From Sacramento Bee

How far should ban on hand weeding go?

By Thuy-Doan Le -- Bee Staff Writer
Published  2:15 am PST Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Vanessa Bogenholm spends a few hours each day working with her crew, hand weeding her organic crops, to ensure that her strawberries and raspberries will survive.

"It's tough work," said Bogenholm, the chairwoman of the board of California Certified Organic Farmers and owner of V.B. Farms in Watsonville. "Everything in agriculture is manual labor."

Bogenholm would rather endure this back-breaking chore than use a long-handled hoe that could damage her densely packed crop, she said.

As California moves toward becoming the first state to ban hand weeding in its farm fields, Bogenholm and other organic growers will still be able to use hand weeding as an alternative to employing pesticides and herbicides.

New research shows just how valuable this exemption is to them. If organic growers of lettuce, celery and carrots were to drop hand weeding, the study concluded, their aggregate income would have dropped by 56 percent, or $24 million, in 2002.

Organic growers say such losses would be devastating in an industry that gets by on margins of 3 percent to 5 percent.

If farmers dropped hand weeding, they would have to space crops farther apart, so yield would drop by 50 percent, according to the study, released last week by the Crop Protection Research Institute. It is a research unit of CropLife America, which focuses on pesticides and their use in the United States.

Growers and their workers spend 775,000 hours stooped over the crops, researchers said. If growers ended hand weeding, they said, workers' backs would be less prone to injury.

Institute program director Leonard Gianessi suggested growers charge customers more to make up for producing fewer crops.

Mark Schacht, deputy director of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, which represents farm workers, said the organization has fought for years to ban hand weeding and believes the proposed ban is the best it can do.

"We're willing to go back (later) and correct abuses if we could," he said.

The institute's study cited numbers but did not place them into context, said Karen Klonsky, a cooperative extension specialist in agriculture and resource economics at the University of California, Davis.

The organic industry has grown by 20 percent each year since 1992, she said, but it remains a fraction of the state's $28 billion agriculture industry.

The state's celery crop is worth $240 million, for example, but the organic take is $6 million. Lettuce brings in $1.7 billion for farmers, $42 million of which goes to organic growers.

"People think of hand weeding as great fields of workers spending day in and day out bending over, but I don't know of any organic farmers envisioning that," said Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation, based in Santa Cruz. "They don't just grow baby lettuce as far as the eye can see."

Organic foods are already pricier than most conventional products because they are more labor-intensive to raise, Klonsky said. She questioned whether customers would actually pay an even higher premium.

Bogenholm said the current hot commodity is baby leaf lettuce plants, which are planted half an inch apart. If spread farther apart, the plants would compete with weeds and there would be less crop per acre, she said.

A high-end crop cannot be contaminated with weeds or dirt. If hand weeding were eliminated for organic farmers who grow these type of crops, they would be out of business, she said.

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health banned hand weeding in an emergency order last year and recently renewed it for an additional 120 days. The board may make a final decision on a permanent ban in March.