7 things to know before you eat your next strawberry
1. Strawberry growers rely on some of the riskiest and hardest-to-control pesticides used in agriculture.
The little red fruit is nutritious and delicious. It’s also fragile, valuable and often grown on coastal California real estate.
So strawberry growers use a class of pesticides known as fumigants, blasting the soil with gases before they plant each season’s crop. Fumigants are like an insurance policy – taking out possible pests, diseases and weeds before they can cause any problems.
Even when used correctly, fumigants turn into hard-to-control gases that float into the air, affecting workers and nearby residents. They’ve been linked to cancer, developmental problems and ozone depletion.
2. Growers use a lot of pesticides. And they often use them close to schools, homes and businesses.
Strawberries take up less than 1 percent of all farmland in California but account for at least 8 percent of the state's pesticide use.
The three ZIP codes in the state with the heaviest pesticide use all fall within two prime strawberry-growing counties, Ventura and Monterey.
Strawberries like to grow where people like to live, in the perpetual spring of coastal California.
The state Department of Public Health categorizes fumigants as among the pesticides of greatest health concern. No school in the state is as close to fields using such large amounts of these problematic pesticides as Rio Mesa High School in Oxnard. It is surrounded on all four sides by strawberry fields.
3. Farmers began using fumigants after researchers in Hawaii experimented with leftover stockpiles of a chemical weapon that soldiers called ‘vomiting gas.’
After World War I, the United States had vast leftover stocks of chloropicrin. The chemical had been added to tear gas to make enemy soldiers vomit and throw off their gas masks, exposing themselves to other harmful gases.
After the war, with the pineapple industry struggling with pests in the soil, researchers pumped chloropicrin into the ground. The results were dramatic. An acre treated with chloropicrin yielded 20 more tons of pineapple than the untreated acre.
By the 1950s, fumigants were being used in strawberry fields. With breakthroughs in breeding and technology, along with the new chemical cocktails, California strawberry farmers had by the 1970s doubled the amount of berries a single acre could produce.
