Climate Change Hits Home: Not all Farmworkers Feel the Heat Equally

Published September 21, 2024 in the Daily Hampshire Gazette

Farm risks rise with heat

By Jacob Nelson

Imagine this: It’s 10 a.m. and already near 90 degrees. The hot sun bakes the farm field where you and your coworkers are harvesting. With no clouds in sight or shade nearby, you wipe sweat from your brow and gulp down more water. It’s exhausting work, but someone has to do it, or this food will rot in the field, never feeding anyone.

With climate change causing more erratic temperatures and intense heat waves, brutally hot days are becoming more common around the world. While milder than some places, New England is no exception. In fact, the summer of 2024 was the fourth hottest ever recorded in western Massachusetts.

Often, conversations about how climate change impacts farming focus on how farm businesses can still thrive and what food they can grow in a warmer, wetter New England. Another important part of the conversation is how climate change affects people who farm. Society is fed through their sweat and effort. As temperatures climb, farmwork takes more of both.

In response, many farm owners and workers are ramping up efforts to keep people healthy and safe. Still, a highly physical, generally lower-paying job like farmwork will always come with risks, and the stakes are even higher for workers in more vulnerable positions in society. As critical a job as farming is, addressing this remains complicated.

Plainville Farm in Hadley is a third-generation business spanning 180 acres. Known for their asparagus and butternut squash, they grow a long list of vegetables sold to places including Big Y and UMass Amherst Dining. Several dozen people work on the farm, more or less depending on the season. Some come from the U.S, others from countries in Central America and the Caribbean. Among them, Lesvia Perez, originally from Chiapas in southern Mexico, has risen to a Swiss army knife-type role, trusted to do almost anything.

“I help however I can,” she says. “At the moment I’m helping pack squash in the back and training a new lady to help customers in the front. That was my job before. And sometimes I’m translating for people who don’t speak English.”

Perez came to Massachusetts in the early 2000s, speaking only Spanish. Greeted immediately by her first snowstorm, she started work at a plant nursery in Deerfield, using sign language to communicate with her Chinese- speaking coworkers. After three years of hard work, the farm owner paid for Perez’s English classes. Being bilingual and a good people manager opened the door for her promotion to crew leader, translating between languages and management levels. Five years later, she followed her husband to Plainville Farm, where she’s remained ever since.

Perez says heat doesn’t bother her as much as others, but she can tell summers have been getting warmer. And while hot days rarely prevent farmwork, they do make it more difficult. Workers continue weeding, picking, lifting, bending and moving things, sweat and energy draining ever faster as the temperature rises. Humidity makes it harder to cool off by sweating. Dry spells might mean crops need irrigating, which adds more work to the list.

As the exertion takes its toll, heat-related ailments set in including cramps, fainting, heat exhaustion, and even heatstroke, which can be deadly. While extreme cases are rare in Massachusetts, farmworkers nationwide are more likely to die of heat-related illness than workers in any other industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their death rate is 35 times higher than the cross-industry average, and nearly three times higher than construction workers, the next most affected industry.

There’s a mental health impact too, says Alfonso Herrera Neal, a professor of Latinx studies and longtime labor advocate for farm and food workers. “Exposure to harsh working conditions has a huge impact on things like anxiety and depression,” he says. “This is a real emotional toll.”

The best safety precautions are often simple: lots of cold water and electrolytes, breaks, and moderating exertion. At Plainville Farm, Perez says, “mostly, when people get tired in the heat, they sit. For three minutes, five minutes — they drink a lot of water and they’re back to work. There’s a water cooler we bring out to the field so everybody can drink, and there’s a bathroom (porta potty) on a truck, too.”

The packing barn could theoretically provide shade for field workers too during breaks, but state regulations that strictly differentiate different kinds of farmwork based on where the work is done make that difficult.

While most local farms have a plan like this for hot days, specific health and safety regulations are sparse for most farmwork, including work in high heat. This summer, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed a rule on heat injury and illness prevention for many industries, including farming, requiring breaks and access to cool water and shade when temperatures hit certain marks.

While it exempts farms with fewer than 10 employees, it’s notable that farm workplaces are included at all. Historically, many U.S. labor laws have exempted farms altogether.

Why is that? “When you connect the dots, a lot of it has to do with race,” says Neal. “From the end of the Civil War to the New Deal era when many workplace protections were enacted, most farmworkers were Black. Excluding them from workplace rights was a way to maintain control over a workforce. Now our farm workforce is predominantly Latinx and Afro Caribbean, and now they are feeling the effects of that exclusion.”

No matter who you are, farming in extreme heat is difficult, and there are many reasons someone might feel compelled to push past safe limits. Maybe a farm owner who works a small parcel alone has orders to fill. The sun is scorching, but they can either fill them and get paid, or rest and risk angering customers. For farm employees, staying productive despite rough conditions is a ticket to job security.

Those with the most to lose, and thus the greatest incentive to avoid rest or asking for help, are people in marginalized and disempowered positions, particularly people of color or people who are undocumented.

According to federal data, 41% of people hired to work on farms in the U.S. are undocumented. Almost 70% of all hired farm employees identify as people of color, including, 63% identifying as Hispanic. Nationally, Hispanic farmworkers were 2.4 times as likely to die of heat-related illness than non-Hispanics.

While concrete data for Massachusetts is hard to find, sources point to a large portion of hired farmworkers being people of color. Census data suggests 13% aren’t U.S. citizens.

Many farm labor advocates are grateful for the new OSHA heat rule. Many also believe people working on farms are due stronger workplace protections across the board. Among them is Neal, who says individuals have some power to push for change.

“In Massachusetts, there are local and state initiatives we can support that require good working conditions,” he says. “Pioneer Valley Workers Center is a great organization to contact to learn more and support farmworkers tackling these systemic challenges, and the Food Chain Workers Alliance, too.”

Voting with your dollar is another avenue Neal mentions; buying from businesses with strong and transparent support for the well-being of people working there.

“You can even have conversations with farm owners and employees — at farmers markets or what have you — to learn how your food is grown,” he offers. “Asking questions is a powerful way of letting the community know that you care.”

Neal also points out that the modern environmental movement in the U.S. originated with farmworkers, kicked off by advocacy against harsh chemicals like DDT, which harmed both natural ecosystems and farmworkers. Today, with the essential work of farming made even harder by climate change, “you still can’t separate environmental and climate justice from farmworker justice,” he says. “These movements are intertwined. And without farmworkers, we have no food.”

Back at Plainville Farm, Perez says she has thought about finding easier work “a million times. But this job has been good. And someone has to farm.”

Someone has to farm. In that respect, protecting people who work on farms isn’t just being nice, it’s ensuring that everyone can still eat dinner, no matter what job they come home from.

Jacob Nelson is communications coordinator for CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture). To learn more local farms and food grown near you, visit buylocalfood. org.