The California Department of Pesticide Regulation has drafted new regulations aimed at protecting farmworkers from potential exposure to 1,3-dichloropropene, known under the brand name Telone.
The proposal layers onto existing 1,3-D regulations that are less than a year old and have drawn criticism from environmental justice advocates for leaving out occupational bystanders and allegedly ignoring the advice of CalEPA’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to lower the safety threshold for exposures.
Now DPR has changed its approach, embracing OEHHA’s recommendation, which would ratchet up protections to 14 times beyond the 2022 standard, according to Californians for Pesticide Reform. The safe exposure limit for concentrations of 1,3-D in the air would be 0.21 parts per billion, assuming workers were present during applications for 40 hours per week for 40 years.
Both regulations require farmers to deploy impermeable tarps when injecting 1,3-D into the soil or a combination of buffer zones and other methods, such as deeper shanks or increased soil moisture, to minimize concentrations in the air to achieve the standards.
DPR adopted the 2022 regulations in response to a brief spike in the off-gassing of 1,3-D, as recorded by air quality monitors in Fresno County in 2020 and later in Kern County. The department feared the fumigant could cause acute and chronic cancer effects at certain levels of exposure to children and other residents.
Nan Singhasemanon, DPREnvironmental justice advocates decried the exemption for occupational bystanders as unfair to farmworkers. In a meeting for DPR’s Pesticide Registration and Evaluation Committee, Jane Sellen, who co-directs Californians for Pesticide Reform, claimed DPR had ignored OEHHA’s 0.21 ppb suggestion and said a 2018 court decision in a lawsuit her group filed “clearly directed DPR to develop a rule for occupational bystander exposure.”
Mark Weller, the group’s organizing strategist, shouted at DPR staff in disbelief, calling it “mind boggling” for the department to not raise the cancer risk level.
Sellen and other advocates took to the phones again last month to comment at a PREC meeting and argue DPR has downplayed the level of 1,3-D that air monitors picked up last year. DPR staff explained that all four sites monitored in the Central Valley and Central Coast were below the screening levels for both acute and chronic exposure.
They described the department as stepping up its monitoring efforts as part of its Sustainable Pest Management Roadmap, which elevates the role of environmental justice while seeking to eliminate the use of certain conventional pesticides by 2050.
“The team we have out there — that does the work here week-in and week-out — does not minimize any of the risk for the residents here in California,” Nan Singhasemanon, deputy director of environmental monitoring and worker health and safety, told Sellen.
Bianca Lopez, founder of the environmental justice group Valley Improvement Projects, then charged that the proposed regulations for farmworkers overlooked students and teachers at nearby schools.
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Singhasemanon pointed to the 2022 regulations, saying they covered the broader community and were based on exposure levels to children, since they are the most sensitive population. Maziar Kandelous, an environmental program manager at DPR, noted that the department also shares annual reports on pesticide use with the schools, along with fact sheets to explain the regulations and enforcement.
“We are also reaching out to the communities around the air monitoring sites to talk about this [monitoring] report and these findings,” said Kandelous.
Yuba County Agricultural Commissioner Stephen Scheer, who serves on the advisory committee, lamented that the general public tends to see the threshold number in the monitoring report and “automatically thinks if it reaches that number they're in a great risk of getting cancer.” Talking with staff, Scheer concluded that “even if you reach that number, it's 150 to 100 times lower than would reasonably be expected to cause cancer.”
Environmental groups are now pressing DPR to apply the more cautious 0.21 ppb standard to all communities, reasoning the state is allowing children to be exposed to 14 times more cancer-causing chemicals than adults.
Renee Pinel, Western Plant Health AssociationThe California Department of Food and Agriculture has also raised issues with the proposal. When DPR issued a new risk management directive last January, CDFA noted several issues around broad assumptions in the proposal. DPR estimated, for example, that workers near applications would be along the edges of the field for weeks on end, putting them at high risk of exposure.
CDFA staff pointed out that farming practices are not so cut and dry. Workers may start a harvest at the edge of a field and work their way in, and they would not be harvesting the same field for three weeks on end. Staff also noted that harvest season does not tend to overlap with fumigation periods.
DPR responded that the comments do not pertain to the directive or the need for cancer protections.
While industry groups are still reviewing the proposed regulation, Renee Pinel appreciated DPR recognized the need to maintain 1,3-D as a tool for farmers. As president and CEO of the Western Plant Health Association, Pinel is trying to determine if the reduced threshold would be too low to allow for adequate applications.
“We are concerned the maximum long-term exposure level of 0.21 ppb seems to be fully based on OEHHA’s risk-based assessment,” said Pinel, in a statement to Agri-Pulse, adding that it appears to lack the risk mitigation strategies DPR traditionally incorporates.
Chris Reardon, who directs government affairs at the California Farm Bureau, said he plans to remind DPR few crop protection tools are left to deal with soil borne diseases that threaten to wipe out whole industries. He also stressed to Agri-Pulse that California already has the most comprehensive health protection measures in the world for field fumigation.
DPR is taking public comments and in January will host three in-person listening sessions throughout the state and one virtual workshop.
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