State: Women faced exposure to toxins in fields

Grower denies acting illegally

Two field workers who gave birth to deformed babies were illegally exposed to pesticides more than 20 times each while they picked tomatoes in Eastern North Carolina, N.C. Department of Agriculture data show.

A third worker, who spent most of her pregnancy working in Florida, was exposed four times during the less than six weeks she worked in North Carolina, the data show.

All worked for Ag-Mart, a Florida-based tomato grower, and they were illegally exposed to a host of chemicals as often as three times a week, the documents show. Three of the 15 chemicals are linked to birth defects in lab animals.

One baby had no arms or legs. Another had a deformed jaw. The third had no nose and no visible sex organs and died soon after birth.

The women's exposures were illegal because they worked fields too soon after pesticides were sprayed, agriculture data show. To protect workers from harmful effects, many pesticides require that workers be out of the fields for anywhere from a few hours to two days after spraying.

Ag-Mart says that none of its workers were illegally exposed to pesticides and that the Agriculture Department misinterpreted its records.

Andrew Yaffa, a lawyer who represents the three women, said the documents tell only part of the story.

"Sometimes it was more than once a day," Yaffa said. "They would come out of the fields covered. Their clothes would be green with pesticides. Their throats would be dry. They would be coughing. They were suffering from skin ailments."

Ag-Mart, which is privately held, grows about 1,100 acres of grape tomatoes in Brunswick and Pender counties, 125 miles southeast of Raleigh. The company employs about 500 people there during the growing season. It sells tomatoes under the brand name Santa Sweets.

State officials have been investigating Ag-Mart for nearly a year. The Agriculture Department has charged the company with 369 violations of state pesticide law, the largest pesticide case in state history. The company will have a hearing before the state Pesticide Board on March 28.

The state Department of Health and Human Services is investigating whether the three babies' deformities are linked to pesticides. That report is expected in the next few weeks.

Until now, the evidence against Ag-Mart has remained private, because neither the state Health Department nor the Agriculture Department has finished its investigation. Last week, the Agriculture Department opened its files to The News & Observer.

State agriculture officials went through reams of data that Ag-Mart provided to determine whether workers went into fields too soon after pesticides were sprayed.

The News & Observer looked at the dates of violations and at the work records of the three mothers to determine how often they were working in fields where violations occurred. The data show that the women frequently worked in fields on days when pesticides were applied.

Ag-Mart spokesman Leo Bottary said last week that pesticides were always applied to sections of the field where workers were not present. He said the company's records aren't detailed enough to show which part of a field each worker was in.

"There's nothing in those records that would put anybody in a particular section" of a field, Bottary said.

The company will keep better records in the future, he said.

State agriculture officials say they can work only with the data the company provided. "We put the burden of proof on them," said Patrick Jones, enforcement manager for the Agriculture Department's pesticide section.