Quick Take
For more than 25 years, parents, physicians, researchers and farmworker advocates have warned about pesticide exposure in the Pajaro Valley. So why haven’t Santa Cruz County's healthcare institutions taken a stand? Local activist Kevin Norton asks why major hospitals and healthcare organizations have remained largely silent on an issue affecting many of their patients — and argues that preventing disease should begin long before someone enters an exam room.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
On a windy afternoon in Watsonville, Dr. Katie Gabriel-Cox steps up to a microphone at a public protest.
She’s an OB-GYN. But she isn’t representing a hospital or speaking on behalf of a healthcare organization. She’s there on her own time, talking about what she has seen in her patients: stillbirths, childhood cancers, parents anxious about exposures they can’t see or control.
Her employer isn’t standing next to her.
Family physician Dr. Valerie Bengal has also spent years speaking publicly about agricultural pesticide exposure. Retired school nurse Kathleen Kilpatrick has done the same.
Their voices matter.
PESTICIDES IN THE PAJARO VALLEY: Read more Lookout news and Community Voices opinion coverage here
But they also raise an uncomfortable question.
Where are Santa Cruz County’s healthcare institutions?
For more than 25 years, parents, physicians, researchers, farmworker advocates and community organizations have tried to call attention to symptoms they believe stem from pesticide exposure in the Pajaro Valley. They’ve advocated for companies like Driscoll’s, Reiter Affiliated Companies (RAC), Naturipe and others to transition away from using synthetic pesticides near schools and neighborhoods. They have evidence, including the landmark CHAMACOS Study, launched by UC Berkeley in 1999, which gave scientific weight to many of those concerns.
Yet, the pesticides remain.
If there is one lesson medicine has learned over the past century, it is that preventing disease saves more lives than treating sick people. Hospitals and physicians helped reduce smoking rates, lead poisoning and drunk driving — not because they regulated those issues, but because they recognized that health begins long before a patient walks into an examination room.
Agricultural pesticide exposure deserves that same upstream approach.
A chemical once used as a weapon of war, applied near the schoolyard
Chloropicrin – the most heavily used pesticide in Santa Cruz County – was deployed as a tear gas and choking agent in World War I, and it’s been banned from the battlefield ever since.
In 2024, the U.S. government accused Russia of a war crime for using it to drive Ukrainian troops from their trenches, allegedly poisoning more than 500 soldiers.
In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, berry growers applied more than 599,000 pounds of chloropicrin here.
It’s injected into the soil of berry plants protected by tarps that sometimes flap open in the wind. It’s used inside nurseries, where workers get exposed to the fumes. Chloropicrin is banned in 43 countries, including every nation in the European Union.
Our country decided this chemical was too dangerous for a battlefield. Yet, here, we don’t think it’s too dangerous for a field a few hundred yards from an elementary school.
Agriculture and warfare are obviously different contexts.
But what’s happening in our community is a quieter violence — a substance too dangerous for soldiers to face is legal to apply near the people who pick our food, so long as a permit’s been filed and a buffer zone’s been measured in feet, not miles.
The county’s second-most-used fumigant, 1,3-dichloropropene, is a chemical cocktail banned in 40 countries and considered a probable human carcinogen.
More than 255,000 pounds of it were applied here in 2023.
I know this is nothing new. Grassroots organizations such as the Campaign for Organic & Regenerative Agriculture (CORA), a project of the Center for Farmworker Families, and Californians for Pesticide Reform have spent years advocating for stronger protections. Individual physicians and nurses have volunteered their time to testify before regulators and educate the public.
But, again, despite the data and facts, the institutions employing many of those professionals have remained largely absent from the public conversation.
Where are the hospital CEOs? The boards of directors? The public statements from our healthcare systems? If preventing disease is part of their mission, why are their institutional voices so quiet?
I sent emails to representatives at Sutter Health, Dignity Health/CommonSpirit, Kaiser Permanente, Watsonville Community Hospital, Salud Para La Gente and the Health Improvement Partnership of Santa Cruz County. I asked each the same questions:
- Beyond treating illness, what is your organization doing to help prevent pesticide-related disease?
- Have you partnered with community organizations like the Center for Farmworker Families or Californians for Pesticide Reform, which advocate for safer farming methods near schools and neighborhoods?
- Do you invest community-benefit dollars in pesticide-related health initiatives?
- Would you support participating in a countywide coalition focused on reducing pesticide-related disease?
- Could your purchasing power help expand markets for locally grown organic food?
None of the health-related organizations I contacted — including Sutter, CommonSpirit/Dignity and Kaiser — answered. Some responded, but declined to make a statement.
That surprised me.
I can already hear the counterargument: The state regulates pesticides, we just provide healthcare.
But this isn’t about regulation — it’s about acting when you have the power to.
And healthcare has power here. It’s the biggest employer in Santa Cruz County, representing nearly 1 in 5 jobs. In recent years, major healthcare institutions — Sutter Health, CommonSpirit/Dignity, Kaiser Permanente — have funded clinic capacity, food security and disaster response in the Pajaro Valley.
Salud Para La Gente has shown that healthcare organizations can move upstream. In 2024, it successfully advocated for a state law increasing paid family and disability leave benefits for low-income workers. Salud’s own impact report also identifies pesticide exposure as a danger facing its farmworker patients.
Why not bring that same institutional advocacy to preventing pesticide exposure?
That leverage could go toward Sacramento — stronger fumigant buffer zones and chloropicrin restrictions — or directly toward growers: public pressure on Driscoll’s, board-level engagement and healthcare purchasing power that supports local organic agriculture and makes the transition away from hazardous pesticides more economically feasible.
Dominican, Kaiser and Sutter have the standing to make that case. Whether they will is another question. In 2024, the family foundation of J. Miles Reiter — a Driscoll’s owner and executive chairman whose family is the majority owner of Driscoll’s — gave $500,000 to Watsonville Community Hospital Foundation and $100,000 to Dominican Hospital Foundation. Health was the foundation’s top giving priority that year, accounting for about 57% of its $1.2 million in grants.
That raises an uncomfortable question: How willing are healthcare institutions to challenge an industry whose wealth also helps support them? And the Reiter Foundation is only one part of agricultural philanthropy flowing into the county’s health and social-service network.
I found little evidence that these institutions are investing significant resources in reducing agricultural pesticide exposure itself — an environmental health risk disproportionately borne by farmworker communities.
When it comes to pesticide exposure, most of the organizing appears to come from outside the realm of healthcare.
The evidence isn’t fringe
Most readers know about the risks of synthetic pesticides.
The CHAMACOS Study, a two-decade research effort following farmworker families in the Salinas Valley, found that children living within 8 kilometers of chloropicrin applications from birth to age 7 showed measurable declines in IQ scores as chloropicrin use near their homes increased. It showed higher rates of neurodevelopment and attention-deficit problems, as well as shorter gestation periods for pregnant women. Separate research has linked residential proximity to agricultural fumigant and insecticide use with elevated childhood leukemia risk.
That’s just some of the data.
These exposures don’t stop at the farm gate. They reach the families and children living near the fields.
The organizers who did talk to me — from the Campaign for Organic & Regenerative Agriculture (CORA) and Californians for Pesticide Reform — told me they could not recall receiving financial support specifically for their pesticide-reform work from the major local healthcare institutions I contacted. Even worse, they said some employees may be discouraged from advocacy.
“Many doctors are afraid to publicly speak out because of retaliation or because of the organizations they represent,” said Yanely Martinez, organizer for Californians for Pesticide Reform.
That response is both puzzling and alarming.
Education is not prevention
Some worthwhile efforts are already underway. Some clinics in the county have offered programs in the past requiring screening and education for pregnant patients about exposure risk. Some of this may still be happening.
UC Santa Cruz’s Farmworker Health program has trained bilingual community health workers since 2023. The county tests groundwater. The state runs an app that tells residents when to shelter indoors from a coming spray.
That’s good, but far from enough.
Education can’t eliminate exposure when people live, work or go to school near where these chemicals are applied — and it puts the burden in the wrong place. Telling farmworkers to protect themselves from pollution they have no power to stop, while working jobs they can’t afford to leave, is a polite version of blaming the victim: We won’t stop the exposure, but we’ll hold you responsible for managing it.
Prevention means reducing hazards whenever possible — not simply teaching people how to live with the aftermath.
What real engagement would look like
Imagine if Santa Cruz County’s healthcare sector brought the same commitment to preventing pesticide-related disease that it brings to treating it.
Healthcare institutions could direct a portion of their community-benefit funding toward organizations working to reduce pesticide exposure and strengthen local food systems.
Hospitals could buy more locally grown organic food, creating stronger markets for farmers who use fewer hazardous pesticides.
Healthcare leaders could stand beside the physicians, scientists, parents and farmworkers who already spend evenings and weekends fighting for healthier communities.
Together, they’d send an unmistakable message to large growers: preventing disease deserves as much institutional attention as treating it.
If we want healthier children, healthier pregnancies and healthier farmworkers, prevention can’t stop at the clinic door.
We don’t need healthcare institutions to lead this movement. Farmworkers, physicians, researchers and organizations like CORA and Californians for Pesticide Reform are already doing that. We need healthcare institutions to put their considerable resources and influence behind them.
What you can do this week
If you’re a patient, ask your provider directly: Does this clinic or hospital have a position on pesticide use in Santa Cruz County?
If you’re a provider, talk to your supervisors and talk to your union. Show up at the next protest or hearing alongside Dr. Bengal or Dr. Gabriel-Cox. You don’t have to organize it. Just be there.
If you’re an administrator, put pesticide-reform organizing on your community benefit committee’s agenda for next year
The question isn’t whether Santa Cruz County’s healthcare institutions care about community health. It’s whether they’re willing to use the full extent of their influence to protect it — before their patients ever arrive in the exam room.
Kevin Norton lives in Santa Cruz and has a background in public health. He welcomes you to send feedback and suggestions to healthysantacruz@gmail.com.
