About 50 people from three Watsonville senior communities met at the Pajaro Village Club House Monday evening to voice their concerns about agricultural pesticide use near their homes and in the surrounding Pajaro Valley.
The meeting included Santa Cruz County Agricultural Commissioner David Sanford and Deputy Agricultural Commissioner Graham Hunting.
The thrust of the meeting came from seniors concerned about pesticide applications in their neighborhoods.
Attendee questions included concerns about airborne agricultural chemicals wafting into their neighborhoods, and what regulations govern dust and dirt stirred into the atmosphere in farm fields that settle in neighborhoods.
Hunting and Sanford explained the role of their department, which includes promoting and protecting agriculture, assuring environmental quality, and protecting the health and safety of residents.
The department does this through programs in the agricultural division, weights and measures division, and mosquito and vector control.
After tourism, agriculture is the second highest income generator in the county, typically bringing in $1.5 billion in overall economic impacts, they said.
Many attendees expressed concern about the dangers of agricultural applications, and about the local program known as SprayDays, the only program in the world designed to inform people of agricultural pesticide applications in their neighborhoods that is now used in the county.
In Watsonville, 40 senior houses border conventional chemical raspberry fields, with 1,000 seniors living within a quarter-mile of that farmland.
Bay Village resident Kathleen Kirkpatrick said that the SprayDays program is the only one of its kind in the world.
“…and we fought for this,” she said.
As of Monday,Kirkpatrick said she had received 45 notices of hazardous pesticide applications that occurred over the summer.
Woody Rehanek, also of Bay Village, shared data from a new mapping tool, California People and Pesticides Explorer, which showed that in 2022 in the square-mile that includes farms and homes where the senior villages are, a total of 53,260 pounds of pesticides were applied.
Of this, 45,154 pounds (85%) were fumigants; 26,211 pounds (49%) were carcinogens, and 45,562 pounds (86%) were toxic air contaminants. He emphasized that children, as well as medically fragile seniors, are most vulnerable to pesticide exposures.
“The on-the-ground and in-the-field reality is that we are exposed to multiple pesticides over time, and these cumulative impacts have not been adequately studied,” Rehanek said.
He pointed to a 2016 UC Los Angeles School of Law study that had arrived at the same conclusion, and said that there has been no subsequent research.
Hunting and Sanford stressed repeatedly that any and all such concerns can be brought to the Commissioner’s Office and by asking the farmers.
“Call us about any of these issues — that’s why we’re here,” Sanford said.
