Dear Farmers: Let’s own our numbers
Washington farmers and agricultural companies do a lot of things right when it comes to the safe handling and application of pesticides. Our pesticide applicator licensing, state provided safety programs, and sensitive persons list are all designed to prevent pesticide drift and protect farmworkers, their families, and farm neighbors.
Unfortunately, pesticide drift still happens. Some of these numbers are from psychosomatic cases or from cases of ‘victims’ looking for insurance payouts. Despite these considerations, sometimes a real and concerning incidence of pesticide drift still affects Washington state farmworkers, families, or even neighbors.
It is time the agriculture community owns these numbers. Though we need accurate data to discuss this problem, if the agriculture industry continues protesting every number and arguing the validity of all claims, more regulation will be inevitable. Legislators looking to make a name for themselves will find pesticide safety an easy target with sympathetic talking points and quickly pass additional regulations. In fact, this is already happening as legislators pushed for a 4-day notification earlier this year with a reporting database.
A great lesson is learned out of Kern County, California: “It takes one person to spray 100. But it takes 1,000 people daily to not spray one.”
Jeff Rasmussen, past president of Kern County Farm Bureau learned this lesson over the last 13 years and has worked to build the county’s group of “1,000 people.” He shared that he was an “everyday pest control advisory getting fed up with more bureaucracy and knowing that in agriculture they were already doing a lot of things right.”
In 2006 there was a major incidence of pesticide drift in Kern County that affected a lot of people. The pressure for more regulation was building and Rasmussen recognized that “We [agriculture] can take care of ourselves. We can do a better job than the state.”
He approached multiple farming groups, including the Kern County Farm Bureau, to develop a pesticide safety program. However, the fear of talking about pesticides was so paralyzing that these groups ignored his attempts or ran him out of the room. Luckily for the county’s future, Rasmussen’s farmer clients decided to buy into his idea.
During that time, the state was implementing a new law for school notification of pesticide application. Knowing the state would be slow to enact the regulations, Rasmussen and his group took matters into their own hands. They mailed 10,000 letters to the parents of students that would be affected by the notification. The letters invited them to a meeting that would allow them to talk to the farmers and applicators. Out of the 10,000 letters, only 10 parents showed up to the meeting.
After this experience, Rasmussen recognized the farming community could be a solution before there was ever a problem. While the state developed a pilot project in a small portion of the county that mandated notification for restricted-use pesticides, the farming community developed Spray Safe.
Spray Safe is a county-wide, one-day pesticide safety education event for pesticide handlers and applicators, farmworkers, and growers. The goal is to increase people’s awareness of their own farms, others, and the environment. Spray Safe will hold its 13th meeting in January 2019 and the program has been adopted in other counties. The state has also recognized the success of Spray Safe and created a $50,000 grant to help other counties adopt the program.
Within two years of the first Spray Safe, the incidences of pesticide drift dropped to zero and for the three out of the following five years there were zero incidents. Pesticide drift still occurs, but according to Rasmussen, “Education has done more than the regulatory part.”
The Washington farming community can do a better than the state to protect farmworkers, communities, and families from pesticides. By developing our own countywide safety programs, like our state’s aerial applicators already did, we can show additional regulations are unnecessary and build our network of “1,000 people to protect the one.”