Crop Dusters Flying in Face of Adversity

Oxnard crop duster Barrie Turner knows a battle when he sees one.

As he skims over towering stalks of sweet corn at daybreak, sprinkling a watery cocktail of insecticide and nutrients with each swooping pass, the former Vietnam helicopter pilot can easily list his industry’s enemies.

Urban encroachment. Loss of farmland. And environmental activists who are targeting his low-flying pesticide runs for elimination.

All have served to cut into business for Aspen Helicopters, Ventura County’s only crop-dusting company. In fact, the company has reduced its crop-dusting fleet at the Oxnard Airport from five helicopters in the late 1980s to three today.

“People have the wrong impression of what we’re doing out there,” said Turner, 63, who grew up in Ojai and has logged more than 10,000 hours buzzing the county’s row crops and orchards since 1966.

“All three of the pilots here were born and raised in this county. This is not just some fly-by-night operation coming in here to slop this stuff around,” he said. “We’ve got roots here; we’ve got families here. We’re not here to poison the world.”

Crop dusting is not what it used to be.

Once a place where fixed-wing aircraft would swoop down to unleash great clouds of toxic pesticides, local farmland now is dusted by helicopters using satellite systems to guide their movements and pinpoint the drops.

Moreover, government restrictions have toned down the potency of pesticides that can be used and many of the chemicals applied on local crops are organically based, posing fewer environmental problems, pilots and agricultural officials say.

Still, the industry is flying in the face of adversity.

Statewide, the number of crop dusters fell from about 1,200 in the mid-1980s to 408 today, squeezed by tough environmental laws, soaring insurance costs, mounting homeowner complaints and the loss of more than a million acres of farmland over the past 20 years.

The battle to stay in business is reflected in Ventura County.

There used to be three crop-dusting companies based in the county in the 1980s; now there is one. Business dried up as the county lost thousands of acres of farmland in the past 10 years and as growers moved to crops, such as strawberries, that have less need for aerial spraying.

But perhaps the tightest squeeze has come from homeowners and environmentalists, who have long complained about the noise, dust and health risks crop dusters leave behind.

Deborah Bechtel, a founding member of Community & Children’s Advocates Against Pesticide Poisoning in Ventura County, said she and board member Elise Wright accepted an invitation from Aspen pilots two years ago to learn more about the operation.

Bechtel said she was impressed by the steps the pilots take to do their job safely. But she still supports her group’s campaign to ban aerial applications.

“The best efforts by pilots can be negated just by the level of toxic chemicals they are using,” she said. “These people do need to work, and they are very good at what they do. But if you talk about aerial spraying anywhere near populated areas, people don’t want that drifting onto their property.”

Pilots Take Many Precautions

With first light bleeding into the sky, Aspen’s agriculture manager, Rob Scherzinger, made his first pass over a cornfield at the bottom of the Conejo Grade in Camarillo. As usual, it was done with no pesticide in the tanks on each side of his Bell Jet Ranger.

He was looking for people--farm workers, early morning joggers--who might inadvertently be passing through the area. Seeing no one, Scherzinger set down across the street from the Camarillo Springs Golf Course, near an Aspen truck where two workers waited to load the chemicals.

One grabbed a thick hose snaking out from the truck and plugged it into a tank. The other cranked up a motor and began pumping out the blend of insecticide and nutrients.

Scherzinger got out and inspected each of the 64 spray nozzles, designed to reduce drift and sitting inches apart on two rods extending from each side of the helicopter like giant wings.

Then he was up in the air, mapping out the boundaries of the spray area on a tiny computer screen with the copter’s satellite guidance system. He sprayed along the edges, then filled in the area one pass at a time, floating so close to the tops of the tall green stalks that it appeared he could brush them with his feet.

“It’s kind of like mowing grass,” he said from the cockpit as the chemical mix drifted down in tiny vapor circles on each side of him. “I just happen to have a half-million-dollar riding mower.”

Scherzinger, a 1967 Fillmore High School graduate who also trained in the Army to fly helicopters, teamed with Aspen owner Charles McLaughlin in 1984 to launch the company’s agricultural service. Aspen sprays about 50,000 acres annually, dousing oranges, avocados and all manner of row crops from Riverside to San Luis Obispo.

Scherzinger, Turner and Ventura native Kevin Miskel each put in about 750 flight hours a year and during the summer months can work 50 to 60 days in a row.

Pesticide application is only part of the job, Scherzinger said. Agricultural pilots routinely apply fertilizer, seed fields and drop snail bait. They whitewash greenhouses to shield indoor plants from the sun and hover over orchards during the winter to prevent bone-chilling temperatures from setting in and damaging fruit.

Scherzinger said most people are unaware of the steps he and the other pilots take to alert neighbors and county agricultural inspectors when they are working in sensitive areas. Nor are they aware that pilots voluntarily establish wide buffer zones and fly early in the morning or on weekends to avoid potential problems, he said.

“We are trying to be good neighbors with everyone as long as we can,” he said. “We know people will keep coming; there’s nothing we can do to control that. So we might as well try to control ourselves.”

The people do keep coming and his work space keeps getting tighter, as strip malls and subdivisions sprout where fields used to be.

Even at this cornfield, sandwiched between the golf course and the Ventura Freeway, pesticide application calls for precision flying. It’s why he doesn’t like being called a crop duster. He’s not dusting anything. His business is more exact than that.

“It’s just a kind of art that evolved over the years as we lose more and more ground and the population increases,” he said. “This is a tough place to spray. There’s just no room for mistakes.”

Mistakes Are Rare but Costly

By most accounts, Aspen hasn’t made very many.

Susan Johnson, pesticide deputy for Ventura County’s agricultural commissioner, said the company has had one minor paperwork violation in the two years since she arrived. The grower in that case failed to get a permit for a chemical that was applied.

She said she remembers how one pilot, set to drop weed killer on a field near a residential area in Oxnard, sprayed the whole thing with water first to make sure the chemical wouldn’t drift.

“They are extremely careful,” Johnson said. “It’s a tough industry. And it’s tough to get far enough away from anybody who might complain.”

Environmentalists and anti-pesticide advocates counter that no matter how careful crop dusters are, there is too much room for error. And they say such mistakes, when combined with the speed of aircraft doing aerial applications, can be costly.

Last year, two dozen farm workers were treated at a hospital after apparently being sprayed with pesticides by a nearby crop duster in Tulare County. And in 1996, 21 farm workers were hospitalized after being hit by another crop duster’s spray near Fresno.

Lori Schiraga, program director for the Environmental Defense Center, said she is concerned about the continuation of aerial pesticide applications in the face of the county’s pattern of urban development on and around farmland.

As a member of the Ag Futures Alliance, a coalition formed recently to help resolve disputes that have dogged Ventura County agriculture for decades, Schiraga said she hopes in coming months to discuss ways to reduce growers’ reliance on aerial applications.

“That’s not to say that they can’t happen safely, but there are no guarantees,” she said. “Accidents can happen and they do happen. And when they do happen, unfortunately they can be terrible.”

While the industry is shrinking and changing, crop duster pilots aren’t ready to see it grounded for good.

At the Placer County headquarters for the California Agricultural Aircraft Assn., a trade group established to promote and preserve an industry that dates back to the 1920s, acting administrative director Terry Gage said pilots are using the latest technologies to reduce pesticide drift.

She pointed to new studies by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation showing that some ground applications can result in more drift than aerial applications. She said the association is trying to spread the word, through school visits and other means, that the industry is a vital part of California’s farm future.

“It’s basically all about being a good neighbor,” Gage said. “Just being proactive eliminates a lot of problems.”

On that point, Barrie Turner couldn’t agree more. As an agricultural pilot in Ventura County for 35 years, he has had a bird’s-eye view of the industry’s evolution. And while there is no question that pressures from all sides have reshaped the business, many of those changes have been for the better.

“We are working with the environment, not against it,” said Turner, who figures he still has plenty of flight hours left in him.

“We want to work with everybody concerned, and we do the best job we can under the circumstances,” he said. “We don’t want to drift on highways; we don’t want to drift onto adjacent crops. We are part of the community, and if we screw up, we have to live with our mistakes.”