Second-hand PESTICIDE exposure – Californians live with Strawberry fields forever

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The transition underscores the modern strawberry industry’s chemical dependence: growers rely on heavy amounts of some of the most dangerous pesticides – a class called fumigants – to deliver the fruit year-round at an affordable price for consumers. Because strawberries like to grow where people like to live, in the perpetual spring of coastal California, growers often use the pesticides near schools, homes and businesses.

The health and environmental problems that come with those pesticides have threatened the foundation of a $2.6bn industry that provides Americans with 9 out of 10 strawberries they eat.

Even as most of the developed world has moved on to other methods of farming, California’s strawberry growers have resisted the methyl bromide ban. Nearly a decade after the pesticide was supposed to be banned, the state’s strawberry growers have staved off the deadline by warning of financial ruin. Today, they use about 90% of all the methyl bromide in the developed world.

Meanwhile, strawberry growers and chemical companies have cycled from one potentially dangerous chemical to another to try to replace methyl bromide.

Strawberry growing can be an unforgiving business. The fruit is fragile and land is expensive, so growers pump the soil with fumigants to wipe out most life below the surface, a sort of insurance policy against future plagues.