Siskiyou Land Conservancy
Protecting California’s Wild North Coast and Rivers Since 2004

Pesticides: Use and Toxicity Reports

Forty Years of State Complicity in the Pesticide Poisoning of California’s Wildest River “It’s a toxic soup in there.”—NMFS fisheries biologist In April 2024, Siskiyou Land Conservancy released a comprehensive report that documents forty years of complicity by the state of California in the pesticide contamination of the Smith River estuary, in the far northwestern Read more

In 2020 Lane Devries, President and CEO of Arcata-based Sun Valley Floral Farms, made a commitment to Siskiyou Land Conservancy to abandon use of the carcinogenic herbicide glyphosate (aka Roundup), which the company uses to prepare the fields for planting. This month Siskiyou Land Conservancy learned that Sun Valley violated this agreement by spraying Roundup on a large field on Seidel Road, in the Arcata Bottom.

Easter lily farmers in Smith River use an enormous amount of “bad actor” pesticides to grow their crops. These are chemicals that have demonstrated significant adverse impacts to the environment, and to human populations. The first document below is a list of pesticides used in Smith River and their impacts to humans and the environment Read more