Much of what the NRDC says is true. It's the, well, finer points on which the NRDC is wrong. No national statistics follow, merely that from the last few years of a single state. This decline is hardly surprising if you don't have the NRDC's prejudice that farmers are a bunch of pesticide-use addicts. Farming today is incredibly competitive, with profit margins measured sometimes in pennies per bushel.
Pesticides cost money.
The NRDC would also have us think that any pesticide exposure is the next best thing to drinking Kool-Aid prepared by the Rev. Jim Jones. Obviously, pesticide application accidents happen, but farmers' real accident worries aren't chemicals but machinery. The NRDC report doesn't even pretend anybody's being fatally poisoned directly from pesticides. Studies repeatedly show that overall farmers have less cancer and live longer than non-farmers. The largest and most recent to date, published this year in the Annals of Epidemiology , combined 37 studies and found yet again that farmers have lower overall rates of cancer.