Imperial Valley Farmers Reap Bitter Harvest in Illegal Spraying

It is early October, and farmer Charles Corfman stares at 160 acres of empty fields through the glass that makes up one wall of his half-built Imperial County ranch house.

Corfman, 50, and a third-generation farmer in the Imperial Valley, knows well that he should already have planted a winter lettuce crop. But he has delayed planting this fall.

Like many farmers in the valley, Southern California’s agricultural heartland, Corfman has had one bad year after another in the 1980s. His financing has evaporated, and Corfman is afraid to ask friends to do work for which he may be unable to pay.

The bare cement floors, exposed fixtures and insulation-packed wall beams began as a family dream 10 years ago. They are testimony now to his financial bind.

“I’m used to the humiliation of being broke,” Corfman said, looking out over fields that were once his livelihood.

He has been the victim of bugs, bad gambles and the tightening of farm credit, which has proved a noose for many farmers during the current crisis in the farm economy.

But Corfman insists it was the blighting of his lettuce crop four years ago by the drift of an illegal herbicide sprayed on a neighbor’s onion field that set him on the path to financial ruin.

Corfman is one of three Imperial County farmers who contend in lawsuits that together they lost lettuce crops worth more than $1.5 million when onion growers, desperate to eliminate broad-leaf weeds, sprayed their fields with a chemical not then approved by the state for use on onions. The onion growers, in court filings, blame the losses on pests and disease that hit the valley in the winter of 1981-82.

County agriculture officials say the incident has parallels to the disastrous watermelon poisonings that rocked the San Joaquin Valley earlier this year. In that case, state investigators concluded that several farmers used an illegal pesticide, contaminating enough melons to make dozens of people ill and force a recall of the season’s crop.

No one got sick from the onions that 14 Imperial Valley growers sprayed with the herbicide Goal, though agricultural inspectors, who had never before encountered the chemical, at first feared that it might pose a hazard to humans.

But as in the watermelon case, an intensive state investigation concluded that the onion spraying was an illegal act taken knowingly by farmers who weighed the chance of detection against the potential loss of large portions of their crops to hardy pests--bugs in the San Joaquin Valley, weeds in Imperial.

“I know people who make mistakes,” said Miguel Monroy, Imperial County deputy agricultural commissioner, who is confident that most illegal use of pesticides and herbicides is accidental. “This was more like a conspiracy.”

The consequences of the onion growers’ gamble still are being harvested four years later.

Some of the farmers who contend that their lettuce was damaged by the spraying of nearby onion fields bounced back; for them, the losses were just one more reversal in the up-and-down cycle of produce farming.

Corfman, though, says the 1981-82 loss of much of the lettuce in a 74-acre field crippled him financially.

Without the income he had expected from that harvest, he was unable to borrow for his next planting from the local Production Credit Assn. (PCA), the farmer-owned bank that had regularly lent to him in the past. An old loan went unpaid, and the PCA--its lending decisions colored by the farm economy’s decline--began exercising its hold on Corfman’s land, crops and equipment in ways, he says, that left him incapable of farming profitably.

Corfman blames the problems with the PCA for the delay in planting his winter lettuce crop. “We’re way behind,” he said. “It’s already cost me the most valuable week of the year.”

Corfman spent last week trying to raise $185,000 to forestall the sale of his irrigation equipment, which the PCA had seized to protect its investment.

He pointed to a bench piled with the records of his lawsuits and loans. “Look at all these briefcases,” he said. “I’m not in the farming business. I’m a paralegal.”

James Vedder, too, says the spraying of Imperial County onion fields could prove the seed of his financial undoing.

Vedder owns Visco Flying Service, the Imperial County crop dusting company that sprayed Goal near the fields of two other farmers who have sued for damage to their lettuce crops. After the incident, county agriculture authorities shut down his business for 10 days and fined him $2,000. Now, in court, his insurance company is contending that it should not be responsible for damage findings against him because the spraying was illegal.

“There’s a potential of wiping out everything I’ve worked for in my life,” Vedder said. “I made a decision to do a grower a favor years ago on something I didn’t think was that critical. It turned out it was that critical. And I’m paying for it now.”

The rains were heavy in the Imperial Valley in the fall of 1981--perfect weed-growing weather, recalled Claude Finnell, county agricultural commissioner.

For onion growers, weeds posed a particular threat that season. An explosion had shut down the factory that produced Dacthal, the herbicide used for weed control in the early stages of onion planting. Growers were desperate for an alternative chemical, Finnell said, because hand weeding would cost 10 times more than spraying.

The growers eventually found their alternative to Dacthal. But the results went beyond what they intended.

In early December, 1981, lettuce farmers called to report an ugly brown splotching on the heads in some of their fields. The damage looked like the product of herbicide spraying, said Monroy, the deputy agricultural commissioner.

“In the wrinkles of lettuce leaves, where it landed and accumulated with the dew, that’s where it settled and that’s where it started burning brown, a molasses color,” Monroy remembered. “I had never seen the primary symptoms. I hadn’t seen those on anything before.”

County officials at first sought to trace the damage to defoliants being sprayed on cotton fields near the lettuce. Then Finnell received an anonymous tip that the offender was Goal, a weed-killer at the time approved for use in Imperial County only on fruit and nut trees and grapevines.

The tip prompted the biggest investigation in his 31 years as agricultural commissioner, Finnell said. “For us down here in the country, it was a pretty big operation,” he said.

Inspectors fanned out through the valley’s 5,000 acres of onion fields, questioning farmers, pest control advisers and crop sprayers. Some, including Vedder, at first denied knowledge that anything was amiss, according to investigative reports.

But Vedder, the reports say, eventually admitted spraying Goal on onion fields owned by Russell Brothers Ranches near acreage planted in lettuce by farmers Albert Hansen and Ben Nakasawa. An official of the Stoker Co., another crop spraying firm, acknowledged spraying Goal on Ben and Tony Abatti’s onions, just south of Corfman’s lettuce field.

“The grower asked them to apply it, and he was one of their largest customers,” county investigators wrote after their interviews with Stoker employees. “(The Abattis said) it was very important to them, they knew they could get somebody else to do it, and so (Stoker) did it.”

Stoker Co. owner Alton Metcalf and Ben Abatti declined to discuss the incident because their businesses are defendants in Corfman’s lawsuit. In a deposition taken in the lawsuits against him, Milas Russell Sr., a partner in Russell Brothers Ranches, acknowledged asking Vedder to spray Goal--and that he knew it was not legal for use on onions.

Russell was not alone in that knowledge. Onion growers throughout Imperial County knew that use of the herbicide on onions was not allowed, investigators learned by interviewing Hammond Ford, president of Rockwood Chemical Co. in Brawley, which sold the Goal that was misused.

Ford told investigators, “The onion growers had nothing else to use, and if it weren’t for the presence of Goal in the county, there would be no onions produced in Imperial this year,” agriculture officials wrote after the interview. Ford declined to discuss the incident with The Times.

Two years after the spraying, Goal was approved for application on onions throughout California. But the cool calculation of the growers and pest control advisers who decided to use the herbicide before it was cleared as safe and effective angered Finnell, prompting the most extensive assessment of penalties in his tenure as commissioner.

“What they did they were doing for economic reasons, knowing beforehand it was a violation,” he said. “I didn’t take very kindly to that.”

State and county agriculture officials say they came down as hard as they could on participants in the illegal spraying.

Rockwood was shut down for seven days and fined $3,000. Three crop spraying companies and five pest control advisers were put out of business for one to three weeks. For a month each, 14 onion growers were prohibited from using those pesticides and herbicides that require government OKs for their application.

Some of those penalized say the administrative action taught them a lesson.

“It stopped me from using (chemicals) without checking with somebody,” said Dave Beauchamp, one of the penalized onion growers who subsequently went bankrupt and left farming. “You didn’t think there’d be any problem at all. You didn’t think they’d investigate.”

Yet Ed McGrew, another of the onion growers, had forgotten the incident altogether. “Until you reminded me of it right now, it was water under the bridge,” he told a reporter.

Nonetheless, Monroy insists that the Goal debacle has proved a deterrent to illegal use of pest-control chemicals in the valley, a complement to the 21-hour-a-day patrols with which the county keeps tabs on pesticide and herbicide use.

“If those people in Bakersfield with the watermelons had been exposed to something like this, they would have thought twice before doing what they did,” Monroy said.

Vedder, the crop sprayer, knows he is being watched. “I feel confident if they catch me doing anything else again they’ll take my license on a permanent basis,” he said. “It didn’t seem like any big deal at the time. Now we know it is. We’re not about to do that again.”

Some farmers, along with the defendants in Corfman’s lawsuit, say Corfman is making a bigger deal of the Goal incident than it merits.

University of California Extension farm advisers have testified in depositions that they saw little herbicide damage in Corfman’s lettuce fields. Defense attorneys say they will rely on that testimony and that of other experts to show that Corfman lost his winter 1981 crop to lettuce disease, not Goal drift.

But Corfman and his pest control adviser, Ron Pittman, say the crop had been coming in strong until it was inadvertently misted with the herbicide. “You had a totally unmarketable item, just from the cosmetic appearance,” Pittman said.

Moreover, Corfman says he has been unable to recover from the damage that losing the crop did to his credit rating.

In 1982 and 1983, with his land already tied down as collateral by the PCA, Corfman could not borrow more money to increase production and recoup his earlier losses, he said. Repeatedly since then, the PCA has released its hold on his assets too late for him to take advantage of peak growing periods or profitable market conditions, Corfman said.

“It doesn’t even look like they wanted to get paid,” Corfman said of the farmer bank. “There’s been no cooperation, no attempt to help me obtain money or collect money, just destruction, destruction, destruction.”

Wendell Baughman, president of the PCA, would not discuss Corfman’s case specifically, citing privacy considerations.

In general, though, he said, farm credit agencies obviously are not out to destroy farmers. But with the collapse of the farm economy, PCAs and other farm banks are losing some of their flexibility, Baughman said.

“We will go the extra mile with a farmer, but there does come a time when we’ve exhausted all the saving tools in our ability to help him,” Baughman said. “Some of those are not the happiest endings.”