Fumigant and Far Between

EPA cracks down on the pesticides on your peppers

Posted at 12:35 PM on 11 Jul 2008

The U.S. EPA plans to tighten restrictions on five nasty soil fumigants that keep pests away from strawberries, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and peppers. The proposed mitigation measures include buffer zones, warning signs, air-quality monitoring, management and outreach plans, emergency-response training, and provision of breathing masks for farmworkers. The rules would apply to five scary-sounding 'cides: chloropicrin, dazomet, metam sodium, metam potassium, and methyl bromide (which depletes ozone and must be ceased altogether where alternatives are available). The EPA has never before required buffer zones, which could range from 25 feet (which health advocates say is inadequate) to half a mile (which growers say would cramp their space). The new regulations, according to the EPA press release, are designed to keep workers and bystanders from "eye or respiratory irritation, or more severe and irreversible effects."

sources: Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, EPA Newsroom

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Comments: (3 comments)

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Thank goodness

It's been way too long that the EPA has been phasing out methyl bromide. It's nasty stuff used by conventional farmers to sterilize the soil before planting crops like strawberries and grapes, destroying all of the beneficial organisms along with the problematic ones. It's also used to gas bananas before shipment (one more reason I buy organic, fair trade bananas).

I know some organic farmers up in Sonoma County who got sick after a neighboring farmer was using the stuff on his fields and the wind shifted (as it will do up in the hills around Healdsburg), exposing the farmer and his family to the poisonous gas. It's not fair that farm workers get exposed to this poison on an ongoing basis. Also, methyl bromide has 60 times the ozone-destroying power of chlorine. Not really what our atmosphere needs right now.

Remember the precautionary principle. We can do what we need to without nasty chemicals. Really.

Eat what you grow, grow what you eat

by PermieWriter at 1:57 PM on 11 Jul 2008

Greenwashing

This is a load of do-nothing crap. It does nothing to eliminate or even reduce the use of these awful chemicals. Signs, buffer zones, and the other provisions will do absolutely nothing to mitigate or stop the poisoning of the Earth, including the atmosphere, with petrochemical pesticides.

by Wolverine at 4:08 PM on 11 Jul 2008

but the strawberries they grow are soooo good!

I don't know what I would do if I didn't have a cheap, abundant supply year-round of perfectly-shaped, pretty, big, red, blemish-free strawberries.

If anybody actually knew what strawberries were supposed to taste like, they wouldn't buy the crap grown in California with all the soil fumigants.

It must've been troublesome for Californians when strawberry growers were spraying these things without buffer zones. All those sick migrant workers flooding into free medical clinics and burdening those poor Californians with high taxes. Hopefully, this should be a little tax relief for California if this results in fewer incidental casualties and liabilities.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

by John former Marine at 6:24 AM on 14 Jul 2008

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