Dirty Dozen Australia: What the 2026 Supermarket Residue Tests Found

Which supermarket fruit and veg carries the most pesticides? If you've ever searched for the "dirty dozen", you'll have landed on a list built from US government testing of produce.¹ For an Australian counterpart, there's been very little to go on. Until recently.

On 7 October 2026, Pesticide Action Australia published its Residue Report 2026. The charity bought 78 samples of 13 everyday fruits and vegetables from Aldi, Coles and Woolworths in five cities. An accredited lab tested every one. It found 201 pesticide residues from 54 different pesticides.²³

Most of those residues were within Australian limits, meaning our food rules are largely being followed, and real science sits behind them. However, meeting today's limits isn't the same as knowing your food is fine to eat every day for fifty years. Here's what the tests found, how "safe" gets decided, and why we farm so we don't need these chemicals at all.

Is there an Australian dirty dozen?

Not an official one. This report is the closest thing we have. It's a snapshot, not a national average: about six samples of each food, bought in June 2026.² Still, it's a rare look at which supermarket produce carries the most different pesticides.

Our count, from the pesticide data published with the report. It's how many different pesticides turned up across all samples of each food, not how much of each.²

Soft berries and grapes sit at the top. Bananas and avocados, with their thick skins, sit at the bottom.

What did the 2026 residue tests find?

Here are the headline numbers from the report:²

• 44% of samples carried at least one PFAS pesticide (more on "forever chemicals" below).
• 56% carried at least one pesticide that isn't approved in the European Union. (The EU uses a stricter, hazard-based test than Australia's risk-based one, so this doesn't by itself mean a residue is unsafe.)
• 14% carried a neonicotinoid, a type of insecticide that's taken up inside the plant.
• 11 detections of 5 different organophosphate insecticides.
• 4 residues over the limits set by Australia's pesticide regulator, the APVMA.

The report's authors say supermarket and government testing is opaque and hard for shoppers to see, and they want more of it published.² We agree: you should know more about how your food is grown. You shouldn't need a charity's lab budget to know your food.

Are the standards being met?

Our regulators do a good job, and most Australian farmers are trying hard to do the right thing. There are only a few exceptions. Only four of the 201 residues were over the limit: bifenthrin on grapes, bupirimate on strawberries, and fipronil and permethrin on capsicum. Another eight suggested a chemical had been used on a crop it isn't registered for. The charity has asked the regulator to check.²

Government testing tells a similar story. In November 2025, the NSW Food Authority tested 100 samples of blueberries and raspberries from Sydney shops for 218 pesticides. Every sample was within the legal limits.⁴

So this isn't a story about rule-breaking farmers or poisoned fruit. Most Australian growers are following the labels and doing their best. The people who set the limits also do careful work. The bigger question sits one layer down: how do we know the limits are right?

How is a "safe" level of pesticide decided?

Pesticides approved in Australia are given an acceptable daily intake. That's the amount the regulator judges you could eat every day of your life without appreciable risk. It comes from long-term studies in lab animals. Scientists find the highest dose that caused no harm in the most sensitive species. Then they usually divide it by 100, to allow for people possibly being more sensitive than lab animals, and for differences between people.⁵ Food Standards Australia New Zealand then checks that the residues you're likely to eat stay under that line.⁶

Think of it like the load limit on a bridge: set well below the point where it would fail. The NSW Food Authority says the limits include "large safety margins".⁴ They do. Yet I would argue two gaps remain:

1. The lifetime is an estimate. The "every day of your life" figure is worked out from animal studies and safety factors.⁵ It isn't measured by following real people eating real residues for decades, which to be fair is near impossible to do with any scientific rigour (how can we control what people eat?) or ethical basis (and how do we decide who gets the “bad” food?).
2. Each chemical is judged on its own. One strawberry can carry several residues at once. Australian limits are set one pesticide at a time, and very little research looks at the long-term effect of the real-world mix.² It's a bit like checking every ingredient in a cake, but never tasting the cake. University of Melbourne reproductive biologist Associate Professor Mark Green says there's an urgent need for that kind of assessment, especially for children.³

Have "safe" levels been wrong before?

Yes, more than once. Limits move as the evidence comes in. Picture a speed limit on a country road: set in good faith, then lowered once the road proves riskier than anyone thought.

• Dimethoate. This insecticide was widely used on Australian fruit and vegetables. When the APVMA reviewed it, it cut the acceptable daily intake twenty-fold, from 0.02 to 0.001 mg per kilogram of body weight. It then found the old label directions put people eating treated food at risk for many crops. On 6 October 2011 it suspended all dimethoate products and restricted how they could be used on food.⁷⁸
• Mercury. In 2003, the World Health Organization's expert committee on food chemicals withdrew its safe weekly limit for methylmercury, the kind found in fish. It replaced it with one less than half as high, to better protect the developing brain.⁹

Each was the best science of its day, done in good faith by the researchers. Yet each was tightened when better evidence arrived, which is a good thing. The system does work. Today's limits are the best estimate we've got, and some of them will move again.

So here's where we land at Your Farmer. The standards are being met, and the science behind them is real. It just can't tell you yet what a lifetime of eating these residues together does. If you can grow food without them, and we believe it's more nutritious as a result, you don't have to wait for the answer.

What makes a pesticide a "forever chemical"?

PFAS is a family of thousands of chemicals. Each one has at least one fully fluorinated carbon atom. Some newer pesticides fit that international definition.¹⁰² As a group, PFAS are known for hanging around in the environment, which is why they're nicknamed "forever chemicals".² Like glitter after a kids' party... it gets everywhere, and you're still finding it months later.

The name doesn't tell the whole story, though. The OECD, which wrote the definition, says calling something PFAS doesn't, on its own, tell you whether it's harmful.¹⁰ The two most common PFAS pesticides in the 2026 tests, fludioxonil and fluopyram, are still approved in the EU.² How long each one lasts varies. Much of the worry is about what they break down into, and how long that stays in soil and water. Pesticide Action Australia reports that in mid-2026 the APVMA proposed raising the residue limits for isocycloseram on berries by 70 to 500 times. It's a newer insecticide that falls under the PFAS definition.¹¹

How to remove pesticides from fruit and vegetables

You can't scrub every residue away. But you can cut down how much you eat:

• Wash just before eating. Rinse fruit and veg under cool running water. The NSW Food Authority says this removes surface pesticide and herbicide residues. Do it just before you eat, because moisture helps bacteria grow.⁴
• Scrub firm produce. A vegetable brush helps on potatoes, carrots and apples.
• Peel firm produce where it makes sense, such as apples and potatoes.
• Know what washing can't do. Neonicotinoids are taken up inside the plant, so no amount of rinsing removes them.²
• Ask the grower. If you can't, choose a source where you can.

Why we built farms that don't need them

On our farms, cattle graze fresh pasture and hens follow the sun across open ground, and vegetables grow in biologically rich soil. It's quiet, unhurried country, and it's designed that way.

I've been farming ecologically since 2005. The idea is simple. Build a farm healthy enough that the problems chemicals solve don't show up in the first place. It's like keeping fit, rather than stocking up the medicine cabinet. Living soil grows strong plants that stand up to pests. Animals rotate onto fresh pasture, so parasites and disease build up far less. Every farm we work with is measured against the eight outcomes of the Your Farmer Certified standard, from living soils to animal welfare.

Right now our shares are meat and eggs. Here's what that means on the farms that grow them:

• Chemical-free pastures. Our cattle and sheep graze pasture that isn't sprayed.
• No hormone growth promotants. Here's what "hormone-free" actually means in Australia.
• No Bovaer. We explain why we don't use Bovaer.
• Hens on open pasture. Our pasture-raised eggs come from hens that range outdoors on open pasture.
• No vaccines for our cattle. This one surprises people, so here's our thinking.

Our cattle are never vaccinated, so no vaccine preservatives, including the mercury-based thiomersal some cattle vaccines use, ever go into them.¹²¹³ Regulators rate the risk from those preservatives as very low, and we agree.¹⁴ Yet mercury doesn't break down, some of it lingers in the body for years,¹⁵¹⁶ and no one has studied what eating it every day for decades means. Our view is simple: if we don't need it, it doesn't go in.

Where that comes from: the European Medicines Agency reviewed thiomersal in food animals in 1996. It judged the risk to consumers negligible.¹⁴ That's an overseas review, but the preservative is the same one used in Australian vaccines. The "lingers for years" point comes from two studies. In a 2005 US study, infant monkeys injected with thiomersal-containing vaccines had less total mercury in the brain than monkeys fed methylmercury. But more of it was the inorganic form, which clears slowly. A 2014 review of the human evidence found inorganic mercury can stay in the brain for years.¹⁵¹⁶ Closer to home, Australia's National Residue Survey tests cattle every year for residues, including mercury. Overall compliance was above 99.8% in every year from 2017-18 to 2022-23.¹⁷

Want to see how it works day to day? Here's how our cattle are raised.

Know Your Farmer®, Know Your Food

Do you know where your food comes from? The 2026 tests show how hard that is to answer at the supermarket. Not because anyone's hiding anything. The information just never reaches the shelf.

You shouldn't have to guess. Every Your Farmer share comes from named Southern Highlands family farms, all sharing the same ecological vision. You can meet the farmers who grow it. The simplest way in is our beef subscription, delivered within 150 km of the farms across NSW and ACT. Good food, from farmers you know by name.

"Your Farmer"® and "Know Your Farmer"® are registered Australian trade marks owned by David Savill and used by Farmer Direct Online Pty Ltd (ABN 87 690 094 690) under exclusive license. The Your Farmer Certified standard is copyright David Savill, used under exclusive license.