Chairwoman Leah Devlin, the state health director, said the group will have recommendations for closing gaps in the state's system for preventing and punishing pesticide misuse among farmers and others before the General Assembly returns to Raleigh in May.

The nine-member panel spent Thursday learning about the state's pesticide programs.

Jim Burnette, head of the state Department of Agriculture's pesticide section, said inspectors do their best to oversee 70,000 private pesticide applicators in North Carolina, many of them farmers, but they have few tools for dealing with the growing phenomenon of corporate farms.

Gov. Mike Easley created the task force in response to the state's continuing attempt to punish corporate tomato grower Ag-Mart for what state officials say were hundreds of violations of pesticide laws.

State officials say the company regularly forced its workers to illegally labor in fields freshly sprayed with chemicals. Some workers claim that they were sickened, and one former worker is suing the company, claiming that pesticide exposure is the reason her child was born with no arms and legs.

Florida-based Ag-Mart, which grows tomatoes in southeastern North Carolina, denies the charges. The state's case against the company has been greatly weakened because the law doesn't require the company to keep exact records of when and where pesticides were applied.

Burnette said the pesticide section licenses individuals, not companies, so it has no way of knowing when a single licensee represents a giant farm with hundreds of employees, as in Ag-Mart's case.

"It was very difficult to even identify that this operation was in the state," Burnette said of Ag-Mart.

The task force will spend its remaining two meetings discussing problems and recommendations.