By Alex Formuzis, EWG V-P for Media Relations

One of my favorite movie scenes of all time features George C. Scott portraying General George Patton in the film Patton. As he's meeting with other Allied field commanders in a base in North Africa they come under surprise attack from the German Luftwaffe.

I hadn't thought about that clip until I read an August 29 article in the Denver Post:

"I came out of a sound sleep and honestly our entire house was shaking, and I said, 'What is that God-awful roar'," said Stephanie Feller, a resident of Sagewater Court in Fossil Lake Ranch (Colorado). "I thought, 'My God, we are all under attack'. "

The "God-awful roar" Feller experienced came from a crop duster, not enemy aircraft, and it wasn't gunfire, but pesticides that hit her property.

Again, from the August 29, 2011 edition of the Denver Post: "Feller said immediately after the airplane flew over, her nose and eyes began burning."

Folks who live near corn operations in the Midwest are also facing similar incidents of crop duster flyovers. In 2010, Indiana residents filed 24 complaints of aerial pesticide spray drifts with the state's pesticide program.

Dave Scott, with the Office of Indiana State Chemist and Seed Commissioner told the Muncie Star Press (Aug. 21, 2011) that "If they get sprayed, they should take their clothing off, stick it in a clean garbage bag, take a shower and call us. The bottom line is, it's OK for crop dusters to be out there, but every product says you can't spray people or drift onto people. If you get sprayed, that's the greatest likelihood of absorbing the stuff."

This reminds me of another iconic film clip.

Crop Dusters: Back in Vogue
For years, the use of crop dusters on the cornfields wasn't always the preferred method to apply pesticides and fungicides to cornrows. It was often too expensive.

However, with corn prices at record levels, demand for more of the crop has made aerial application affordable and back IN vogue, including squirting cornfields with the highly toxic pesticide glyphosate, known by Monsanto's trade name RoundUp.

According to the August 21 report in The Muncie Star Press, one crop dusting operation was fined $1,250 for applying pesticides without a license. The paper quoted a local resident as complaining that the pesticides "browned his maple leaves and spruce needles, burned his petunias and peonies and spotted his strawberry plants." A lab identified the substance as glyphosate, the paper said.

The U.S. Geological Survey recently reported finding widespread glyphosate in air, river and rainwater in Iowa and Mississippi.

Unfortunately, people who happen to live in fly zones are being dusted with airborne releases of pesticides and fungicides, causing much concern about the potential impacts these chemical aerial assaults may mean for people's health.

"I am a cancer survivor. I try so hard to avoid this stuff. I don't smoke or drink, so it's very upsetting to be poisoned in my own home. It was coating my house and it also hit me," Selma, Ind., resident Sheri Stewart told the Muncie Star Press.

Dan Cooper of Fort Collins, Colo. described some of the symptoms he experienced shortly after a crop duster buzzed his home. "Dizziness, sinuses swollen, just a little bit stumbly," Cooper told The Coloradoan's Bobby Magill.

There are similar stories of pesticide drift into residential areas located near cotton fields from west Texas to Georgia and fruit and near vegetable operations in California.

Spray Drift: Is it Floating Your Way?
The practice of blasting crops with pesticides is not a precise science - far from it.

Spray drift is a common occurrence that can leave homes, playgrounds, schools, backyard swing sets and patio furniture - not to mention people -- covered in toxic chemicals.

Of particular concern are schools, playgrounds and daycare facilities located near chemical agriculture operations. The Pesticide Action Network has helped sound the alarm on this issue.

According to the network's website:

• Schoolchildren in Strathmore, California, were exposed to pesticides sprayed in a neighboring field in November 2007, after which they reported feeling dizzy and falling sick.


• Eleven people got sick, including seven children who were hospitalized in Kahuku, Hawaii in 2007 when organophosphate insecticide fumes drifted over a school from a nearby sod farm.

Aerial and land pesticide spraying can taint soil, other field crops and nearby waterways. Modern agribusiness is predicted to use more than 1 billion pounds of pesticides annually, with large quantities contaminating local water supplies throughout the country.

For nearly a decade, Oluf Johnson's central Minnesota organic farm, which is surrounded by corn and soybean operations, has been the victim of aerial pesticide drift. Johnson and his family have fought the Paynesville Farmers Union Cooperative Oil Co. in court for years. Last July, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that Johnson is entitled to damages from the pesticide cooperative that contaminated his fields, rendering his crop unsalable in the organic market.

A California appellate court handed down a similar ruling in December of 2010, awarding an organic herb farmer $ 1 million after a nearby farming operation doused his crop with pesticides. Agriculture chemicals are now so widely used that they can be found in umbilical cord blood of American newborns.

Chemical agriculture and its aerial bombardiers have managed to pollute the entire biosphere --including people not yet born.

Keep on flying and thanks again (for nothin'), chemical ag.

By Alex Formuzis, EWG V-P for Media Relations

Chemical agriculture's defense of pesticides conjures up the image of the chain-smoking industry attorney Nathan Thurm slithering through a minefield of facts and figures about the causes of global warming in this classic skit from Saturday Night Live.

Stacks of scientific studies have documented serious health risks to humans from pesticide exposure, but pesticide makers and sprayers, like the fictional Mr. Thurm, ignore the research and stick with talking points or their own questionable "science" in their efforts to muddy the waters, create confusion and delay government action to protect the public. Meanwhile, we eaters are left to consume pesticides along with conventionally grown produce.

Pesticides are engineered to kill living organisms in a number of ways, including destroying the nervous system of the insects they target. They can't be good for human health, either.

The most worrisome pesticides in wide use today are organophosphates, OPs for short. Earlier this year, three separate studies published at the same time reached very similar, and very disturbing, conclusions: Children exposed to organophosphates while in the mother's womb had lower IQs when they reached school age than unexposed children.

Other health problems that have been linked to low-dose exposure to OPs include disruption of the endocrine (hormonal) system, lower levels of testosterone and other hormones, leukemia, lymphoma and Parkinson's disease.

Here's a rogue's gallery of the most worrisome pesticides:

1. Chlorpyrifos:

One of the OP pesticides most widely used by chemical agriculture is chlorpyrifos, also known by the brand names Dursban and Lorsban. It's applied in large quantities to a number of crops, including corn, oranges and apples. It was once heavily used as an in-home insecticide, but the Environmental Protection Agency banned it for home use in 2001 because of the risk to children's health.

Most recently, chlorpyrifos was back in the headlines when it was linked to the deaths of several tourists in Thailand, who were apparently killed by a chlorpyrifos-based fumigant used to eradicate bedbugs from hotel rooms.

None of this seems to matter to sprayers and manufacturers, though. In the face of this and plenty of other evidence that chlorpyrifos exposure can cause serious and permanent health problems in humans, the statements of leading agribusiness representatives reveal their true colors:

"CAFA (California Alfalfa and Forage Association) has been working hard to oppose some people in the environmental movement who are trying to basically take all the organophosphates away from us, but in particular, chlorpyrifos." - Philip Bowles, CAFA board member and president of Bowles Farming in Los Banos, Calif. Western Farm Press, January 17, 2009

"Chlorpyrifos has become a major target of environmental groups who are trying to take it off the market. Fortunately, Dow AgroSciences has stated its determination to defend the insecticide." - Aaron Keiss, Feb.18, 2010 column in Western Farm Press

When environmental and community groups pressed EPA in 2010 to restrict Lorsban, one of Dow AgroSciences' popular products, the company ran this (scare-tactic) ad depicting a world without fruits and vegetables.

"Medellin lives with his parents and three little sisters in the agricultural town of Lindsay, California, where chlorpyrifos is sprayed routinely on the orange groves surrounding his home. During the growing season, the family is awakened several times a week by the sickly smell of nighttime pesticide spraying. What follows is worse: searing headaches, nausea, vomiting."

Tests showed that Medellin had five times more chlorpyrifos in his body than the average American, based on research conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In turn, a July 23, 2010, article in the San Francisco Chronicle, quoted Cynthia Cory, director of environmental affairs for the California Farm Bureau Federation, as having this to say about chlorpyrifos and the situation the Medellin family faced:

"We have to continually evaluate chemicals and make sure they are used in the safest way - but I do believe that has been done with this chemical. It's a widely used chemical in California and across the United States, and it's used on a wide range of insects. There's no alternative that's going to replace it tomorrow, but we try to continue to reduce its use." (Emphasis added)

Think about it. If chlorpyrifos is so safe, why does chemical agriculture strive to reduce its use?

2. Parathion:
One of the most notorious members of the organophosphate family is the pesticide parathion, which made hundreds, if not thousands, of farm workers sick and was responsible for nearly 100 deaths before it was banned in the U.S. in 2003. More than a decade earlier, public health officials and agribusiness executives had been debating its risks to human health.

"It is a chemical that is very acutely toxic, and as an agency we need to decide what we are going to do on it quickly." - Linda J. Fisher, then EPA's assistant administrator in charge of pesticides, in March 1991.

But according to a story by Maura Dolan in The Los Angeles Times, the toxicity of parathion was hardly atop the list of concerns for Bob Krauter of the California Farm Bureau at the time.

"Bob Krauter, spokesman for the California Farm Bureau, said the loss of the pesticide, manufactured by Cheminova A/S, a Danish company, would be especially hard for almond growers, the farmers most dependent upon it in California. Substitutes tend to be less effective and more expensive," he said.

Krauter's bottom line: Nuts come before the public's health.

3. Aldicarb
This pesticide was responsible for the worst outbreak of pesticide poisoning in U.S. history.

"At least 2,000 people fell ill from eating California watermelons illegally contaminated with aldicarb on the Fourth of July in 1985," wrote Environmental Health News' Marla Cone on Aug. 18, 2010.

Four years later, the EPA began it push to restrict the use of aldicarb, as The New York Times reported on March 21, 1989:

"The Environmental Protection Agency's pesticide division has recommended barring the use of an acutely toxic insecticide on potatoes and imported bananas. The staff report says the chemical presents an unreasonable risk to infants and children.

"One drop of aldicarb absorbed through the skin can kill an adult, toxicologists say.

"A spokesman for Rhone-Poulenc (manufacturer of aldicarb), Mary Anne Ford, said today that aldicarb is not a hazard on food crops.

''That data does not reflect any risk to any group including infants and children,'' said Ms. Ford. ''I'm concerned for parents who hear such unrealistic numbers.''

Thanks for your concern, Ms. Ford.

Aldicarb is still being used today on a number of fruits and vegetables. Its U.S. manufacturer, Bayer CropScience, has agreed to phase it out by 2015, but despite all the misery it has caused farmers and consumers for decades, the company still more or less sticks to the original talking points, as reflected in this August 2010 press release:

"Although the company does not fully agree with this new risk assessment approach, Bayer CropScience respects the oversight authority of the EPA and is cooperating with them. This decision does not mean that aldicarb poses a food safety concern.

" 'For nearly 40 years, Temik (aldicarb) has provided farmers with unsurpassed control of destructive pests, without compromising human health or environmental safety,' said Bill Buckner, president and CEO of Bayer CropScience.

" 'We recognize the significant impact this decision will have on growers and the food industry, and will do everything possible to address their concerns during this transition,' added Buckner."

What about the impact this pesticide has had on the public's health for more than four decades, Mr. Buckner?

The Public Votes at the Grocery Store

While chemical agriculture clings to its arsenal of pesticides, the American public has become increasingly concerned - and rightly so - about their presence in food. A recent NPR/Thomson-Reuters poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans prefer organic produce to conventional alternatives, a third them primarily concerned about pesticides.

The reactions of pesticide users and producers I've highlighted is just a snapshot of the industry's typical response in the face of research and federal action stressing the negative impacts that pesticides have had on human health.

Its leaders never acknowledge possible risks to people, especially children. Time and again, their only concern is for losing a tool from the pesticide toolbox. That should tell consumers something about where U.S. agribusiness stands on the use toxic chemicals in growing its fruits and vegetables.

By Sonya Lunder, EWG Senior Scientist

In a 2010 meeting between the pesticide industry and the Obama Administration, the pesticide industry revealed its objective that government food testing data (like the USDA pesticide residue data EWG uses to create our Shopper's Guide to Produce) be spun to emphasize the safety of pesticide residues on conventional produce.

Why?

They're worried you know too much. See, if people know about the health (and environmental) downsides of pesticides, they might, well, not want to eat them. In their own (self-interested, your-health-is-not-their-first-priority) words in this high-level meeting:

"[W]e want to see if we can figure out that whatever data is out there be less likely to be misconstrued and misinterpreted. We're trying to make sure that anyone who reads [USDA's pesticide residue report] sees -- as do all the people in the room -- that there is no risk associated with the consumption of fresh produce due to pesticide residues."

But are pesticides really safe? Should fruits and veggie eaters everywhere breath a sigh of relief because there's "no risk," as the pesticide guys want you to believe? Not so fast.

The science does not say "no risk"
Industry's task spinning pesticides got a bit more difficult today, when a group of 3 long-term studies found that a woman's exposure to organophosphate pesticides during pregnancy could affect IQ and memory in her child 6 to 9 years later.

Researchers at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, University of California Berkeley's School of Public Health and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health separately recruited pregnant women and tested either their mother's urine during pregnancy or umbilical blood at birth.

All three studies are available for free and online at the Environmental Health Perspectives website. And you can hear it for yourself on ABC's World News Tonight.

Some restrictions in place, more possibly needed
Between 1999 and 2003, EPA put in place restrictions on the most toxic organophosphate pesticides on crops and in homes. In 2006, the Agency concluded those restrictions would be sufficient to protect children's health, but these studies show further restrictions over the use of organophosphates in agriculture may be necessary to protect kid's health.

For years, EPA used complex models to assure us that pesticide exposures were safe. These studies strongly suggest that kids remain at risk. The next time EPA and the pesticide industry tell you all is well with the food system, don't rush to believe them.

Organophosphates have been associated with learning delays and ADHD in children. But the fact that three separate studies arrived at such similar conclusions is overwhelming evidence that this family of pesticides presents profound and very serious health risks to children before they're even born.

Understanding - and avoiding - pesticide residues
About that data the pesticide industry is worried you'll be worried about. Each year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture extensively tests fruits and vegetables for pesticide residues. The tests are conducted after each sample has been washed as if being prepared to eat or cook. EWG compiles USDA's data and ranks the most popular fruits and vegetables according to the levels of overall pesticide residues. The cleanest 15 and dirty dozen are listed below (grab the iPhone App or see the full list here):

We think there is ample evidence to avoid pesticides, particularly while you are pregnant. Here are the 12 with the highest and lowest levels of pesticide residues from EWG' 2010 Shopper's Guide. The 2011 Guide will be out soon once USDA releases its latest round of produce testing.

EWG's top tips to eat fewer organophosphate pesticides:
It makes good sense to avoid these pesticides whenever possible, especially during pregnancy. Here's how:

1. Eat organic and low-residue fruits and veggies. Organic produce is becoming much more available and the price gap between it and conventionally grown fruits and vegetables has narrowed somewhat, but buying organic can be a burden on families on tight budgets. EWG's online Shopper's Guide to Pesticides provides an easy-to-use list of non-organic items that have the lowest levels of pesticide residues. EWG recommends sticking to those fruits and vegetables whenever possible.


2. Wash, wash, wash. Washing conventional produce won't remove all of the residues, but it does make a difference. Wash all fruits and vegetables before serving.


3. Eat food that's in season. It is more likely to be grown domestically where there are tighter restrictions on organophosphate pesticide use.


4. Pregnant? Make that extra effort to eat organic or low-residue fruits and veggies. Eating fruits and vegetables is an essential part of a healthy diet, but we recommend that women who are pregnant choose organic produce or conventional fruits and veggies with the lowest levels of pesticide residues. And, by all means, avoid farms that spray these chemicals.

For more tips for an environmentally healthy pregnancy, see EWG's 11 Healthy Pregnancy Tips. Those are nine (plus!) very important months, with significant health consequences for babies.

By Chris Campbell, Brett Lorenzen and Elaine Shannon

Big agribusiness is up in arms over The Dirty Dozen, Environmental Working Group's list of fresh fruits and vegetables that are most likely to carry pesticide residues.

The Dirty Dozen is based on testing of residue levels conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. EWG compiles the results into a user-friendly Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in produce, because we think people have a right to know what's in their food.

A lot of people evidently agree. The Shopper's Guide gets more than 100,000 page views a month -- and it's now become the target of a slick, well-heeled attack campaign by the conventional produce lobby.

The industry's latest counter-offensive, spearheaded by the California-based Alliance for Food and Farming representing major produce trade groups and agricultural chemical vendors, is a pro-pesticide website that goes by the faux-green name, Safe Fruits and Veggies.com. The website asserts:

"The mere 'presence' of pesticide residue does not mean that the food is harmful in any way. Use the calculation tool below to see how many servings a man, woman, teen or child could consume and still not have any adverse effects from pesticide residues."

The "calculation tool" is a real head-scratcher. Take celery, which ranks first - meaning worst - on EWG's Dirty Dozen list. The industry calculator tells us that a child between ages two and five could eat 98,412 "servings" of celery without consuming a dangerous amount of chlorothalonil, the most abundant pesticide found on celery.

Since few small kids want to tuck into a bathtub-size batch of crudités, the website's message is one of reassurance. But a few facts underscore the absurdity of the Alliance's argument. The pesticide lobby makes the false assumptions that:

• Every child is identical and that children are no more sensitive to toxic chemicals than adults -- or laboratory rats.
• A child eating a piece of celery has no other exposures to pesticides and no other fruits and vegetables get dosed with pesticides.
• Pesticides don't interact in the body, potentially bolstering or multiplying one another's toxic effects.
• The pesticide industry and health agencies know everything there is to know about pesticide toxicity.
• A child's serving of celery is a two-inch, seven-gram bit from the end of the stalk - when the CDC says it's more like 60 grams.

Kids need extra protection. Luckily, the Environmental Protection Agency, not the industry, sets pesticide safety standards. The agency starts with the highest pesticide dose found to be safe for a group of laboratory animals, usually around 50 rats. But then it builds in standard safety margins that take into account "inter-species" differences (rats vs. humans), "intra-species" differences among individuals, data gaps and, unless the agency has data proving it's unnecessary, an additional 10-fold safety factor to protect children's developing bodies. By ignoring these factors, the industry's calculation lowballs the risk by a factor of at least 100 and sometimes 1,000. The effect is enormous.

People encounter lots of pesticides, not just one
Kids get exposed to pesticides in lots of ways. Another whopper in the industry's pesticide calculator is the assumption that a child will encounter any one pesticide residue in just one kind of fruit or vegetable and that it isn't used on anything else. Not true.

As just one example, the pesticide chlorothalonil (the chemical on celery singled out by the industry calculator) turns up in around 10 to 20 percent of the green beans, tomatoes, winter squash and cranberries we eat, according to the test data. It has non-food uses, too. Altogether, at least 57 pesticides (or their breakdown products) have each been found in 10 or more kinds of fruits and vegetables. Moreover, pesticides commonly contaminate drinking water. Think about how many pesticides people encounter on any given day, and you can see why federal law requires that pesticide safety standards take into account aggregate exposures from all sources. That bite of celery is just the beginning.

Many pesticides do compound one another's effects. EPA has found that chlorothalonil is unique in the way it damages the stomach and kidneys. At the moment, the EPA safety standard for chlorothalonil assumes that no other pesticide -- and, implicitly, none of the hundreds of other chemicals known to pollute our bodies -- amplifies its harm.

But that's the exception. More typical is the insecticide Dursban. EPA restricted use of this popular bug-killer when it found that its class of pesticides, organophosphates, poses risks to childhood brain development by blocking chemicals that help transmit signals through nerves.

Children are often exposed to many of these pesticides at once. Again, take celery: on average, samples were polluted with residues of four different pesticides. (In 2008, one particular batch of celery tested positive for 13 pesticides.) Since people eat a variety of foods, the chemicals on a bite of celery represent a small fraction of an individual's daily exposures to industrial chemicals. As testing of umbilical cord blood by EWG and others has shown, babies are exposed to a huge array of industrial chemicals in the womb, including substances that can cause cancer, damage the brain and nervous system and cause birth defects or abnormal development. When you pile up even more exposures from food, water and air, the risks can inch up and reach a tipping point.

What we don't know just might hurt us.
Since November 2009, EPA has amended, stopped or suspended the use of about one of every three of the 22,122 pesticide uses it has reviewed. Some fell out of use because when more effective or safer agricultural chemicals came online, but others were shelved over health concerns uncovered by recent research.

The more we test, the more we find. Take lead, for example. Once an ingredient in pesticides for fruit orchards, it is still a common contaminant in tap water and old house paint. The government's "safe" blood lead level for children has dropped six-fold over the past 40 years, with each decrease driven by new studies revealing risks to brain development at ever-lower doses. New science regularly turns up previously unknown pesticide toxicities, and the standard test protocols in rodents can miss health risks for people. The pesticide industry itself conducts most safety tests for its products, submits them to EPA and then defends the product tooth and nail. It might be anything but safe.

You call this a serving?
In coming up with its estimate that a child could eat 98,412 "servings" of celery without running a safety risk from pesticides (leaving aside the issue of a massive stomach ache), the industry's celery calculator assumes that a serving is 7 grams, basically a thin, two-inch slice of a stalk. The CDC says it's more like 60 grams. If your kids are anything like ours, they don't stop after at two inches, especially when there's a scoop of peanut butter or ranch dressing on it.

Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, professor and chairman of the Preventive Medicine Department at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, helped persuade Congress to pass the 1996 pesticide law. He contends that even a 1000-fold safety factor is inadequate for some chemicals, such as organophosphates, that have been linked to developmental disorders of the brain and nervous system. Says Landrigan:

"There appears to be no safe limit for the organophosphates. Exposure in early development, exposure during pregnancy lead to effects on brain development that are quite profound and qualitatively quite different from the toxicity produced by these chemicals in adult animals. The early development of the human brain is probably one of the most complex phenomena in all of nature.

The price we play for that great complexity is great vulnerability. There's not much chance to go back and get it right because the whole thing is such a precisely orchestrated dance. That's why exposures even to small doses of chemicals can have devastating effects."

People don't want to gamble with their health and their children's futures. As they become more aware of the consequences of food pollution, they are voting with their pocketbooks. It's no coincidence that organic produce sales have been climbing rapidly, even during a recession. At the end of the day, young families and children - the audience the AFF seems to feel is most affected by EWG's message - are not only eating their vegetables, they are eating more of them, and they are increasingly choosing to buy pesticide-free products. This is the exact result EWG had in mind when it created Dirty Dozen.

If people mistrust the conventional produce and pesticide industries, it's not because of the Dirty Dozen. It's because of the industry's long, sorry history. People don't refuse to eat vegetables because of EWG. They refuse to buy vegetables, if they actually refuse at all, from people they don't trust -- and EWG's Shopper's Guide makes it easier for them to weigh that decision.

Big Ag would do better to spend its money to fix its trust problem ... instead of making it worse by engaging in nonsensical distractions, like the celery calculation. Turning to public relations campaigns as a "solution" only encourages people to distrust them more.

Methyl iodide: it's listed as a human carcinogen, is considered a neurotoxin and has been linked to late-term miscarriages. Now the state of California is poised to let farmers spray it on the state's strawberry fields - fields that provide over 85% of the US crop.

California's regulators are all but ignoring their scientific advisors by proposing a "safe" level of exposure (for those doing the spraying) at a rate 120 times higher than that recommended by their own scientists and an outside independent panel.

What's so bad about methyl iodide?
This toxic chemical, that gets extra precaution and a fume hood when handled in a lab, has been linked to thyroid disease, neurological damage, lung tumors and fetal harm. Both California state scientists and an outside review panel determined that when widely used as a pesticide, methyl iodide would have "a significant adverse impact on public health."

Too much at stake
But the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) appears to be putting the profits of strawberry growers and pesticide manufacturers above the interests of public health and is poised to allow farmers to sterilize their soil with methyl iodide, risking:

1. The health of Californians living and working near any field where the pesticide is sprayed. DPR claims that safety measures such as buffer zones and tarps will prevent a dangerous level of human exposure, but enforcement of these safety measures is often lax.
2. The health of farm workers who will face the highest exposure to the toxic poison. While DPR insists that the use of respirators and other precautions will make it safe, experience has shown that real life application of these measures often falls short.
3. California's air & water quality. Methyl iodide is a particularly volatile chemical, and when released into the environment, there's a risk of contamination of air and groundwater.

There is still time for California's regulators to change their mind. Tell the California Department of Pesticide Regulation that use of methyl iodide should not be permitted in California. Anyone (even non-Californians) can email them a comment through June 29th. Below we've given you some sample text - feel free to add, or send as is today!

Sample Text:
I am concerned about the pending approval of methyl iodide for use as a fumigant on California fields. Agricultural spraying of this poisonous chemical, linked to cancer, thyroid damage and fetal loss, threatens farm workers, Californians living in agricultural areas, and the state's water & air quality. I urge the DPR to put the health of the state's citizens & environment first and withdraw its recommendation to approve the use of methyl iodide.

Thanks to .JenniferLeigh. & flickr for the photo