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Time for a Change: Pesticides & Wine Grapes in Sonoma & Napa Counties, CA (1997)
Summary
This report is the first of its kind to detail pesticide use, farm by farm, for one crop: premium wine grapes. It also provides information about alternatives to these dangerous chemicals.
Californians for Alternatives to Toxics (CATs) began its inquiry amid growing concern about these poisons by residents of Sonoma and Napa counties, the premier wine grape region in California.
We found that the most commonly used pesticides in the two counties are among the most hazardous used in agriculture - with large amounts of them applied close to the Russian and the Napa rivers - primary supplies of drinking water.
Thousands of schoolchildren may be exposed when these chemicals are sprayed and drift form vineyards, so, too, are untold numbers of visitors who have made "wine country" a tourist magnet. The report documents how much of these poisons are used, and where.
CATs also discovered that:
- rates of pesticide application vary so radically among neighboring growers that their use is linked to factors other that need.
- the high-priced wine grape industry contributes little of its profits to research about alternatives to hazardous chemicals
- lending institutions and chemical companies fuel the unnecessary use of pesticides.
- organic, sustainable agriculture, "integrated pest management" and the reintroduction of wildlife all can be effective in producing healthy crops without resorting to toxic chemicals.
- In information gleaned from reports that grape farmers must submit to agricultural commissioners, CATs also was able to discover that the conroversial ozone-killer methyl bromide may not even justify its cost for most fumigations.
Disquietingly, that information -- which should be readily available to the public -- was not that easy to get, for different reasons. In Napa County, public officials are making it hard to find out.
What emerges however, is a portrait of a lucrative industry heavily reliant on industrial poisons. Study this report and you may conclude that the entire range of pesticides -- from extremely hazardous methyl bromide to least-toxic -- sulfur -- poses enough of a problem to human health and the environment to warrant a serious program of reform of its own practices by the California wine industry.
