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By focusing on the general ignorance concerning occupational diseases related to exposure to pesticides among farmworkers, the authors seek to understand how public policy tools used to produce knowledge may paradoxically result in the obscuring of social problems. In order to do so, they draw on recent sociological studies on the dynamics of organised ignorance, stressing the underlying moral and political implications of this phenomenon. The authors demonstrate two factors contributing to the social invisibility of diseases brought about by the use of pesticides among farmworkers: the institutionalised under-recognition of chronic illnesses caused by certain forms of exposure to low doses of toxic substances; and the under-reporting by workers of the acute effects of high-dose pesticide poisoning.