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LinkedInPosts Tagged: farmworkers
UCCE nutrition educators teach farmworker families about healthy eating
UC ANR partners with state and local organizations to improve urban communities. This story is one in a series about the impact of these partnerships.
The Farmworker Institute of Education and Leadership Development (FIELD), founded by Cesar Chavez in 1978, is dedicated to strengthening communities and the lives of farmworkers and immigrants in the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys.
In Kern County, they are partnering with UC Cooperative Extension's CalFresh Healthy Living, UC program to ensure families have the knowledge and skills they need to buy and prepare food that will help prevent chronic diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, and prevent obesity.
Each year, UCCE nutrition education supervisor Beatriz Rojas and UCCE nutrition education specialist Bea Ramirez present students in the program with eight free lessons on nutrition, physical activity and healthy living. Beginning in March 2020, due to the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders, participants attended classes online, and the Kern County CalFresh Healthy Living, UC staff adapted their classes to an online platform.
FIELD requested nutrition classes for their 32 adult students during the summer session.
“We provided the students with lesson packets and followed up with one-on-one calls to review each lesson,” Rojas said. “The participants received vital information on how to keep themselves and their families fit and healthy, save money at the grocery store, make healthy food choices and prepare tasty meals.”
In one of the phone calls, a participant mentioned that she started to incorporate 30 to 40 minutes of stationary bike riding in her daily routine and started her family on this activity as well.
“Ever since I started the nutrition class, it has taught me how to read the nutrition facts label when I go to the store, also how to choose the right oil, meat and dairy,” the student said. “My family and I do a lot more physical activity at home and we eat healthier.”
The CalFresh Healthy Living, UC program and other UC ANR statewide programs rely on donor contributions. To learn more about CalFresh Healthy Living, UC and how to support programs in your area, visit the UC Youth, Families and Communities program website.
Trump presidency and potential impact on food prices
President-elect Donald Trump promised to crackdown on illegal immigration during his campaign. Caitlin Dewey reported in the Washington Post that such a move would result in increased fruit and vegetable prices for Americans.
The Post sought information from the UC Agricultural Issues Center (AIC), a statewide program that is part of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. UC Cooperative Extension was credited as a source for a chart that accompanied the article that noted the crops most vulnerable to labor-cost change. Asparagus is listed as having the highest proportion of the farms' operating costs dedicated to labor: 82 percent.
"The plants must be hand cut multiple times per day during their two-month harvest season," the story said. Other crops that have high labor costs are wine grapes, oranges, sweet cherries, and all types of fruit. The article said berries, peppers, onions, watermelons and apples are also typically picked by hand.
A Texas A&M agricultural economist, Luis Ribera, told the reporter he believes U.S. farmers may not be able to produce some fruit and vegetables as a result of Trump's planned deportation of undocumented immigrants.
"We had a farm labor shortage even without Trump. Whatever he does will just compound the problem," Ribera said.
The director of the AIC, agricultural economist Daniel Sumner, doesn't express dire concern about the potential impact of the Trump administration on food prices and agriculture policy.
"I do not see big changes in immigration policy relevant for ag. Except perhaps a guest worker program, which would be positive," Sumner said. "I do not see big deportation of farmworkers coming."
California has a stable farm workforce
Led by Philip Martin, professor emeritus in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis, scientists analyzed all Social Security numbers reported by farm employers in 2014. The total number of farmworkers employed in California in 2014 was 829,300. The number of full-time equivalent jobs was 410,900.
“We have lots of people who do farm work in California,” Martin said. “If we could use more of them year round, we would not have to always be looking for immigrants.”
Interest in farmworkers and farm employment is growing in California and in the nation. Comments about illegal immigration by presidential candidates and a new law under consideration in California to require overtime pay for farmworkers have made farm employment part of a national conversation. California's labor-intensive fruit and vegetable production systems, the tightening of border controls and proposals to give some unauthorized workers a temporary legal status have also fueled interest.
“Many farm employers argue that there are farm labor shortages, while worker advocates counter that there is only a shortage of wages to attract and retain farmworkers,” Martin said. “Our objective was to provide a clearer picture of California's agricultural workforce by determining the actual number of wage and salary workers in agriculture.”
The research was based on information from the state's Employment Development Department, which collects data on farmworkers and wages paid when it collects unemployment insurance taxes from employers.
The results of the 2014 analysis are compared with previous analyses of farm employment going back to 1990. The data reflect a shift over the last 30 years away from direct-hire employment on crop farms and toward employment by farm labor contractors.
“Crop support services, like farm labor contractors, surpassed on-farm hires for the first time in 2007,” Martin said. “Since 2010, average employment reported by crop support establishments has been rising by 10,000 a year.”
In 2014, nonfarm crop support firms brought an average of 205,000 farmworkers to crop farms, while direct-hires on crop farms was 175,000.
“Our data show that California has a remarkably stable workforce,” Martin said. “We found that most farmworkers are attached to one farm employer, often a labor contractor who moves them from farm to farm.”
Average earnings for all workers who held at least one farm job during the year was over $19,000 in 2014, while average earnings of those who had their maximum earnings in agriculture was $16,500. Farmworkers who were employed by farm labor contractors had the lowest average earnings at $12,719.
In addition to Martin, the article was authored by Muhammad Akhtar, Brandon Hooker and Marc Stockton of the California Employment Development Department. California Agriculture journal is the peer-reviewed research journal of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.
UC programs provide heat illness prevention training
Record-breaking heat led to 12 farmworker deaths in 2005, bringing the issue of heat-related illness to the forefront for California labor activists and legislators. New laws enacted since then call for employee and supervisor training, fresh water at work sights, access to adequate shade for rest and recovery periods and written documentation on site that provides information about the regulations.
As the hottest August on record comes to a close, the next essential task has become educating California’s diverse population of outdoor workers and their employers about the heat illness prevention rules, according to an article on HealthyCal.org.
At the heart of the educational efforts are “Train the Trainer” workshops in which representatives from UC Berkeley’s Labor Occupational Health Program along with UCLA's Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program, and UC Davis’ Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety train representatives from schools, advocacy organizations, cultural centers, churches and health centers who in turn reached out to thousands of outdoor workers in their respective communities, the article said.
Related to this story, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources has a Heat Illness Prevention page on its website with the following articles:
- Ten key points about heat stress
- UC gives tips for coping with heat stress
- Heat illness symptoms and first aid
- How heat affects the body
- Preventing heat-related illness among agricultural workers (pdf)
Visitors can also download bilingual (Spanish and English) heat illness prevention handouts from the website.
In 2011, of 753 heat enforcement inspections, 76 percent of employers were found to be compliant.
Santa Maria farmers and farmworkers assist in UC pesticide-exposure research
The study is led by Robert Krieger, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Entomology at UC Riverside. Krieger is an expert in environmental and occupational toxicology.
This summer, Krieger and a team of researchers spent nearly three weeks in Santa Maria with workers at DB Specialty Farms. The workers wear gloves as they pick strawberries. Before each break, their gloves are collected and frozen for later lab analysis.
“We’ve found that pesticides are transferred to the gloves during normal work and we’re measuring the amounts that are transferred in hopes that we can use it to measure total exposure,” Krieger said. “The real question is how much exposure occurs, how much is OK, and how little occurs under normal conditions of use.”
The team is also collecting samples of strawberries harvested by the workers and samples of leaves.
In order to understand uptake and excretion, the workers are asked to collect urine for 24-hour periods after working in sprayed fields. To be certain any sign of pesticides in the urine came from work exposure, the researchers have also collected 24-hour urine samples from spouses or roommates of the field workers to assess dietary or home exposure.
“The levels of exposure are determined by how much is applied, how much remains on the crop and how much is transferred to people. We’ve independently measured those and came up with an assessment of how much a person is exposed to during their normal work,” Krieger said.
The research focuses on two pesticides: the organophosphate malathion and the pyrethroid fenpropathrin. After the pesticides are applied, there is a three-day waiting period before harvest gets under way. In the project, as soon as the workers are back in the field, the monitoring begins.
Studies that Krieger has conducted over the past 18 years show that low, safe levels of pesticide are absorbed and rapidly excreted by harvesters. Breakdown products of the pesticides – parts of the pesticide molecule that are not toxic – can be measured in the urine, but it is not known whether the pesticide broke down on the plant, before the workers were exposed, or if the workers’ metabolism broke down the pesticides.
“Those breakdown products are not toxic, but if they are absorbed, they will appear in the urine and we can’t tell whether a plant made it or a person made it and that complicates our analysis and that’s one of the new areas that we’re investigating in 2012,” Krieger said.
By comparing the gloves, fruit, leaves and urine and using sophisticated metabolic chemistry in the laboratory analyses, the researchers will be able to reconstruct how much exposure there was during the work day.
If the research concludes that analyzing gloves is a useful way to measure worker exposure, gloves could become an important tool for farmers and regulators. Another probable area of impact from the study is in verifying the levels of exposure, which the researchers are finding to be very low.
“These workers have very low levels of pesticide exposure. And in fact, they’re the best-studied workers with respect to pesticide exposure in agriculture,” Krieger said. “That gives us confidence that the exposure is not having a health impact.”
Definitive results from the August study are expected in about six months.
The research program has been sponsored by strawberry growers of the California Strawberry Commission and the Personal Chemical Exposure Program, UC Riverside. The current Santa Maria research is possible by the involvement of DB Specialty Farms and Safari Farms of Santa Maria, and PrimusLabs.
The research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of UC Riverside and the California Environmental Protection Agency. All the participation is voluntary and the farmworkers and their spouses or roommates are compensated for the inconvenience of urine collection. They receive $25 for each 24-hour collection and a $100 bonus for completing all 10 urine collections.
In addition to the extra pay, the study volunteers benefit by helping improve pesticide safety for themselves and their colleagues.
“These workers are doing a service to other workers by allowing us to measure the amount of exposure that occurs during normal work,” Krieger said.
View video of the on-farm research below:
