Inspectors Find Few Problems at Area Farms : Agriculture: State labor investigators give only two citations after looking for health and labor violations at about 15 sites.

State labor investigators gave good marks to Ventura County growers Monday after inspecting about 15 farms in the Oxnard, Camarillo and Ventura areas for health and labor violations.

Only two citations were issued against county growers who could not show proof that they provided laborers with workers’ compensation insurance, said Roger Miller, regional manager of the state Department of Industrial Relations.

“Overall, Ventura County farms are relatively clean with some minor violations,” Miller said. “They looked very good.”

But advocates for farm workers say working conditions in the county are not as good as state inspectors believe.

“We go out and find two or three violations in one day,” said Marco Antonio Abarca, staff attorney with the California Rural Legal Assistance program. “Crews often are not provided with bathrooms and water.”

He said he was surprised that the state only issued two citations. “It does not give you a true picture of what it is like in the field,” Abarca said.

“Their trips (to the fields) will always have problems,” he said. “They are going out there and asking people about their working conditions right in front of the foremen. They are not going to give the most candid response.” But state officials said they have confidence in their inspection program.

Early Monday morning, several teams of inspectors made surprise visits to the farms, where they looked for violations of state labor laws on farm contracts, child labor, minimum wages, overtime, workers’ compensation and field sanitation conditions.

The department usually makes unannounced inspections on county farms twice a year, Miller said.

He said he did not know how many violations were found in Ventura County during a sweep last spring. But he said generally most county farms inspected are in compliance with the law.

The inspections are part of a program led by State Labor Commissioner Victoria Bradshaw, who was recently appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson to head the department’s Division of Labor Standards Enforcement.

“We do sweeps periodically throughout the year. It’s part of a normal program,” Bradshaw said Monday.

Last year, labor officials made 359 inspections of farms throughout California and found 923 violations.

According to Deputy Labor Commissioner Maria De La Rocha, the two farms receiving citations on Monday were Rio Farms and West Coast Growers, both in Oxnard, for failing to show proof of workers’ compensation.

However, she said officials for both farms insist that they have the workers insurance and have told state inspectors that they will send in paperwork to prove it.

De La Rocha said inspectors also found a few minor violations at other farms, such as no running water or no toilet paper in the bathrooms.

In addition, she said, labor officials have arranged for an audit of the overtime pay for workers at BLT Farms in Oxnard.

Under state law, she said, some farm employees are required to receive overtime pay after working an eight-hour day. But at the farm, De La Rocha said, it appears that workers may have been given overtime after working 10 hours.

“They may have overtime coming to them,” she said.

But overall, she said, the conditions at farms were better than she had expected.

Deputy Labor Commissioner King Cheung, who inspected farms with De La Rocha, said he was amazed to find so few violations in Ventura County.

“This time it’s clean,” he said.

The inspectors were on their way Monday evening to inspect farms in Santa Barbara County, where they say they expect to find more violations.

In an unrelated matter on Monday, the department filed a lawsuit in Santa Barbara Superior Court against Babe Farms Inc., on behalf of 15 farm workers. The suit alleges that Babe Farms failed to pay minimum wage and seeks to recover $47,000 for the farm workers, according to department officials.