Cash Crop
by Jessi Loerch
After Steven and Shannon Martin moved into a house on Beard Grove Road near a raspberry field, Shannon began having frequent headaches. Soon her kidneys began to hurt. After awhile, the rest of the family began having health problems. Steven also started having headaches and kidney pain. The couple and their 4-year-old son, William, developed a rash. Steven and Shannon were frequently nauseous.
Then, one morning in July 2001, the whole family got sick at the same time, Steven said.
"I woke up one morning, about 1 a.m., sick," he said. "I walked in the kitchen to get a drink of water, and I looked out the window and there’s this giant cloud over the whole area.
"They were spraying."
The Martins said that at the time they weren’t sure of the cause of their ailments. But, as they spent more time in the house near the fields, they began to suspect the chemicals used on the raspberries were causing their troubles.
This March, the Martins became so ill they went to the emergency room.
Steven said they became sick during a heavy windstorm. The winds were blowing from the north, across the fields and their home, he said. A few days before he had seen workers pouring something on the raspberries. He said it didn’t rain after that. Steven said he suspects the wind brought chemicals into their home and made them sick.
"We woke up about 3 a.m. We woke up sick. We went to the ER, we were so sick," he said. "(The doctors said) there was more than a 50-percent chance that it was pesticide exposure."
Pesticides and other chemicals are a major part of most modern farming and raspberries are no exception.
From pesticides to herbicides to fertilizers, raspberry farmers barrage their fields with chemicals to produce a better product.
In Whatcom County, farmers grow raspberries on approximately 6,500 acres, said Henry Bierlink, executive director of the Washington Red Raspberry Commission. Raspberries are a major cash crop for many Whatcom County farmers. In 2001, Whatcom County produced nearly 57.5 million pounds of red raspberries, according to the commission. More than 65 percent of America’s raspberries are grown in the county.
Raspberries can be profitable but require a lot of chemical attention. In order to get the best possible harvest, farmers use chemicals to fertilize the plants and reduce weeds and predators.
"It’s impossible to grow perfect fruit without pesticides," Bierlink said.
Chemical pesticides and herbicides can produce a variety of negative health effects, including cancer. In Whatcom County, state environmental workers discovered some of those toxic chemicals in the groundwater.
Before 1983, many raspberry, strawberry and seed potato farmers used a soil fumigant – a chemical injected into the soil before a crop is planted to kill pests – called ethylene dibromide. Soil fumigants like EDB kill microscopic rootworms that could destroy a crop.
In September 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered an emergency suspension on the sale and distribution of EDB as a soil fumigant because of the chemical’s carcinogenic effects and its tendency to leach into groundwater.
The concerns about EDB prompted investigations in Washington state. In 1984, the Washington state Health and Agriculture departments began looking at drinking water in areas where farmers used EDB to determine if it had contaminated the wells.
They found four areas in the state contaminated with EDB, Department of Ecology environmental specialist Mary O’Herron said. Two of these are in Whatcom County.
Areas northeast and west of Lynden showed levels of contamination above the drinking water standards. Ecology paid to connect the area to the northeast to public water so residents would have a clean source of water. But, because of the distance from the city, the area west of Lynden was not connected to public water, O’Herron said.
Mary Downing has lived on Birch Bay-Lynden Road all her life. From her back porch she can see acres of raspberries. Enfield Farms touches her backyard. Her father used to farm the area that Enfield Farms now uses for raspberries.
Downing said most of the people in the area have a long history there. The community is tightly knit and very supportive of each other.
But Ecology found that many wells in the area — including Downing’s well — are contaminated with EDB and provided residents with drinking water.
While she worried about possible health effects when she found out about the chemicals, she said it didn’t do any good to point fingers.
"We weren’t very happy (about the chemicals) but nobody could tell us where they came from," Downing said.
Downing said no one knows for sure when EDB was applied in the area. But, even if she did know, she said she wouldn’t tell. Growing up in a farming community, Downing said she believes farmers try to do the right thing. She said she doesn’t know where the chemicals came from and she doesn’t blame anyone.
"We were raised as farmers and we understand that farmers aren’t going to go out and risk their livelihood to get rid of a bug. That’s just silly," she said.
In the fall of 1997, Ecology decided to collect more information about the drinking water in the affected area, as well as the chemicals.
The studies found another chemical, 1,2-dichloropropane, in some wells. The chemical was also used as a soil fumigant.
Ecology requested information about the chemicals from the Agency for Toxic Disease and Disease Registry. At the same time, residents petitioned the EPA to find out more about the chemicals.
The research showed that water tainted with 1,2-DCP could be hazardous even if residents didn’t drink it. O’Herron said that skin contact or inhalation can expose a person to the toxin just like drinking the water. She said shower filters were offered to homes with 1,2-DCP contamination.
The tests didn’t show if people could be exposed to EDB through inhalation and skin contact, as they can with 1,2-DCP.
"The implication was that both chemicals probably performed the same way," O’Herron said.
In the late 1990s, tests showed that the level of contamination had dropped. The levels of EDB were nearly 10-times lower than the levels of the 1980s tests, O’Herron said. But some homes were still above the 0.05-parts-per-billion drinking water standard for EDB.
Last year, nearly 18 years after the contamination was identified, the City of Lynden used Ecology money to extend water lines to homes with contaminated drinking water.
For now, the furor over pesticides in the water has quieted. But farmers are still using chemicals to produce a perfect, plentiful crop.
Brian Cieslar, agronomist for Curt Maberry Farms in Lynden, said consumer demand drives a lot of the farmers’ pesticide use.
"The food in the grocery store is driven by consumer demand," he said. "Right now the food has to be too perfect. You go in the store and you don’t see any blemishes on the fruit or vegetables. If people were willing to eat a few bugs we wouldn’t have to spray so much."
As a solution to pesticide overuse, many farmers have adopted an approach called integrated pest management. IPM uses smaller amounts of chemicals to produce insect-free crops.
Using IPM, farmers monitor their fields to determine what pests are problematic. Then they can determine what chemicals to use to control those pests.
For example, Cieslar said that black root weevils frequently cause a problem in the raspberry fields. The young can eat the roots and the adults can end up in the fruit.
Cieslar uses long, triangular pheromone traps to determine how many beetles are in the field. He hangs the traps in the field and checks them several times a week.
When pests start to build up in the traps, Cieslar knows he needs to spray for them. He uses a formula to determine when there are more pests than purchasers will accept in the fruit.
Moths called leaf rollers can also damage the raspberries. The young moths damage the plant by eating the leaves, causing them to roll up, and the insects can end up in the fruit.
When Cieslar finds more than 25 moths in a trap during a week, he sprays for them. He found the most effective way to deal with the moths is to spray 10-12 days after they exceed 25 per trap, per week. At that time, the vulnerable larvae will be hatching. When he sprays the leaves with a naturally occurring bacteria, the young eat it and die. By timing the spray for when the moths are most vulnerable, he reduces the amount of spray he needs to use.
Todd Murray, IPM project manager for the WSU extension office in Bellingham, said IPM helps farmers adapt to pest problems, rather than just spraying blindly.
"Before, lots of people just relied on the calendar," he said. "Now they can go out there and look and see if that pesticide is necessary."
Murray said education is the key to making IPM work. He said teaching farmers about pests has helped reduce the problems with some insects like root weevils.
"(Farmers) understand the biology better and then they can make one application instead of five," Murray said.
Cieslar said that, although using IPM reduces pesticide use, farmers still need pesticides and herbicides to make money.
"With the amount of acreage we have we wouldn’t be able to (farm it without pesticides)," he said. "There wouldn’t be enough people to do the hand weeding."
But Cieslar said he is interested in any method that will reduce the amount of pesticide use.
"It would make our day if we didn’t have to apply pesticides because they’re expensive, some of them are persistent, and some of them are relatively toxic," he said.
Persistent chemicals are ones that breakdown slowly when released into the environment.
Though Boxx Berry Farms, at 10 acres, is much smaller than Maberry’s 500 acres, owner Mike Boxx also worries about the pesticides’ effects. But he said he believes with methods like IPM, farmers have become more careful with pesticides and herbicides.
And while Boxx worries about health effects, he admits the chemicals are necessary.
"I certainly couldn’t be farming on the level that I am without them," he said.
Boxx demonstrated the value of herbicides by kneeling between the rows of raspberries. He pulled a handful of common chickweed from the moist dirt. The plant is dark green with tiny white flowers. In some areas, it completely covers the ground between the raspberry rows. If the weed is not sprayed or tilled, Boxx said, it takes over the area.
Several rows away the chickweed is pale, lime-green and thinner. Boxx sprayed those rows with an herbicide called Gramoxone to control the weeds. Boxx said pesticides and herbicides make farming his 10 acres possible and profitable.
The Martins haven’t been able to prove that pesticides made them sick but Steven and Shannon said their health problems disappeared after moving to Maple Falls, Wash. Shannon said she still has some kidney pain but her headaches are gone. Steven said nausea is also no longer a concern and the rashes have disappeared.
“We’d go back there and get sick again, just from being there a short time,” Steven said. “Maybe it’s in our heads but I don’t think so.”
Shannon has an appointment with a specialist in Seattle to discuss her lingering health concerns. The Martins said moving into the new house made a dramatic difference in their lives, but they still wonder what made them so sick.
They haven’t received the results from the water tests conducted on their former home. They still want to know if chemicals were in the water they were drinking.
"The thing is that we can’t prove that anything happened to us, yet we were sick all the time," Steven said. "We’re just now getting over it."
Junior Jessi Loerch studies environmental journalism at Western. She has previously been published in Arbiter, Boise State University’s student paper, the Idaho Statesman and Ecotones.
