• Health

Pesticides Are Prevalent and Poisonous

• cancer
• chlorpyrifos
• exposure
• farmworkers
• health
• pesticides

Pesticides are harmful to insects and other wildlife — including humans. The first real accounting of pesticide poisoning since 1990 found that: 

• About 44% of farmers, farmworkers, and pesticide applicators are poisoned by pesticides every year
• Accidental pesticide poisoning causes 11,000 deaths annually 

Why This Matters: We’ve been relying on old data about farmworkers’ exposure to pesticides for the past 30 years, and thus the full picture of the harmful impact of these products on people has been underappreciated.

• Food

Will Robots Soon Replace Farm Workers?

• #COVID
• automation
• farmworkers
• harvest
• robots

The COVID-19 pandemic is “ratchet[ing] up the pressure” to automate harvesting processes, Civil Eats reported. Alongside the rising cost of labor and the increasingly dangerous conditions caused by wildfires, more and more farmers are considering this move to automate their harvests with robots replacing up to half the farmworkers currently needed.

Why This Matters: As Twilight Greenaway wrote for Civil Eats, “If the people doing the work on farms are getting sick, the logic goes, why not just replace them with machines?”

• People

Farmworkers Lack Adequate Legal and Public Health Protections During Pandemic

• agricultural workers
• agriculture
• civil rights
• COVID-19
• farmworkers
• labor
• public health

by Julia Fine, ODP Contributing Writer As Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett reported last week, coronavirus is “exploding” in populations of farmworkers across America. In their report, they noted that on a single farm in Tennessee, all 200 workers tested positive for the disease while in Immokalee, Florida, results indicated that over 1,000 migrant workers […]