Strawberry Fields

[KEND]

California’s strawberry industry is hooked on dangerous pesticides
A decision to dismantle strict oversight designed to protect Californians from dangerous chemicals has put more than 100 communities at greater risk of cancer
Farmworkers harvest strawberries in Ventura County, California. Americans now eat four times as many fresh strawberries as they did in the 1970s. Photograph: Sam Hodgson/CIR
Bernice Yeung, Kendall Taggart and Andrew Donohue, The Center for Investigative Reporting
Monday 10 November 2014 08.00 EST
A ‘dangerous approach’ to pesticides
Paul Helliker had a job for Dow AgroSciences.
As director of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, Helliker had allowed some growers to ignore the restrictions for a pesticide called 1,3-Dichloropropene, which the state believed caused cancer.
The loophole was supposed to be temporary. Helliker gave Dow, the company that manufactures 1,3-D, and growers two years to come up with a plan to follow his department’s rules or to create new ones.
This story was produced by the independent, nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, the country’s largest investigative reporting team.

For more, visit cironline.org. Yeung can be reached at [email protected] and Donohue can be reached at [email protected]. Photograph: CIR
It took Dow less than a year to hand in its proposal. The company’s plan didn’t close the loophole, however. It greatly expanded it.
Dow asked that the director allow growers across the state to use twice as much 1,3-D in a year as the rules permitted. And the company wanted it to happen quickly. Two Dow officials, Bryan Stuart and Bruce Houtman, closed their proposal by saying that “implementation will begin immediately upon receipt of approval” from Helliker.
Six days later, Helliker signed off on the heart of Dow’s plan.
With that simple memo in 2002, Helliker dismantled the strict oversight designed seven years earlier to protect Californians from cancer, opening the door to 12 years of nearly unfettered 1,3-D access as its use spread to populated areas near schools, homes and businesses.
The decision put people in more than 100 California communities at a higher risk of cancer, according to interviews with former state scientists and documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting. The system of exemptions, which has continued under two subsequent directors, runs counter to the department’s stated mission to protect the well-being of California residents.
The Dark Side of the Strawberry
Joseph Frank, a retired state toxicologist whose team evaluated human exposure to 1,3-D, said people in those communities should demand answers.
“They should ask their representatives, ‘Why?’’’ he said.
The loophole also expanded a key market for Dow, allowing it to sell millions more pounds of chemicals across a state that provides the United States with nearly half of all its fruits, vegetables and nuts.
The chemical is the third most heavily used pesticide in California.
California has a long and tortured relationship with 1,3-D, a byproduct of plastic manufacturing that’s often sold under the brand name Telone.
In 1990, the state suddenly pulled 1,3-D from the market after learning how much lingered in the air near farm fields in the Central Valley. After five years and $5m of research, Dow persuaded the state to allow it back on the market with severe restrictions.
In response to questions from CIR, Dow said no agricultural uses of 1,3-D pose any cancer risk. And the company said it has new research that shows the existing limits are too conservative.
In an interview, Helliker maintained that his decision to alter the pesticide policy in 2002 didn’t put Californians in danger. Because the state’s regulations average cancer risk over a lifetime, Dow and state regulators said, it’s fine for people to be exposed to more 1,3-D in some years as long as it evens out over time.
Helliker said he can’t recall whether department scientists disagreed with his decision. But documents obtained by CIR show a state toxicologist objected to the science – and the logic – as soon as Dow began raising the idea in 2001.
Eight years later, a new batch of department leaders received similar warnings from another staff scientist. Toxicologist Linda Hall disputed the basic justification Dow and Helliker used to create the loophole.
“Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) scientists do not agree and suggest that this practice may actually increase cancer risk,” she wrote.
Still, department leaders didn’t put a stop to it.
Chensheng Lu, an associate professor at Harvard University’s School of Public Health, likened the averaging idea to drinking and driving.
If you get pulled over once and you are sober, but you are pulled over a second time and your blood alcohol level is twice as high as the legal limit, you can’t average the two incidents and say everything is fine.
“This is a very dangerous approach,” Lu said.
***
Dow’s plea came at a pivotal moment for California agriculture. An international treaty had banned the popular pesticide methyl bromide for depleting the ozone layer. Sweet potato farmers needed something to fill the void.
But in the years since, 1,3-D has become an increasingly crucial chemical for the people who claimed they’d be hit hardest by the methyl bromide ban – California’s strawberry growers.
Strawberry fields at Terry Farms Inc in Ventura County, California, are treated with chloropicrin. Fumigants turn into gases that can float into the air. Photograph: Sam Hodgson/CIR
The transition underscores the modern strawberry industry’s chemical dependence: growers rely on heavy amounts of some of the most dangerous pesticides – a class called fumigants – to deliver the fruit year-round at an affordable price for consumers. Because strawberries like to grow where people like to live, in the perpetual spring of coastal California, growers often use the pesticides near schools, homes and businesses.
The health and environmental problems that come with those pesticides have threatened the foundation of a $2.6bn industry that provides Americans with 9 out of 10 strawberries they eat.
Even as most of the developed world has moved on to other methods of farming, California’s strawberry growers have resisted the methyl bromide ban. Nearly a decade after the pesticide was supposed to be banned, the state’s strawberry growers have staved off the deadline by warning of financial ruin. Today, they use about 90% of all the methyl bromide in the developed world.
Meanwhile, strawberry growers and chemical companies have cycled from one potentially dangerous chemical to another to try to replace methyl bromide.
Strawberry growing can be an unforgiving business. The fruit is fragile and land is expensive, so growers pump the soil with fumigants to wipe out most life below the surface, a sort of insurance policy against future plagues.
Even though strawberries take up less than 1% of the total farmland in California, they account for at least 8% of pesticides used in the state. The three zip codes in the state with the heaviest pesticide use fall within two prime strawberry-growing counties, Ventura and Monterey.
Fumigants don’t leave residue on the fruit, posing no risk to consumers. But even when they’re used correctly, they turn into hard-to-control gases that float into the air, affecting workers and residents. They’ve been linked to cancer, developmental problems and the hole in the ozone layer.
State public health officials classify fumigants like methyl bromide, 1,3-D, metam sodium and chloropicrin as among the most potentially dangerous to workers and neighbors.
They’ve become a key reason America’s strawberry production and consumption has skyrocketed. Without fumigants, the industry warns, farmers will go out of business, farmworkers will lose jobs, and you’ll have to pay more at the grocery store.
Brian Leahy, the current Department of Pesticide Regulation director, said he wishes fumigants would go away, but he doesn’t see it happening. The department and growers are researching alternatives, but no clear solution has emerged.
“Until we have figured out a reliable way for the producers to grow food without fumigants, I think they’re going to be using fumigants,” he said. “That means that we just have to continue to regulate them and put in protective measures that really do the job of protecting.”
***
More than 1 million people live in the 100 communities where growers surpassed the original 1,3-D health limits.
The state has allowed growers in six communities from Merced to Santa Barbara to exceed the limits every year since 2002. Some areas in Merced and strawberry centers like Monterey and Ventura counties have exceeded the limit by startling amounts.
Near New Republic Elementary School in Salinas, for example, growers and Dow have been able to use a total of 1.3 million pounds more 1,3-D than the original rules allowed.
Down the coast in Oxnard, Rio Mesa High School is boxed in on all four sides by strawberry fields. It’s surrounded by more of the most risky pesticides than any other school in the state. Here, strawberry growers surpassed the original 1,3-D health limits in 10 out of 12 years.
The balance between agriculture and public health plays out starkly here. An odd mix of sprawling cul-de-sacs and agriculture, the coastal city of more than 200,000 residents is just 35 miles from Los Angeles’ city limits.
In the backyards of suburban ranch homes, fence doors open to vast strawberry fields. A single road can separate coastal townhouses from a farm.
Ingrid Brennan is pragmatic about what she can control and what she can’t living here in Ventura County. She buys organic strawberries for her two young daughters. To avoid direct pesticide drift, she chose a house more than a mile from a farm field.
But Brennan loves being an English teacher. Every day, she goes to work at Rio Mesa. She’s been pregnant twice while working at the school, and while her daughters are healthy, the potential health impacts of working next to pesticides loom in the back of her mind. Like many teachers at the school, she wishes she knew more.
“The exposure that staff and the students have, we really have no idea,” Brennan said. “There could be a lot of exposure or barely any. There could be periodic exposure. As far as I know and I can tell, it’s not something that anybody knows.”
The state does know. Its air monitors show 1,3-D lingers in the air around Rio Mesa. It’s just that the teachers and principal had no idea.
How a chemical weapon became a pesticide
To understand how these gases ended up getting injected into the soil to help grow fruit, you have to go back to an old chemical weapon that British troops called “vomiting gas.”
During World War I, armies used a chemical called chloropicrin to penetrate the gas masks worn by soldiers fighting across Europe. The soldiers would throw up, forcing them to pull off their masks and expose themselves to other toxic chemicals.
After the war, the US had a lot of the gas left over and nothing to do with it.
The surplus was shipped to Hawaii, where the pineapple industry tried using the chemical to eradicate troublesome worms in the soil. The results were dramatic – an acre treated with chloropicrin yielded 20 more tons of pineapple than an untreated acre.
The Hawaii innovation marked the beginning of a new genre of pesticides. Researchers in other industries conducted more studies searching for gaseous chemicals that could wipe out pests in the soil and leave a clean foundation to plant crops.
Growers had a new tool to fight a persistent problem.
All kinds of fungi and parasites live beneath the soil. Wireworms burrow into sweet potatoes. Nematodes, another kind of worm, devastate almond trees. Verticillium wilt can sweep across a region, attacking plant roots and wiping out entire swathes of strawberry fields.
In the 1950s, scientists at the University of California experimented with chloropicrin on strawberry fields, using hand-held guns to inject hundreds of pounds of the chemical into an acre of soil. Within 10 years, nearly every strawberry field in the state was being treated with a combination of chloropicrin and another fumigant, methyl bromide.
By the mid-1960s, strawberry growing had changed radically. The University of California and Driscoll’s, a major grower, pioneered heartier varieties that allowed them to be grown year-round. Growers started to replace their plants every year, which cut down on pests and diseases. They learned to mimic the natural progression of winter to spring by starting plants in the winter cold of Northern California and then shipping them to the coast, where there is year-round springlike weather.
With those breakthroughs and the new chemical cocktails, California strawberry farmers had doubled the amount of berries a single acre could produce.
This boom in production also coincided with the expansion of the interstate highway system and new cooling and packing methods. Interstates made it possible to reach markets on the east coast.
The fragile fruit was poised to become a gold mine. But Americans’ consumption wasn’t keeping pace.
Farmers had the supply. They needed the demand.
Dave Riggs was in charge of marketing for the strawberry growers’ trade group at the time. He got wind that cardmaker American Greetings Corp. was considering a few options for a new character. The growers’ association provided data arguing that the strawberry was the best choice. In the end, the company went with Strawberry Shortcake.
“Everybody loves strawberries,” he said.
Strawberries had started appearing on the cover of Cool Whip containers. Riggs went looking for other products that paired well with strawberries – chocolate dips, pie shells and daiquiris. Soon, strawberries were on boxes of Corn Flakes and Cheerios.
Every year, Riggs would make a pilgrimage to New York to visit the most popular women’s magazines. He’d talk to editors at Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook and Good Housekeeping about the strawberry season and provide them with recipe ideas.
Today, Americans eat four times as many fresh strawberries as they did in the 1970s.
Growers now were locked in. Fumigants helped produce more strawberries and made an unforgiving business more certain.
The modern California strawberry industry had been built on the back of methyl bromide and chloropicrin. But the destruction of the ozone layer was about to threaten its very foundation.
***
Visit Rod Koda and it’s likely he’ll ask you, in his friendly, chuckling way, to spray the soles of your shoes with Lysol.
Koda’s Watsonville ranch is a sweeping, hilly expanse with a view of the Pacific Ocean that’s so picturesque, it feels like it should’ve been bought long ago by an elite country club or four-star hotel.
He, like most strawberry growers, is afraid of what lurks in the dirt. He’s not sure whose soil you’ve been traipsing around on or what kind of diseases you might be dragging in from some other growers’ fields.
That’s why methyl bromide’s so important to him. The stories of a past generation still haunt him: in the late 1950s, a plant disease called red stele swept through the area, forcing growers to abandon their land. The fungus infects the plant’s roots and either kills it or makes it less productive. Red stele can hang around in the soil for more than a decade.
Today, growers like Koda use fumigants pre-emptively every season to ward off potential problems. Methyl bromide is especially important in California, where growers say conditions – like the high cost of land and type of soil – make things dicey.
Strawberry growing is a high-risk, high-reward business. Fumigants help growers hedge that risk.
From a modest ocean-blue house on the western edge of the property, Koda raised three kids. He still lives there with his wife, who handles the farm’s finances.
Koda’s not too worried about the health impacts of living or working near fumigants.
“I’m still here. I haven’t mutated,” he joked.
Methyl bromide is a phantom gas. It’s odorless and colorless. Chemical companies manufacture it by distilling the reaction between two chemicals, methanol and hydrobromic acid. It also leaks out naturally in small amounts from algae and kelp.
Once the fields are cleared of last season’s strawberry plants, the manufactured version is combined with another chemical like chloropicrin and pumped more than a foot deep into the soil by a hulking metal tractor that looks like a Zamboni outfitted with a bunch of gigantic tattoo guns.
The gas courses through the soil, killing weeds, fungi and bacteria. It’s so potent that nothing can be planted for almost two weeks afterward or it, too, will die.
Inevitably, some of that highly toxic gas escapes. Workers and neighbors can breathe it in, giving them headaches or making them vomit. Studies have found a connection between living and working near these chemicals and developing neurological and reproductive problems. But in the 1970s, the main concern was what happened when that gas drifted up into the atmosphere.
Humans had begun to learn that the chemicals they used to keep their refrigerators cold and their bangs tall were creating a hole in the ozone layer. A depleted ozone layer could lead to increased skin cancer risk and damage plants and marine life.
Methyl bromide, too, was blamed for between 5 and 10% of the ozone depletion.
Eventually, the nations of the world banded together to take action, signing the Montreal Protocol in 1987. Five years later, methyl bromide became the only pesticide to be banned by the treaty.