Free Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook

decades to come.
    Hispanics are relatively recent arrivals on the migrant scene. Decades ago, localAfrican Americans usually performed the same low-paying, excruciating work. In some areas, they stayed after theagricultural jobs moved away. Many are now retired. One such community can be found nearLake Apopka, just north of Orlando. Some farmworker advocates are convinced that the chemicals applied to the produce that these workers picked decades ago are responsible for the litany of medical horrors the community struggles with today.
    Leaning on her cane in the scorching midday June sun,Linda Lee matter-of-factly listed her medical conditions: diabetes, lupus, high blood pressure, emphysema, and arthritis. Her hip had to be replaced and her gall bladder removed. Her kidneys failed, so she had a transplant. She also had two corneal implants. Asked what caused her woes, the fifty-seven-year-old African American resident of Apopka didn’t hesitate: For nearly a decade as a farm laborer on the shores of Lake Apopka in the 1970s and 1980s, she was routinely exposed to agricultural chemicals as she worked in the fields. “Plenty of my old friends and neighbors got what I got, and a lot of them got stuff I don’t want to get,” she told me.
    In a survey of workers conducted in 2006, eight years after the Apopka farms were closed for good, the Farmworker Association of Florida found that 92 percent of the roughly twenty-five hundred African Americans, Haitians, and Mexicans with whom Lee toiled had been exposed to pesticides through a combination of aerial spraying, wind drifting from applications on adjacent fields, touching plants still wet with pesticides, and inhaling pesticides. Fully 83 percent of those queried reported that their health was only “fair” or “poor.” They complained about arthritis, throat problems, diabetes, persistent coughing, recurring rashes, miscarriages, birth defects, and childhood developmental difficulties—all conditions that research studies have linked to the agricultural chemicals that were applied in the area. In a state where the average incidence of birth defects is 3 percent, 13 percent of the Apopka workers had a child born with a defect.
    I came to the shores of Lake Apopka at the insistence ofJeannie Economos, the pesticide safety and environmental health projectcoordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida. She is in her late fifties but still wears her mane of curly hair in the free-flowing fashion of the hippie era, and she still holds the innocent belief that caring people can make constructive changes to the system. Economos, who signs her e-mails “Yours in solidarity,” wanted to give me the “pesticide tour,” a firsthand look at one of the country’s most extreme examples of what happens when agribusiness shows utter disregard for the environment and workers.
    Located fifteen miles northwest of Orlando , almost in the shadow of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Lake Apopka has had many claims to fame. Roughly circular and measuring about ten miles in diameter, it is the state’s fourth largest lake. For a time in the first half of the twentieth century, it was nationally famous for its trophy largemouth bass, and twenty-one lodges sprang up on its shores to cater to anglers from around the world. But by the 1980s, Apopka had earned yet another distinction: It was the Sunshine State’s most polluted large lake. By then the fabled bass were extinct. Blame for the decliningwaterquality was not hard to assign. In 1941, as part of the wartime effort to produce more fruits and vegetables, nineteen thousand acres of swamp on the lake’s north shore were drained to make way for “muck farms” in the rich soil. During the growing season, farmers pumped water in and out of the lake depending on irrigation requirements and rainfall amounts. In the off season, they allowed the lake to flood the fields to replenish the soil and prevent wind erosion and weed growth. With each