AUGUSTA – Spencer Aitel started his organic dairy business in the town of China with a single cow. Now that he is milking 80 registered Jerseys and sending his milk to the Organic Cow Cooperative, it is more important than ever to Aitel that he retain his organic certification.

But Aitel and other organic farmers are concerned about drift, the pollution of their organic crops through the use of pesticides by their farming neighbors. “Our market wants biological purity,” Aitel said last week, just before a public hearing on LD 960, an act to protect a farmer’s right to farm. “If my neighbor unintentionally contaminates my crop or seed with drift, I have a certification problem.”

Though he supports establishing critical pesticide control areas, Aitel was in Augusta to oppose LD 960 because it would establish such areas based solely on the medical effects of pesticides on neighbors, not the effects on nearby organic crops.

Maine Farm Bureau Executive Secretary Jon Olson testified Thursday in favor of the bill before the Joint Standing Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. Olson said his organization, which represents 5,100 Maine members, backed the creation of pesticide critical areas. The bill would require medical documentation that a person is sensitive to one or more pesticides and that long-term health effects will result from exposure.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Richard Crabtree, D-Hope, agreed that medical documentation was key to the bill. “Abutting landowners are not entitled, for example, to interrupt the farmer’s right to farm based on their philosophical opposition to the application of pesticides.”

Leslie Poole of Searsmont, however, opposed LD 960. She said the bill “has everything to do with a farmer’s right to contaminate his neighbor’s property and not be held accountable.” It is this view that organic farmer Aitel supports.

Poole and Aitel’s positions were also backed by Robert I. Batteese Jr., director of the board of pesticides control of the Maine Department of Agriculture. He opposed requiring a medical test and said “physicians would be very reluctant to make such a determination.”