tightly regulated laboratory chemical that scientists use to create cancer cells in laboratories. It is a nervous system poison that causes thyroid disease, late-term miscarriages and is listed on California’s Proposition 65 list of “chemicals known to cause cancer.” It also has the potential to contaminate groundwater for decades to come.

Last Thursday, a panel of internationally respected scientists added fuel to the debate about the chemical after months of review, stating, “We have concluded there is little doubt that the compound possesses significant toxicity.” These findings concurred with a letter penned in 2007 by scientists across the country, including five Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, noting they were “astonished” that a chemical posing such high risks to human health would be considered for use in agriculture. California’s own regulatory agencies estimate that workers could be exposed to levels of methyl iodide 3,000 times higher than the “acceptable” dose.

Concern over the potential registration of methyl iodide hasn’t been limited to scientists. In August, Assemblymember Bill Monning (Monterey) and Senator Mark Leno (San Francisco) co-authored a letter signed by 33 state legislators in opposition to the proposed use of this new fumigant in California.

With increased global trade and climate change, California agriculture faces unprecedented challenges. Yet alternatives to pesticide soil fumigation such as crop rotation, soil solarization, use of green manure treatments, and steam treatment of nursery container stock are already available. Groundbreaking research on disease resistant varieties and anaerobic soil disinfestation are coming out of the University of California and show great promise as both safer and easier to use alternatives. Commodity groups, recognizing its importance, are helping to fund this research because of its long-term potential for reducing costs.

Despite the risks posed by methyl iodide and the availability of safe alternatives, many growers feel caught between the ways they know and the uncertainty of new techniques. This reluctance to make changes now sits uneasily with the fact that many in the agriculture industry see the public’s concerns over health as the writing on the wall that the future of farming is one without chemical fumigants. Ultimately, California regulators will help determine one course or the other.

In choosing short-term profits over investing in clear, long-term trends, American automakers bet the farm on the Hummer: let’s hope that farmers don’t make the same mistake.

Paul Towers is the State Director of Pesticide Watch Education Fund and The California Food Project where he works side-by-side with communities to prevent pesticide exposure, support local farming, and build healthier communities.

 

Scientific panel: Methyl Iodide poses health risk

Published: February 11, 2010 | 1 Comment

A scientific review panel evaluating a soil fumigant for use in California agriculture has concluded that its application in strawberry fields and elsewhere would result in “significant health risks” for workers and the general population.

The conclusion about the methyl iodide comes as the Department of Pesticide Regulation is nearing a final decision on whether to register the chemical for use in California despite objections from farmworker groups, environmentalists and organic farmers. Methyl Iodide was developed to replace methyl bromide, another fumigant that was found to cause cancer and birth defects and is being phased out by the US EPA. The EPA has approved methyl iodide and it is registered for use in 47 other states.

Representatives of California’s nursery industry have said that much of the industry will leave the state if the chemical is not authorized because it is one of their few tools to fight nematodes in the soil. A separate state law sets a “zero tolerance” policy for nematodes, banning the shipment of any agricultural product containing them and forcing growers to destroy crops that are growing in infested soil. Nematodes are a microscopic roundworm that can do tremendous damage to fruit trees and berry crops, among other plants.

But scientists critical of the pesticide industry said the report confirms what they have been arguing: that big agriculture in California and elsewhere is going to have to find less toxic ways to protect its crops from bugs.

“The science is in. Using methyl iodide in the fields would be a ticking time bomb,” said Dr. Susan Kegley, Consulting Scientist with Pesticide Action Network North America. “If the Department of Pesticide Regulation approves methyl iodide, we can expect to see increased numbers of late-term miscarriages for women who live or work near methyl iodide applications, increased thyroid disease, and more cancers.”

Other resources: To read the full scientific report, go here.

 
 
 

Home | Cal Health Report | Community Report | Legislation | Ideas | Forums | About Us

©2013 HealthyCal.org