Farmworkers and their families have long demanded the right to know when and where growers plan to spray dangerous pesticides in their communities. The California Department of Pesticide Regulation finally debuted a system in March that does just that.
Now regulators have added new features to the pesticide notification system, called SprayDays California, which they described in a public briefing Friday. The updated version allows users to see where growers applied pesticides over the previous four days, in addition to planned applications. It also allows people to subscribe to alerts by choosing square-mile sections on a map, the unit in which pesticide applications are reported, rather than using their addresses. This change was intended to allow people whose addresses aren’t recognized by DPR’s system to access the warnings.
The map provides real-time access to information about highly regulated pesticides, said DPR spokesperson Juvenio Guerra at the briefing. “We’re making it easier for folks to find those recent applications.”
When regulators launched the notification system, the first of its kind to give advance notice through email and text alerts, farmworkers, organizers and their allies celebrated.
“With this information, for the first time, agricultural communities can take the proper health precautions by closing windows and doors, taking clothes off the line, and allowing the especially vulnerable, like pregnant or asthmatic individuals, to stay indoors at home, work or school,” Erika Alfaro, a public health nurse and member of the nonprofit Safe Ag Safe Schools, said at the time.
But they also voiced concerns.
People living in agricultural communities have repeatedly asked regulators to let them know exactly where growers plan to spray. If it were a field next to their house, for example, they would take stronger precautions than if it were a mile away.
Pesticide applications are currently mapped onto a square-mile grid for consistency across every county in the state, said DPR’s Guerra, explaining why the map doesn’t show exact locations. He did not say why the agency would not provide precise locations in the most heavily sprayed areas.
California’s updated SprayDays system allows residents to enter an address to see where pesticides are used near them, in this case, in the Salinas Valley, a major strawberry-growing region. The circled numbers represent the number of times growers plan to spray pesticides plus applications that had been scheduled within the past four days.
It’s definitely a step forward to give communities notification, said Emily Marquez, a senior scientist with the nonprofit Pesticide Action Network who serves on DPR’s newly formed Environmental Justice Advisory Committee. But knowing precise locations is important, Marquez said, because if residents know which field will be sprayed, they can approach the grower and ask about using safer alternatives or avoiding spraying when children are outside nearby.
The system still doesn’t address the fact that some people feel they need to leave home when spraying occurs because they’re worried about drift, Marquez said. “People we talk to who are concerned about drift just clear out for a couple days during fumigant applications.”
Fumigants, which are applied to soil before planting, are highly volatile gases that can drift for miles. They and other pesticides can also increase greenhouse gas emissions. Studies show that the pesticides, including the fumigant chloropicrin, can trigger emissions of carbon dioxide and the climate super-pollutant nitrous oxide by harming microbes in the soil.
DPR’s notices apply only to so-called restricted use pesticides, defined by the Environmental Protection Agency as chemicals that could potentially “cause unreasonable adverse effects to the environment and injury to applicators or bystanders without added restrictions.”
That raises the question of why California, which positions itself as an environmental leader, allows widespread use of pesticides that the European Union has phased out for presenting unacceptable risks to public health and the environment.
California still uses more than 130 pesticides banned in the European Union, including cancer-causing 1,3-dichloropropene, or 1,3-D.
Karen Cameron, a retired schoolteacher and member of Safe Ag Safe Schools, said the new system doesn’t address her primary concern. “DPR removed the air-monitoring system in Salinas about a decade ago,” said Cameron. “Without air monitoring in Salinas, we don’t know what we’re breathing.”
A growing body of research shows that living near pesticide-treated fields increases the risk of disease. The long-running CHAMACOS study, conducted by University of California, Berkeley researchers, studied hundreds of mothers and children in the Salinas Valley and found that children exposed to pesticides face higher risks of neurodevelopmental problems, as well as metabolic disorders associated with obesity and diabetes.
Children are also more vulnerable to the harmful effects of toxic pesticides like 1,3-D because they inhale proportionally higher doses for their body weight than adults and can’t clear poisons as efficiently, research shows.
McKinnon Elementary School, where Cameron now coaches student teachers, is “literally surrounded by fields,” she said. The school had more than 38,000 pounds of 1,3-D applied within a mile of the campus between 2018 and 2022, the most recent year of available data, an Inside Climate News analysis revealed.
During the same period, growers applied more than 104,000 pounds of 1,3-D and chloropicrin within a mile of Cameron’s house.
The fumigants 1,3-D and chloropicrin are used extensively on strawberries in California, including the Salinas Valley. Both are illegal to use in the European Union and several other countries.
Authoritative science bodies, including the International Agency for Research on Cancer and California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, have repeatedly classified 1,3-D as a likely human carcinogen.
The cancer-causing fumigant remains California’s third highest-volume pesticide.
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Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal and Association of Food Journalists.
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