California Advocates Renew Fight To Limit Hand Weeding
Hand weeding would be banned if farm worker advocates are successful in their campaign to convince the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health that it's so harmful to workers' backs that it should be eliminated from most fields. California would be the first state in the nation to restrict the hand weeding of crops. Growers, including many organic farmers, argue there are no reasonable alternatives to hand weeding because long-handled tools are too imprecise and would damage the crop. They say hand weeding reduces the use of often-criticized herbicides. Vanessa Bogenholm, chairwoman of the board of California Certified Organic Farmers and owner of V.B. Farms in Watsonville, was quoted as saying, "This isn't something we are doing to circumvent the law. It is something we have to do to harvest a marketable crop."
Hand weeding is widely used on several major crops, such as strawberry, lettuce, nursery plants, and broccoli. Nearly all the state's 228,000 acres of lettuce, for example, are hand weeded at some point each growing season, as are the state's 26,000 acres of strawberries. After failed attempts to persuade the legislature to restrict hand weeding in 1995 and 2002, farm worker advocates are pressing the safety board to impose stiff restrictions. Growers say they also fear that hand weeding restrictions are a Trojan horse for a ban on hand harvesting, which requires stooped labor similar to hand weeding. "One of the things that is really disturbing about this whole (proposed rule) is they are banning something that is essentially the same task as hand harvest," said one organic farmer. "If what you are really trying to do is say that this form of motion is damaging to the human body, it seems like a slippery slope." The Farm Bureau and others are pushing hard to prevent the loss of hand weeding as growers prepare for the end of the widely used fumigant methyl bromide, one of the most effective chemical tools against weeds in strawberry and lettuce. (Knight-Ridder Tribune, 4/30/03).
