Toxic Taters allies Pesticide Action Network and Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha in a joint action at a Minneapolis McDonald's last year.
Norma Smith drinks only bottled water.
It’s not her preference, but it’s become a necessity. After potato growers moved in next to her farm in Frazee, Minnesota in 1995, Smith says her tap water became undrinkable.
“We drank the water for eighteen years,” Smith tells The Progressive. “The year after they started spraying [pesticides], the water tasted horrible.”
The growers next door, like many farmers in rural Minnesota, grow potatoes for a company that sells to McDonald’s. Residents including Smith contend these crops are grown with the aid of pesticides that have affected their health, livestock, pets, and surroundings.
“In this area, everybody knows someone who has cancer or who has had a family member die,” says Amy Mondloch, a Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, resident. “We are breathing [pesticides], we are drinking the water, we are dealing with the soil as well.”
Mondloch is a coordinator with the Toxic Tater Coalition, a Callaway, Minnesota-based organization founded by Smith and other community members in 2014. Toxic Taters is dedicated to raising awareness about the impacts of pesticide drift in agricultural communities where potatoes and other crops are grown.
In mid-August, the Toxic Tater Coalition co-signed a letter with 35 other organizations to McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook, asking that the company cut pesticide use on its potatoes. The letter also requests the company direct their providers to publicly disclose the chemicals used on their potatoes.
“We call on you to meet with Toxic Taters and other allied organizations to determine a strategy to significantly cut or eliminate pesticide use in your potato products,” the letter says. It asks McDonald’s for a response by September 15.
The media relations office for McDonald’s did not respond to a request for comment from The Progressive.
The Toxic Tater Coalition is primarily focused on pesticides used on potatoes by R.D. Offutt (RDO), a potato producer headquartered in Fargo, North Dakota. RDO is the country’s largest potato producer, producing than 60,000 acres of potatoes in 12 states, including Minnesota, North Dakota, and Oregon. The company is a supplier for McDonald’s, the world’s biggest purchaser of potatoes.
Past national initiatives aimed at cutting pesticide use in potatoes include more than twenty in-store actions in several states, as well as a webinar and petition to Easterbrook.
Toxic Taters is entirely run by local community members and often collaborates with other organizations including Pesticide Action Network North America. “We are really trying to fight for the little guys,” Mondloch says.
In an email to The Progressive, RDO communications director Anne Struthers writes, “Despite what representatives from the Toxic Taters may tell you, we are considered among the best in the United States at farming potatoes and other crops sustainably.” She sent a fact sheet about the company’s sustainable practices, which says RDO “operates its farms at or below the EPA and state regulation limits for pesticide use” and has been certified as an active participant in the USDA’s Good Agricultural Practices program.
“They are taking good steps, but local people really want to be able to hear that they have a firm commitment [to the community],” says Lex Horan, a Minneapolis-based Pesticide Action Network North America organizer who works with Toxic Taters. “No community should be a sacrifice zone for corporate profit.”
“No community should be a sacrifice zone for corporate profit.”
“RDO likes to fashion itself as a big family farm but it’s not. It’s a giant corporation,” says Mondloch.
Toxic Taters features stories on its website from people who live near potato farms and have been experiencing health problems. Local residents report difficulty breathing, sore throats, headaches and nausea, slurred speech and pregnancy issues.
Smith also believes pesticide use harmed the lambs she once raised. In 1997, many of her lambs were born sick or with birth defects. After several years, she and her husband decided to quit raising lambs all together.
“They were poisoned,” Smith says. “They had absorbed a bunch of that pesticide, so we sold the rest.”
While community members worry about the effects of pesticides, they do not know which or how many chemicals are used on the crops. That’s because Minnesota’s pesticide statute does not require public pesticide-use reporting.
“In Minnesota, our state law doesn’t allow for transparency,” Horan says. “People who live near fields are left guessing.”
So local residents have taken matters into their own hands. From 2006 to 2009, community members led an air-monitoring study in nineteen locations across central Minnesota, and all but two showed evidence of pesticides. The fungicide chlorothalonil, whose possible health impacts from exposure include cancer, pneumonia and kidney failure, was found in sixty-four percent of air samples.
“Nobody should have to go through their life wondering how their health is affected by chemical exposure,” Horan says.
The coordinators of Toxic Taters hope to protect people not only in Minnesota but across the country who may be impacted by McDonald’s pesticide use.
“We need to get word out about what McDonald’s is doing everywhere,” Mondloch says. “The potatoes being grown in Minnesota are eaten by people across the country.”
In Kern County, California, high amounts of a pesticide used on potatoes have been linked to neurological and developmental issues.
“When one community is successful in fighting back, we can show victories for other communities that are fighting similar battles,” Horan says.
Mondloch says the fight against pesticide use has become a unifying force, especially between native and non-native residents.
“We've been able to come together around the issue of pesticides,” she says. “We've been able to recognize that we all drink the same water and we all breathe the same air, and that we need to protect this place together.”
While Toxic Taters awaits a response to its most recent letter, Mondloch remains optimistic.
“I see the energy growing on our side,” Mondloch says. “We will continue to push them and I think we will eventually win.”
The group will see, on September 15, if McDonald's is listening yet.