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The Agriculture Department fined the company for 369 violations of state pesticide laws when it visited farms last spring. Ag-Mart was using 18 pesticides on its crop, six of which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies as among the most dangerous to workers and the environment.

Job conditions faulted

According to the October violation notice, the company failed to train workers who handled pesticides, using an unqualified trainer who showed an unapproved video. It didn't supply workers with proper safety equipment and didn't have adequate water for them to rinse their eyes.

The notice says the company was also burning empty pesticide containers beside a field, a violation of state law.

"They knew that they should not burn pesticide containers" in North Carolina, the notice says, an Ag-Mart manager told inspectors, "but Ag-Mart President Mr. Donald Long told them to stop sending empty containers to the landfill and to burn them on site."

The company applied one of its most dangerous pesticides more than three times as often as law allows, the notice said. And it allowed employees to work in freshly sprayed fields that weren't safe to re-enter for up to seven days, the notice said.

One worker told inspectors that he sometimes worked in the fields while the pesticide methyl bromide was being applied. By law, workers cannot re-enter a field until 48 hours after the application of methyl bromide, which is known to deplete the ozone layer. At least one study has linked methyl bromide to cancer in farmworkers.

The worker, Oscar Hernandez, said in a telephone interview last week that during the 16 months he worked for Ag-Mart, tractors often sprayed fields without warning while he was collecting debris and working on irrigation systems in them. He also worked as a pesticide handler and said he received no training for the job.

Hernandez, 36, said through a translator that he sometimes felt dizzy and agitated, almost drugged, while pesticides were being sprayed. He said he still suffers from headaches, nervousness and memory loss -- all documented effects of pesticide exposure.

Hernandez said he was given no drinking water while he worked. He said his managers got angry if he asked for it.

Hernandez left the company in the summer of 2005 and now works in construction in New Orleans. He has retained a lawyer, Carol Brooke of the N.C. Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for the poor.

Brooke said Ag-Mart fired Hernandez because he talked with state pesticide inspectors. Hernandez has filed a claim with the Department of Labor's employment discrimination bureau and may file a lawsuit. He is not the only former employee threatening to sue.

Babies deformed

A few months before state inspectors arrived at the North Carolina farms, three former Ag-Mart workers bore babies. The women lived in the same labor camp in Florida when they became pregnant, and all worked for Ag-Mart in Florida and North Carolina during their pregnancies, said their lawyer, Andrew B. Yaffa, who practices in Florida.

The first baby, born in December 2004, had no arms and legs. The second, born in early February 2005, had a severely underdeveloped jaw. The third, born two days later, had a missing nose and ear and no visible sexual organs. That baby died within days.

The company has since stopped using five chemicals linked to birth defects.

Ann Chelminski, an epidemiologist with the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, said she is studying whether the deformities could have been caused by exposure to pesticides. She said she expects her report to be completed in a few weeks.

Florida health officials did a similar study last fall, looking at the mothers' exposure while they worked there. The Collier County Health Department concluded that pesticides could not be definitively linked to the deformities.

Bottary, the Ag-Mart spokesman, said the Florida county's report showed pesticides were not to blame. "An independent study found no link between birth defects and pesticide use at Ag-Mart," he said.

Those who study pesticides say it is difficult to prove that pesticides cause specific health problems. Yaffa, the women's lawyer, said he sees no other explanation. He said he plans to sue on behalf of the boy with no limbs, Carlos Candelario, in the next few months.

He said that since the three women came forward, he has found a fourth former Ag-Mart employee whose baby was missing a part of its brain and later died.

He said two of the women had aborted fetuses with deformities.

"They're living in the same place," Yaffa said. "They're working in the same fields. It's screaming. The alarms are going off. Something's wrong."

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