cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
Life as a Farmworker in Yuma’s Lettuce Fields - Civil Eats
Each winter, the fields of Yuma, Arizona, grow half a billion heads of iceberg lettuce. This is what it's like to work as a lettuce harvester in those fields.
The lettuce seemed to glow in the moonlight. Thirty-two men and women flashing knives, folding boxes, bagging hearts: chewing up a Yuma Valley lettuce field. It was Day 55 of the romaine harvesting season, just after five in the morning, and the 32 cutters, sleevers, sealers, stickerers, boxers, drivers—the team of lechugueros—had already been up for hours. All of them crossed the border from San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora, between 1 and 2 in the morning, and boarded the crew bus (a converted, white-painted Blue Bird school bus hauling a trailer with two portable toilets and a hand-washing station) that ferried them to this moonlit lettuce field. During harvest season, both San Luises (in Sonora and Arizona) come alive just after midnight, where 10,000 agricultural laborers cross the border to pick enough produce to send, every single day, 1,000 fiber-filled semi-trailers streaming out of Yuma.
Agricultural technology, utilizing GPS, drones, lasers, and sophisticated machinery, is changing the way America farms. But getting vegetables from the field to the fork still largely depends on manual labor. Manuel (who declined to give his last name) has been working in the fields all his life. A great-grandfather, at 62 he’s still working on the front side of a romaine team, bending at the waist, cutting and defoliating romaine hearts, tossing them onto the outer conveyor belt of the harvesting machine. He works six days a week with fluctuating hours, depending on how many boxes of lettuce the shippers order.
Each winter, the fields of Yuma, Arizona, grow half a billion heads of iceberg lettuce. This is what it's like to work as a lettuce harvester in those fields.
The lettuce seemed to glow in the moonlight. Thirty-two men and women flashing knives, folding boxes, bagging hearts: chewing up a Yuma Valley lettuce field. It was Day 55 of the romaine harvesting season, just after five in the morning, and the 32 cutters, sleevers, sealers, stickerers, boxers, drivers—the team of lechugueros—had already been up for hours. All of them crossed the border from San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora, between 1 and 2 in the morning, and boarded the crew bus (a converted, white-painted Blue Bird school bus hauling a trailer with two portable toilets and a hand-washing station) that ferried them to this moonlit lettuce field. During harvest season, both San Luises (in Sonora and Arizona) come alive just after midnight, where 10,000 agricultural laborers cross the border to pick enough produce to send, every single day, 1,000 fiber-filled semi-trailers streaming out of Yuma.
Agricultural technology, utilizing GPS, drones, lasers, and sophisticated machinery, is changing the way America farms. But getting vegetables from the field to the fork still largely depends on manual labor. Manuel (who declined to give his last name) has been working in the fields all his life. A great-grandfather, at 62 he’s still working on the front side of a romaine team, bending at the waist, cutting and defoliating romaine hearts, tossing them onto the outer conveyor belt of the harvesting machine. He works six days a week with fluctuating hours, depending on how many boxes of lettuce the shippers order.