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Greg Schell, a lawyer with Florida Legal Services, said his staff surveyed 89 Ag-Mart workers in June. About half said they had been sprayed with pesticides within the past three months. Some, whose job it was to apply pesticides, said they sprayed fields filled with workers, Schell said.

"We've interviewed applicators who said they did that all the time for Ag-Mart," Schell said. "They just told us all kinds of stories, and I don't think they're all making it up."

Exposed in pregnancy

In 2004, the three women, Francisca Herrera, Sostenes Salazar and Maria De La Mesa Cruz, were among hundreds of Ag-Mart workers who traveled with the harvest, picking tomatoes in the company's fields in North Carolina, Florida, New Jersey and Mexico. All three are illegal immigrants.

Herrera and Salazar became pregnant in April, De La Mesa Cruz in May.

Yaffa said none of the women were available to comment for this story. With Yaffa's help, Herrera filed suit against the company Feb. 28, claiming that pesticide exposure is responsible for her son's deformities. She is asking for an undisclosed amount in damages.

The agriculture records show that Herrera, whose boy was born in December 2004 with no arms and legs, started working in North Carolina in mid-April. During her first trimester, when a baby's limbs form, she was illegally exposed on 11 different days, the Agriculture Department data shows.

By the end of September, she had been exposed on 22 days. On four of those days, records show, she was exposed at least twice -- once at the company's Brunswick County farm and once at the Pender County farm.

Salazar, whose son had a severely underdeveloped jaw, started work in North Carolina in June 2004. She was illegally exposed on 25 days during the next 3 1/2 months, the analysis shows, seven of them during her first trimester.

De La Mesa Cruz, whose child died, didn't start work in North Carolina until mid-September. She was exposed four days by the end of that month, the analysis shows.

Salazar and De La Mesa Cruz also worked in Florida and were exposed to pesticides there during their pregnancies, a Florida study shows. Their babies were born in February 2005.

Among the chemicals that the women were exposed to are Monitor, Agri-Mek and Penncozeb. Ag-Mart has dropped those three because some studies link them to birth defects.

The Collier County (Fla.) Health Department studied the women's exposure there and concluded last fall that there was no definitive link between the deformities and pesticide exposure in that state. That study did not look at the women's exposure in North Carolina.

North Carolina officials say they are looking at the workers' exposures in both states.

Experts say it is nearly impossible to prove that pesticide exposure caused a specific baby's birth defect.

Ted Schettler, a Massachusetts doctor and science director with the Science and Environmental Health Network, an Iowa-based nonprofit that studies the impact of pesticides on health, said medical literature is full of stories about farmworkers with deformed children. But he said he doesn't know of a single completed study in which farmworkers were monitored during their pregnancies. As a result, when a deformed child is born, no one knows what pesticides, if any, were in the mother's bloodstream during her pregnancy.

"Assigning responsibility here is incredibly difficult," Schettler said. "The reality is that we don't know what causes most birth defects."

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