Pesticides & Jersey Tomatoes - NJ fines company $1 million (Star Ledger)

N.J. fines Florida-based tomato grower $1 million for misuse of pesticides

by BrianT. Murray/The Star-Ledger

Thursday January 29, 2009, 4:55 PM

A Florida-based tomato grower facing pesticide misuse charges in North Carolina was hit in New Jersey today with a record-high fine of nearly $1 million, officials said today.

Ag-Mart Produce Inc., which has an office in Cedarville, Cumberland County, faces allegations it misused pesticides in 17 Garden State fields, jeopardizing workers and consumers alike in what officials are calling the worst pesticide case in state history.

 

Ag-Mart is already battling record-high fines and charges of pesticide misuse in North Carolina, where female workers claim their babies were born with serious defects.

Today, New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection slapped the company with hundreds of violations, claiming it denied state investigators access to facilities, applied pesticides to tomatoes more frequently than permitted and harvested and shipped pesticide-sprayed tomatoes before they were safe for public consumption on 17 occasions.

"We don't have specifics right now on how much of that crop went to market, and we have no reports of illness. We only discovered these violations while inspecting records, years later, so it was after the fact," said Darlene Yuhas of the DEP, adding that the probe began in 2005, continued until recently and involved searching records dating back to 2004.

The state also charged the firm with careless record-keeping, failing to properly ventilate areas during pesticide use, failing to post important pesticide-safety information for workers, using forbidden mixtures of pesticides and losing track of a 2.5 gallon container of highly toxic insecticide. The penalties linked to the violations amount to $931,250.

"Ag-Mart has repeatedly shown a stunning disregard of laws and regulations intended to protect the workers who harvest their tomatoes, the people who consume them and New Jersey's environment," Acting DEP Commissioner Mark N. Mauriello said in a prepared statement. "Ag-Mart's pesticide violations are the most serious DEP inspectors have ever uncovered. We have imposed a record-high penalty not only to hold Ag-Mart accountable for their failure, but to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Telephone calls requesting a response were placed to Ag-Mart's Cedarville office and corporate headquarters in Plant City, Florida, but the calls were not returned. The company, a subsidiary of Procacci Brothers Sales Corp. in Philadelphia, Pa., is the sole grower of Santa Sweets, a brand of grape tomatoes, and UglyRipe heirloom tomatoes.

It has farms in New Jersey, Mexico, Florida and North Carolina, where hundreds of charges were filed against Ag-Mart in 2005, after three women who worked in company fields gave birth to babies with serious defects and told authorities they were regularly sprayed with pesticides. Ag-Mart has denied the charges, and, last year, without disclosing the details or acknowledging any fault, settled one lawsuit with one farm-worker couple whose baby was born without limbs.

North Carolina is still pursuing its charges, although the case exposed gaps in that state's regulations of pesticide use. Two weeks ago, the state tightened its rules, particularly regulations requiring farmers to document and maintain records on when and how pesticides are used.

New Jersey, which already has strict regulations, claimed Ag-Mart failed to keep required records on its pesticide applications and ignored a regulation that it wait until 90 days after a pesticide application to harvest and distribute a crop. The company employs about 700 workers on 17 farms in New Jersey.

DEP officials said they uncovered violations after a series of inspections on Ag-Mart farms in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and that Ag-Mart tried to interfere with the probe. In May 2006, according to the DEP, the company barred an environmental investigator from inspecting facilities and forced the investigator to wait several hours before finally allowing him access only to a portion of a packing house that was not the subject of his inquiry.

On another occasion, three state inspectors were overcome by chlorine vapors in the company's packing house because the firm failed to provide proper ventilation, the DEP claims.