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Yaffa said he has tracked down more than a dozen current and former Ag-Mart employees who have testified under oath about pesticide exposure.

"The only conclusion I can reach is that the state did a horrific job investigating it," Yaffa said. "I could give you 15 depositions that would support all these things they were trying to prove."

Among those deposed was Cristobal Rueda Moreno, who worked alongside his wife in Ag-Mart's fields for several years.

In his deposition, Moreno said sprayers frequently came so close that chemicals landed on his skin, causing eye irritation, nose bleeds and dizziness. Once, he said, workers were doused so thoroughly that many of them threw up.

In February 2005, Moreno's wife bore a baby with several deformities, including an absence of genitals. The doctor told them it was likely because of pesticide exposure, and Ag-Mart offered them money in exchange for not suing, Moreno said in the deposition. They declined the money and later decided against suing, he testified.

Ag-Mart attorney David Stefany said Monday that Moreno was never offered a settlement.

Another worker, Yolanda Cisneros, who supervised tomato pickers, said in a deposition that she frequently saw workers exposed to pesticides on their skin.

'A big can of Raid'

Once, Cisneros said, she was sprayed so badly that she felt as though she couldn't breathe. "I felt like somebody had taken a big can of Raid and just pointed it at me and shoot," Cisneros said.

A former Ag-Mart pesticide applicator, Eric Newsome, said in a deposition that angry workers sometimes threw tomatoes at him for spraying near them.

Ag-Mart officials say dozens of workers say they were never exposed to pesticides. Some of those questioned by state investigators in North Carolina and Florida said they had had no problems with pesticides. They say Yaffa and other advocates have ignored that contingent of Ag-Mart workers.

North Carolina officials began investigating Ag-Mart in April 2005, after hearing of the deformed babies.

State investigators spent months combing company records, which were supposed to show where pesticides were applied and where workers harvested tomatoes. They also interviewed a handful of workers, one of whom said he was sometimes in the fields while pesticides were being applied, which is illegal.

In fall 2005, the state issued a lengthy notice of violation based largely on Ag-Mart documents, which state investigators said showed that workers were often illegally sent into fields freshly sprayed with pesticides. They also used the statement from the lone worker, Oscar Herrera.

The company maintained from the start that the documents were flawed, with some logs putting individual workers in different fields at the same time. Ag-Mart argued in court that its records weren't accurate enough to show where workers labored, or whether those fields had been sprayed recently with pesticides. Two judges agreed.

The judge threw out Hernandez's statement because the state failed to bring him to court. The worker's attorney, Carol Brooke of the N.C. Justice Center, said he was willing to testify but was never contacted.

No other workers testified, though some were made available by their attorneys.

Greg Schell, a Florida lawyer who has filed several class-action suits on behalf of Ag-Mart workers, said he was shocked investigators never interviewed any of the dozens of witnesses he offered up.

"It's easy to second-guess, and I recognize that as a litigator," Schell said. "But this one just seemed like a refusal to look at evidence that's being handed to you on a platter."

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