A judge has recommended that the state Agriculture Department drop nearly all its 369 charges of pesticide violations against tomato grower Ag-Mart, the company announced Monday.

In a ruling issued last week, an administrative law judge said Ag-Mart should pay $6,000 in fines, down from an original fine of nearly $185,000.

Judge Joe Webster said the Florida company -- which grows hundreds of acres of tomatoes in southeastern North Carolina -- could be held responsible for only 17 violations, which included burning pesticide containers, failing to provide safety equipment for employees working with pesticides and, on eight occasions, allowing workers to harvest crops too soon after chemicals were sprayed.

The final decision on the case still rests with the state Pesticide Board, as the judge's ruling is only a recommendation. The Pesticide Board decided last summer that the case was too complicated for its members to handle and asked the Office of Administrative Hearings for a recommendation.

The board must now decide whether to accept the judge's ruling or press forward with the original charges. Agriculture Department spokesman Brian Long said the board won't take up the matter until at least December.

He declined to comment on the case, saying it was still active.

But the judge's decision was a blow to the Agriculture Department's case. Officials once characterized Ag-Mart as the worst pesticide violator in state history, routinely forcing workers to labor in fields freshly sprayed with toxic chemicals and possibly causing deformities in their children.

In his ruling, Webster said the department failed to prove the vast majority of its case.

Ag-Mart officials said that the judge's ruling showed the entire case was a mix-up and that the company never endangered its workers. The company sells its tomatoes, which are grown in several states and Mexico, under the brand names Santa Sweets and Ugly Ripe.

"As we have stated from the outset, agriculture officials from North Carolina misunderstood information supplied by Ag-Mart to reach erroneous and misleading conclusions," Ag-Mart President Don Long said Monday in a statement.

Much of the state's case was based on the company's records, which showed where pesticides were sprayed and where workers were harvesting crops. Ag-Mart said the records were not accurate enough to prove that employees were exposed to pesticides.

The company says that it does not keep exact records of where employees work and that work records provided to the state were only educated guesses about the fields where work occurred. The company also says its fields are so large that employees could be working in one area while pesticides are being applied acres away in the same field.

Even in cases where the records proved a violation of pesticide laws, the state often could not prove that the company had "willfully" broken the law, as state pesticide law demands.

For instance, the state found that Ag-Mart applied one highly toxic pesticide more than three times as often as the law allows. Company officials admitted overusing the pesticide, saying they didn't know the law. The judge ruled that that violation was not willful.

North Carolina's is the second case against Ag-Mart to fall apart under a judge's scrutiny. A similar case in Florida suffered a blow in March, when an administrative law judge in Tampa said the Florida Department of Agriculture should throw out all but seven of 78 pesticide violations against Ag-Mart. The judge reduced the company's fine by 90 percent, from $111,000 to $11,000.

Carol Brooke, a lawyer with the N.C. Justice Center, has represented some Ag-Mart workers who say they were exposed to pesticides. She said employees told her they were frequently subject to unsafe working conditions, and she said she was disappointed that the state didn't bring them in to testify before the judge.

She said the case points out weaknesses in the Agriculture Department's ability to regulate industry, enabling growers to avoid punishment by claiming ignorance of the law. She said the remaining violations against Ag-Mart appeared serious enough to warrant a larger fine.

"Those are pretty serious violations," Brooke said. "You would think that it would add up to more than $6,000."