Quick Take
The California Department of Pesticide Regulation is letting growers act like entitled neighbors, writes 18-year-old Rocio Ortiz, a rising first-year Cal State Monterey Bay student and founding member of Future Leaders of Change – Watsonville. Ortiz, whose parents picked strawberries for more than 20 years, believes the state should require growers to tell residents exactly when and where pesticides are being applied as part of its notification system. She calls for an “end to pesticide secrecy” and what she sees as racist policies against farmworkers and their families.
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If your neighbors sprayed pesticides into their yard and those pesticides drifted into your yard and onto your children, would you want to know what they were? Would you accept their argument that their “right to privacy” allows them to do that?
Of course not. Yet that is basically what growers do in our community.
I heard representatives of grower organizations arguing this at the Department of Pesticide Regulation’s (DPR) July 12 public hearing on its plans for a statewide pesticide notification system.
As a founding member of Future Leaders of Change – Watsonville, I made the journey to Turlock with other youth leaders and Safe Ag Safe Schools (SASS) allies to demand that DPR include the exact location of pesticide applications in its upcoming online pesticide notification program.
It seemed like a simple and obvious demand. Scientific research tells us that pesticides can be harmful even in the tiniest amounts and can drift for miles, and also that the closer we are to the application site, the higher the risk of exposure. So, we need to know not only what and when, but also where pesticides will be applied.
After all, some of these pesticides are highly hazardous chemicals that California officially recognizes as causing reproductive and developmental harm, including brain damage, lung damage and cancer.
We know they are drifting into our homes, workplaces and even school grounds. DPR’s own pesticide air monitoring studies show that at Ohlone Elementary School – just on the other side of the Pajaro River from Watsonville (there are no such monitors in Santa Cruz County) – many pesticides have been detected in the air over the past decade, including concentrations of cancer-causing 1,3-dichloropropene more than double the lifetime cancer risk warning level set by the state’s office of environmental health hazard assessment.
For generations, our farmworker communities have been poisoned by pesticides in secret.
There are more than 130 pesticides that are so dangerous they are illegal for use in the European Union that are applied regularly in California, and dozens of these are used in the Pajaro Valley.
Future Leaders of Change and SASS have been calling for an end to pesticide secrecy, because California has done such a poor – and I believe racist – job in protecting farmworker communities from pesticide harm, the state should, at the very least, give us a “heads up” before hazardous pesticides are applied in the fields.
Yet, DPR’s current plan is only to tell us where restricted pesticides are applied at a one-mile square level. That is, you’ll be able to zoom in to an address (your home, workplace or child’s school, for example), but the system will not tell you how close to the address pesticides will be applied, only that somewhere within a square mile, specific pesticides will be used.
This “notice” still keeps the pesticide application secret. If we want to avoid the application site, we can’t.
Is the application in the field where I work, at my sister’s school, or is it a mile away? DPR’s “notification” system won’t tell us.
In the Pajaro Valley, pesticides are applied all the time. We’re breathing a kind of pesticide soup. I know we have to live life, that we can’t just “shelter in place” every day. A notification system that tells us about the worst pesticides applied within a one-mile square will possibly be a system that tells us to stay inside every day.
Maybe we should, but we can’t. Knowing exactly where the pesticides are coming from would allow us to take precautions we think are appropriate for ourselves and loved ones.
For instance, if there’s a fumigation in the field behind our house, maybe we can stay with our relatives outside of town for a couple days. If the fumigation is a mile away, then maybe we’ll be careful to close our windows and try to keep those with asthma indoors most of the day. Different families will make decisions about precautions they take, but these decisions should be informed by the best and most specific information.
It’s not notification without location. Growers don’t have a “right to privacy” that protects them from their responsibility not to poison us.
I urge you to let Yana Garcia, the state’s secretary for environmental protection, know by email or phone (916-323-2514) that you want to see the exact location of pesticide applications included in the pesticide notification system planned for implementation in 2025.
Our community health depends on this.
Rocio Ortiz is a 2024 graduate of Watsonville High School, a farmworker, a co-founder of Future Leaders of Change – Watsonville and a soon-to-be first-year student at Cal State Monterey Bay.