On a sweltering August morning in 1988, Cesar Chavez ended a 36-day water-only fast to protest high rates of cancer and birth defects among California grape workers and their children, which he blamed on the profusion of pesticides in the fields, water and air around farming towns.
Thirty-seven years later, state regulators launched the nation’s first early-warning system for spraying toxic agricultural chemicals.
California has long produced more fruits, vegetables and nuts than any other state. But that bounty comes at a cost. State officials logged more than 2,500 cases of pesticide-related illnesses between 2011 and 2021, when growers applied an average of 202 million pounds of pesticides a year, including chemicals that cause cancer, birth defects and neurological and reproductive damage, among other health problems.
On Monday, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation launched SprayDays, billed as “a first-of-its-kind statewide system to provide transparent, accessible and timely notifications and information about the use of specific pesticides.” State officials celebrated the launch in Shafter, a small Central Valley town known for producing table grapes and tree nuts that is inundated by air pollution from pesticides and oil and gas operations. The celebration was about 20 miles south of where Chavez refused food to raise awareness about the pesticide poisoning of farmworkers.
“I’ve been fighting pesticides since 1980 with Cesar Chavez and now with this coalition with Californians for Pesticide Reform,” said Gustavo Aguirre, associate director of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, based in Delano, where Chavez fasted. “It’s an honor to be here this afternoon, celebrating this great victory that is a result of the collective action that we had throughout the state,” he said at a press briefing in Shafter.
Shafter residents first pushed for advance spraying notices as part of A.B. 617’s Community Air Protection Program, which was established to reduce exposure in communities most impacted by air pollution. But when the county agricultural commissioner declined to implement the community’s plan, Aguirre said, “we took it to the state.”
And now, instead of a notification system just for the area around Shafter, communities can celebrate a notification system that applies to the entire state of California, he said.
As Aguirre spoke, community members shouted, “Sí, se pudo! Sí, se pudo!”—We did it!—as they held banners and wore T-shirts reading “The 1st in the nation!” and “Exact location.”
Sixty-three years ago, in warning about the toxic effects of pesticides, Rachel Carson said “the obligation to endure gives us the right to know,” said Californians for Pesticide Reform co-director Angel Garcia. “In every single one of those 63 years, farmworker communities like the ones here in Shafter, in their struggle to endure, have demanded the right to know about pesticides and their applications in one form or another. These communities have never given up the fight for justice.”
Pesticide regulators say the SprayDays site will list information about intended applications of soil-sterilizing volatile chemicals called fumigants 48 hours in advance and 24 hours in advance for all other pesticides that require specialized handling, which are called “restricted use” pesticides.
“Yesterday, if we wanted to know if we needed to take precautions against drifting pesticides at our homes, our schools and workplaces, we just simply couldn’t,” Garcia said. “But today, as I stand here, we can zoom in on an online map to our home, school or workplace and see that the most hazardous pesticides will be applied nearby the next day, and if not, we can rest a little easier.”
Although the notification system “is a huge step forward,” it’s not perfect, he said. “Our communities have loudly and consistently demanded the exact location to be revealed, but today’s system does not have that.”
The system shows, within one square mile, where growers intend to apply pesticides. But residents have no way of knowing whether growers plan to treat a field next to their house, their children’s school or where they work with chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects or other serious conditions.
SprayDays builds on counties’ existing restricted material permitting processes to provide information about a permitted pesticide before it is applied, said Department of Pesticide Regulation spokesperson Leia Bailey. The location of applications relies on the Public Land Survey System, which uses one-square-mile coordinates, she said, noting it’s the only location information used consistently in the restricted material permitting process across all California counties.
The SprayDays site shows that growers plan to apply the cancer-causing fumigant 1,3-D on March 26 and 27 over nearly 80 acres of fields about four miles north of Shafter High School. California pesticide regulators allow residents to be exposed to substantially higher levels of 1,3-D than the state has determined poses no risk of cancer, as Inside Climate News reported.
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Donate NowPesticide-reform advocates vowed to continue fighting for a better system.
“Our state does not do a good job on protecting our communities from these highly hazardous chemicals,” Garcia said. “More than 130 pesticides applied in the state cannot be legally applied in the European Union. And since California is so far behind by world regulation standards, we’ve needed pesticide notification so that we can try to protect our loved ones in the absence of state protection.”
Protection from toxic pesticides has been a central workplace safety issue for farmworkers for generations, said Cesar Lara, director of workforce strategy for the California Federation of Labor Unions, at the press briefing. Approximately 500,000 farmworkers in California face hazardous pesticide exposure, and many of the schools in the Central Valley and Central Coast are right next to fields, exposing thousands of children to toxic chemicals, Lara said.
“Our kids in that situation? They shouldn’t be,” he said. “We need to fight more and more.”
The state’s most recent records show that, in 2022, California growers applied nearly 2 million pounds of the five pesticides Chavez and the United Farm Workers fought to ban in the 1980s.
“The wealth and plenty of California agribusiness are built atop the suffering of generations of California farmworkers,” Chavez said after recovering from his debilitating fast to raise awareness about pesticide exposure. “Why do we allow farmworkers to carry the burden of pesticides on their shoulders?”
The generations who came after him are still asking the same question.
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Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal and Association of Food Journalists.
