Anti-Pesticide Group Draws Farmers’ Ire

VENTURA — Responding to an east Ventura farmer’s decision to stop growing strawberries, farm industry officials on Wednesday condemned an environmental group that led a successful effort for strict new rules on field fumigation near homes where residents have complained of pesticide poisoning.

The state’s top farm and grower associations said planting delays and threats of continued legal action forced grower Raul Garcia late Tuesday to abandon his efforts to plant strawberries on an 87-acre field, potentially costing 150 farm workers their jobs.

“When common sense is overrun by hysteria and a lack of information, it sends a chilling message to other farmers in the area,” said Dave Moore, president of the 3,100-member Western Growers Assn.

Likewise, the California Farm Bureau Federation slammed the Environmental Defense Center, which represents 30 east Ventura residents who appealed to the state to stop Garcia from using the highly toxic pesticide methyl bromide near their houses.

“Environmental Defense Center activists have manipulated the issue, shunned science and deceived the public,” state Farm Bureau President Bob L. Vice said.

But Marc Chytilo, lead attorney for the Santa Barbara-based ecology law firm, said at an afternoon news conference that new restrictions were placed on Garcia because state tests showed they were needed to protect public safety.

The state Department of Pesticide Regulation last week notified Garcia that he would be allowed to fumigate his strawberry field for the 12th consecutive year only if he greatly expanded the buffer zone between crops and homeowner property lines.

“I offer to match our science with their science any day,” Chytilo said. “The fact [is] that the Department of Pesticide Regulation revised the buffer from 30 feet to 250 feet. We didn’t do that. That proves that the 30-foot buffer was insufficient.”

Chytilo called Garcia’s decision not to use methyl bromide on the Montalvo field this season “a watershed event.”

“There are substantial risks to the public and the environment from the continued use of this chemical,” he said.

Chytilo said his law firm will assist in a statewide campaign for wider buffer zones between neighborhoods and fields.

Garcia could not be reached for comment.

But his attorney said the farmer decided against growing strawberries this season because it no longer makes financial sense. Planting delays and the new rules made it unacceptably risky to plant strawberries on the field near Ralston Street and Ramilli Avenue.

“We believe that there is a substantial probability that the strawberry crop planted on these fields this year would either fail totally or, at best, have yields so low that we would lose money on the substantial investment that planting would require,” said a statement issued by Washington lawyer Gary Smith, who represents Garcia’s Montalvo Ranch.

The lawyer said that an unusually wide state-imposed buffer zone between the field and nearby houses meant Garcia would have been able to plant strawberries on only about 69 acres of the 87-arce field.

Also, delays in pesticide application had taken Garcia to the end of the summer planting season, Smith said. The grower had intended to fumigate in July, but was blocked after nearby residents appealed his pesticide permit to state pesticide regulators.

Smith said Garcia has not yet decided what crop he will plant on the site instead of strawberries. He said some type of vegetable is most likely.

Farm industry sources said that Garcia intends to sublease his field to another grower for celery cultivation. But celery, which wouldn’t require such fumigation, would produce far fewer jobs than strawberries, they said.

One of Garcia’s employees, 70-year-old Jose Ochoa, said the grower’s decision may please homeowners, but it is disastrous for him and his co-workers, who were told they were out of work Tuesday evening.

“Two hundred people worked here, and now we have nothing,” said Ochoa, who has worked at the farm as an irrigator for 12 years. “It’s not good what they’re doing. Who’s going to give me work at my age?”

Yet, numerous residents have said they were sickened last summer when Garcia fumigated the same field. And some of them said at the news conference that Garcia’s decision shows that residents can be effective when they fight for their health.

Some local farmers said they see both sides of the argument, and that the Montalvo Ranch case is a good example of the need for residents and farmers to cooperate and compromise if agriculture is to be saved as Ventura County’s largest industry.

“It is a classic case of the difficulty of incompatible uses adjacent to one another,” said former county Farm Bureau President J. Link Leavens, whose farm is near Garcia’s. “If agriculture is going to stay a viable force in Ventura County, rational heads are going to have to prevail. Compromises need to be reached.”

The 250-foot buffer imposed on Garcia is a farm killer that should have been avoided, Leavens said.

“There could have been closer monitoring of conditions in the field or other options,” he said. “It’s an absolute shame that it all came to this.”