By Esther Quintanilla
Driving through the back roads of rural California, miles of abundant farmland stretch as far as the eye can see.
Two miles outside the small town of Exeter in Tulare County, a crew of about 20 farmworkers are harvesting plums on a 3,000 acre orchard managed by High Sierra Ag Inc.
The workers are covered head to toe, dressed in long sleeves, jeans and bandanas under wide brim hats.
Some laborers move from tree to tree, climbing ladders to harvest plums. Others load delicate fruit into large bins for transport.
It’s 9 a.m. – and it’s already 90 degrees.
“I love the work I do,” says Rigoberto Ibarra, 69, the foreman of the crew. “The only bad thing is that it’s hot.”
Heat is one of the deadliest weather-related disasters in the country – and farmworkers are at disproportionate risk of heat-related illness and death, according to the National Climate Assessment.
The National Weather Service has continued to monitor prolonged heatwave, which has already broken multiple heat records in the agricultural region.
Ibarra – who has worked in Valley fields for more than 50 years – says he’s heard stories about workers on other farms suffering the heat effects. Last August, a farmworker in Fresno reportedly died from heat exhaustion.
“Thank God no one on my crew has felt that,” Ibarra says in Spanish. “I don’t even want to think about it. Thankfully we’ve all been okay.”
Heat affects workers, crops alike
Farm owner Zack Stuller says that during heatwaves, the crews work limited hours. They tend to start work early in the morning and stop by noon, before temperatures hit triple digits. On this day, the workers started at 5:30 a.m.
“I don't want my guys out when it's 115 [degrees] anymore than they want to be out there, but it's what makes the world go round,” Stuller says. “They gotta work to feed their families just like I do. This is their line of work, just like it’s my line of work.”
The plums on this field are already ripe by early July, he says, and if they just didn’t work during the heatwave, they would end up with thousands of pounds of sunburnt fruit.
But the heat could also impact future crops if trees don’t get a chance to cool down. Stuller says that, like people, orchards can physically shut down when it’s too hot.
“If that tree is stressed at all, it's going to shed that fruit,” Stuller says. “That's affecting our crop that we're going to harvest six months from now.”
Are heat regulations doing enough?
California is one of the few states with heat protection laws for outdoor workers in place. It requires employers to provide adequate shade, easy access to clean drinking water, and rest breaks. The Biden Administration recently proposed similar regulations for the whole country, and California recently expanded protections to include indoor heat protections.
But labor advocates, like the United Farm Workers, say the problem is those laws aren’t always enforced.
“There's one law on the books and there's another law on the fields,” UFW spokesperson Antonio de Loera Brust says.
De Loera Brust says the union continues to get calls about growers who don’t comply with the law and threaten retaliation against workers – like from Lourdes Cardenas, who lives just outside Fresno.
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