Pesticide drift causes concern, angst in town
HASTINGS (AP) – For decades, life in this tiny town revolved around the spud.
Residents swore that when they bit into a potato chip, they could tell whether the tuber was grown in Hastings. The high school football team was dubbed “The Spudsters.” A sign posted at the city limits still proclaims, “Hastings: Potato Capital of Florida.”
But Hastings, population 607, isn’t so certain of its identity these days. The verdant rows of potatoes have shrunk, replaced with Chinese cabbage, sorghum grain and sod grass. There are new homes, too, bought by folks who work in nearby St. Augustine but couldn’t afford a house there.
Some of those newer residents cherish the slow pace of life in Hastings, yet are troubled by one of its pastoral mainstays: farmland pesticides. A debate has simmered for two years over whether chemicals sprayed on crops have drifted into the air near the new elementary school.
“Before, people were kind of left alone to do what they wanted to do,” said Johnny Barnes, owner of Johnny’s Kitchen, one of the town’s few restaurants, which serves heaping, tasty portions of locally grown foods such as okra and purple cabbage. “But that’s changing.”
Pesticide drift has become a politically and emotionally charged issue from the blueberry farms of Maine to the apple orchards of Washington to the fields in Hastings, Fla. Farmers fear that any restriction of pesticides could jeopardize their industry, while some of their new neighbors worry that breathing the chemicals may cause health problems.
Complicating the matter: the risks of chronic, low-level exposure haven’t been definitively studied. Short-term problems, anti-pesticide activists assert, can include headaches, eye irritation and breathing problems. They say longer-term problems may include asthma, cancer and birth defects.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Web site, “The drift of spray from pesticide applications can expose people, wildlife, and the environment to pesticide residues that can cause health and environmental effects and property damage.” Yet the pesticide residue that ends up somewhere other than crops can vary in volume and be based on weather, rain and soil conditions – even if the chemicals are applied properly.
Similar conflicts have played out across the country.
In Washington state, monitoring stations were set up at certain apple orchards to measure whether pesticide sprays are drifting toward homes or schools. In September, a Santa Cruz, Calif., jury awarded an organic herb grower $1 million in damages after deciding a pesticide company violated the farmer’s rights when its chemicals drifted with the fog onto his crops. And in Maine, some homeowners near blueberry farms are urging state officials to prohibit aerial application of pesticides within 200 feet of homes, buildings and public roads.
The schism in Hastings began in December 2006, when two area high school students tested the air near South Woods Elementary School for a science project. The eight-day test found levels of four pesticides that were sprayed on nearby cabbage fields.
The students and a handful of residents asked the Pesticide Action Network North America – a group that opposes the use of such sprays and chemicals – to test again. The group found levels of the same chemicals in the air in the spring of 2007, including three substances that are or will soon be banned in Europe. The local school board sponsored a probe, which found nothing.
PANNA tested the same location again in the fall of 2007 and in a report released in September 2008, said that “distressing” levels of the same four chemicals were detected in the air near the school.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services are reviewing the latest PANNA report. “So far, data available to the Agency concerning levels of pesticides in homes or children’s bodily fluids are limited and inconclusive, and do not demonstrate that children in agricultural areas receive significantly more non-occupational exposure than children in nonagricultural areas,” wrote Dale Kemery, spokesman for the EPA in Washington, D.C.
Doubts and bad feelings linger in this once-tight community.