Are Ventura County growers switching to organic production?
. Not very quickly. There are 79 registered organic growers in the county, and they account for only 4,337 acres — about 5 percent of the farmland in cultivation. Q. Do growers use a lot of pesticides? A. It depends on how you define it. According to figures compiled by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, 6.4 million pounds of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides were applied in Ventura County in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. That’s nearly 1 million pounds less than was applied in 2004. Structural fumigation, commercial landscape maintenance and weed control along roads and highways accounted for a minor amount, but most was used on farms and ranches. Q. What’s the most commonly used pesticide? A. The most abundantly applied pesticide was chloropicrin, a soil fumigant, of which 1.6 million pounds were used in 2008. Second was petroleum/mineral oil, 1.5 million pounds. Oil is mainly used in orchards to control scale, aphids and mites, and it
