People say Belle Glade is known for three things: sugarcane, prisons, and National Football League players.1 The town has other distinctions as well. In 1985 it became famous for having the highest AIDS infection rate in the nation, higher than New York City, ground zero of the epidemic at the time.2 In 2003 the town made national news for having the nation’s second highest violent crime rate per ten thousand residents.3 Poverty is long entrenched in Belle Glade, as shown in the 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame that depicted the desperate lives of the town’s farm families: starving children, rat-infested homes, and thin, tired, typically black mothers, fathers, and teens crowding into trucks bound for vegetable fields.
Things haven’t improved much since the film appeared. Unemployment in Belle Glade hovers around 40 percent today, and 33 percent of the town’s people live below the federal poverty line.4 Decent-paying jobs just don’t exist, except at the correctional facilities. People used to work as sugarcane cutters until the area’s sugar corporations—collectively known as “Big Sugar”—replaced human workers with machines in the early 1990s.5 What really hurt the economy, though, was Big Sugar’s buy-up of the region’s vegetable farms, which drastically cut the number of agricultural jobs and drove away businesses that depended on local farmers and their families. Almost everyone with means to leave Belle Glade has done so, including what family farmers are left. “Even me, I’m proud to work out here, but I can’t live out here,” says Ryan, who lives in a town called Loxahatchee, twenty-five miles away from the farm.
Belle Glade is one of thousands of small, rural communities in America that used to rely on small and midsize farms for economic support. That sector is shrinking nationally, and it’s all but disappeared around Belle Glade. When farms get bigger, local economies suffer. One reason is that big farmers rarely do business locally because they can find cheaper goods elsewhere. They buy in bulk on the national or international market. It’s not just about economies, though, it’s about communities. As John Ikerd writes, “A rural community is far more than a rural economy. It takes people to fill the church pews and school desks, to serve on town councils, to justify investments in health care and other social services, to do the things that make a community. As farms have grown larger and fewer, rural communities have lost people—human and social resources—and many rural communities have withered and died.”6 In rural towns, the social cost of industrial farming is on full display. I see it in my hometown of Bison, a lonely farming community with a population of 338, half of what it used to be decades ago. What few businesses are left struggle to stay open, with the exception of the grain elevator and stores that sell fertilizer, seed, fuel, and agrochemicals. If Bison wasn’t the county seat, then the courthouse and its jobs wouldn’t exist for the many farm wives forced to take employment in town. More people are leaving Bison than staying and raising families. Myself included.
Who can blame them for leaving? Not that I’m trying to justify my flight, but Bison’s heyday is long past. The nearest movie theater is 50 miles away, the nearest commercial airport 150. There’s one restaurant, one tiny grocery store, one bar (well, if you count the bar inside the one convenience store, two), and zero stoplights. One of my sisters graduated high school with just four other students. It’s not that fun to live in Bison anymore; people often feel isolated and bored. Young people are choosing city life instead of taking over the farms they were raised on, which allows the area’s biggest farmers to swallow up more land. If nothing changes, then Bison could die. And it is just one such community among hundreds of thousands on the verge of collapse, not to mention the thousands more that already have.
For the time being, Belle Glade still offers some agricultural jobs, such as planting, cultivating, spraying, and harvesting vegetables. When I visit Roth Farms on a windy day in November, I watch members of a harvesting crew stoop, sever iceberg lettuce heads with their knives, slice away the limp outside leaves in one or two quick motions to leave just enough “wrapper leaves,” and lay the heads on the bed. Other men pack the heads into boxes, and still others, the loaders, lift the boxes onto moving flatbed trucks. A box can weigh between forty-five and sixty pounds depending on the crop packed inside, and a crew pulls roughly two thousand boxes of leaf in a day.
Ryan stresses that field workers are paid good, but not great, wages for this tough physical work. He says leaf harvesters earn roughly $600 to $800 gross a week on his farm, loaders around $1,000 (the number of days crews work in a week varies according to field conditions; same with the number of hours worked per day). Ryan’s lettuce crews earn more than Florida’s tomato pickers, who also labor under the piece system, earning $70 per day on a good day. But for all field workers, the piece system is unfair. If rain or dew keeps them out of the field for an hour or two, they stand around, earning nothing, most unable to go home because they don’t own a car. Some days they earn nothing, and most receive no benefits. There’s also no overtime pay. If a storm is coming and a farmer needs the crew to work over the weekend in order to save the crop, he or she is not required to pay them more, even if the workers have already put in forty hours that week.7
As we watch the loaders, Ryan comments that he can’t believe they can work so hard day in and day out. A loader might lift 120,000 pounds in a single day, he says. “All these are jobs Americans don’t want to do,” he says, gesturing across the field. “But that job specifically is one.” I see what he means: every person in the field is of Hispanic descent except Ryan and me, and he tells me later that most are migrant workers here on work visas. The crews work about six months of the year for Roth Farms, then move up the East Coast for the summer. I feel ashamed walking through the field, taking notes about the sweat on their brows and the way they hunch over the rows. The pain they must feel in their knees and backs, the cuts they must endure on their hands and arms from swinging the knife. All so people can eat a one-dollar burger with a couple of lettuce leaves from a fast-food drive-through.
Conventional producers can’t charge more for their crops to cover rising input costs, but they can control what they pay for labor, which is why farmworkers are some of the nation’s lowest-paid laborers. Only dishwashers earn less. Most farmworkers live below the poverty line, on minimum wage and with virtually no benefits. Less than one-tenth receive employer-paid health insurance, and just 10 percent receive paid holidays or vacation time.8 Factor in the extremely hard work, and most Americans, like the residents of Belle Glade for example, cannot afford to take farm jobs even if they wanted them—but desperate undocumented immigrants or impoverished migrants on work visas often will. The situation is similar in California, where Mexican workers pick grapes and strawberries in withering heat. On the Great Plains, wheat harvesting companies sponsor cheap workers from South Africa; these are the people who’ve harvested my father’s wheat in the past. In the dairies of Wisconsin and Minnesota, Central American workers draw milk from thousands of Holsteins each day for minimum wage. Meanwhile, people from the nearby farm towns cannot find work.
Farm labor in the U.S. has always been a job of the lowest socioeconomic class, one reason we don’t value such labor in our society. In the South, slaves worked cotton, sugarcane, and tobacco plantations. After the Civil War, poor, usually black sharecroppers lived as serfs under wealthy landowners. In Texas, during the late 1880s, cattlemen hired expendable labor, called cowboys, to drive cattle thousands of miles across dangerous terrain to market. Though the Chicago meatpacking plants of the early 1900s were not farms, they, too, preyed on poor immigrant workers from eastern Europe to slaughter and process livestock, paying the workers next to nothing and providing no benefits when they were injured or killed. In California during the Depression, farmers who had lost their farms, derisively called “Okies” because many were from Oklahoma and surrounding states, picked fruit and vegetables for pennies a day.9
Putting impoverished foreign workers in U.S. fields became institutionalized during World War II. In 1942, when the West Coast experienced a wartime labor shortage, the federal government invited Mexican workers to American farms under the bracero program. The government pledged transportation assistance, living expenses, and a return trip to Mexico when their work agreement ended. Growers saw an opportunity to hire a controllable workforce that they could pay a fraction of what they did American workers. West Coast growers became so addicted to cheap Mexican labor that after the war they persuaded Congress to prolong the bracero program, which lasted until 1964. The arrangement ultimately pushed domestic workers out of the fields and caused devastating poverty among the Mexican field hands, who lacked the ability to protest their situation.10
Ryan would like to see immigration reform, specifically a law that would allow foreign workers to return home during the off-season. They long to go home, he says, but if they do they likely won’t be able to come back. “Getting back is going to be such a huge problem that they just stay, and they may stay for fifteen or twenty years, making as much money as they can, sending money home, trying to survive here, so they can get back home. If you did set up a work permit program where people could come and say, ‘I have a job at Roth Farms’ or ‘I have a job at whatever’—it may not be Florida, it may be New York or California or whatever—but ‘I have a job, it’s a six-month-a-year job. They want me to come work this job and those other six months I will sign documentation that I’ll go back.’ Because that’s what a lot of these guys want to do. Some of them want to work here in the wintertime and go home in the summertime, some want to work up in New York or New Jersey or wherever there are other farms in the summertime where they grow vegetables, and go home in the wintertime. They can’t do that. It’s really sad to hear some people say, ‘My dad died. And I can’t go home for the funeral.’”
Life for migrant workers on visas is often dismal—but at least they have a choice to stay or leave. When writer Barry Estabrook published Tomatoland, his exposé of Florida’s tomato farms, in 2011, police had rescued more than a thousand people from Florida farms who were being held against their will and forced to work—and Estabrook says that number is “only the tip of the iceberg” because most cases go unreported.11 In South Florida’s agricultural world, he writes, “slavery is tolerated, or at best ignored.” He describes human traffickers promising men and women jobs in America, but these people arrive in Florida only to discover they’ve been sold into farm crews, where guards lock them in shacks at night and beat them if they attempt an escape. These workers often have no idea where they are, can’t speak English, and are in the U.S. illegally, which makes them hesitant to approach police if they do escape. The bodies of murdered field workers routinely show up in the region’s rivers and canals, even now.
The human trafficking situation has improved since 2011, but the appalling conditions in which legal, non-enslaved fieldworkers live and labor have not, especially in terms of housing.12 Workers usually live in overcrowded, decrepit trailers and apartments, sleeping on floors but paying high rents to rural slumlords. They can barely afford to feed themselves, so they go to soup kitchens and food pantries as if they were homeless. As researchers have noted, every day on the job is dangerous for fieldworkers: “The rate of death due to heat stress for farmworkers is twenty times greater than for the general population. . . . Fatality and injury rates for farmwork rank second in the nation, second only to coal mining. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that U.S. agricultural workers experience 10,000 to 20,000 acute pesticide-related illnesses each year, though they also admit that this is likely a significant underestimate.”13 These pesticide-related illnesses go beyond temporary sickness. Cancer, loss of toenails and fingernails, recurring rashes, breathing problems—these are just a few of the health issues field workers develop. Pregnant women, who must continue working or lose their jobs, experience miscarriages or give birth to children with physical deformities or developmental problems. Estabrook documents cases of pesticides being sprayed directly on pregnant workers in the field.
In the few minutes Ryan and I spend talking, the crew moves about twenty yards away from us down the rows. I hear Spanish spoken between them occasionally; otherwise the field is silent except for the crunch of lettuce underneath the men’s feet. I wonder how many have missed their parents’ funerals. I wonder where they live, if they are sick, where their last meal came from. Discarded lettuce heads lie in their wake, left behind due to deformities or disease, looking like oversized green succulents. I see a barely attached head wobbling in the strong wind and bend over to rock it gently under my palm. It feels like it could roll off the bed if I pushed just a bit harder.