Agriculture Reference
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work clothes into more comfortable attire, and after everyone had a chance to get
an evening meal. A local Spanish-English interpreter was recruited, and four cur-
rent farm laborers volunteered to participate in a panel presentation for the Forest
Service employees. The gathering was held outdoors under a rooftop mat with
benches arranged in a semicircle facing the panel of workers. Several dozen other
farm laborers and family members also attended, mostly out of curiosity.
The panel presentation was enlightening. The four workers described their
home villages, how they came to the United States to find work, how many years they
had been coming to the United States to work in the fields, how much they earned,
how much money they sent back home each week to support their families, and
what they thought about while doing heavy manual labor in the baking hot fields
of the San Joaquin Valley. One worker said that he wanted to learn more about the
potential impacts of the newly approved North American Free Trade Agreement on
employment in his region of Mexico.
Forest Service employees asked many eye-opening questions. One worker
described how he had been coming to the Stockton area for over 45 years, doing
the same kind of work year after year, and how his grandson had just graduated
from California State University, Stanislaus, with an honors degree in computer
sciences. He said he was proud that his labor had helped to make it possible for
his grandson to realize his dream. After he spoke, there were several moments
of silence among all participants in the evening's event and then a crescendo of
respectful applause.
Engaging Northern High Plains Growers
The third example involved growers on the northern high plains. In 1998, or-
ganic growers in central North Dakota requested a meeting with scientists of the
National Farm Medicine Center (NFMC) so that they could explore concerns about
personal health and about potential contamination of their organic farm products
resulting from the use of pesticides on adjacent acreage that had been purchased or
rented by potato growers of the Red River Valley in the North. The organic growers
could smell the pesticides used by potato growers and wondered about exposure
of themselves or their households. The use of the products is not permitted on
organic acreage, and the organic growers were concerned that pesticide drift would
contaminate growing crops, the soil in which the crops are grown, or worse, the
hands, feet, face, and other body parts of people working on organic acreage.
North Dakota is administratively in federal HHS Region IV, so NFMC con-
tacted the High Plains Intermountain Center for Agricultural Health and Safety
(HICAHS) at Colorado State University, Fort Collins; the two centers worked
together to structure a 2-year study of the issue. Once institutional review board
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