Climate Change Is Already Reshaping How We Farm

Ramón Barba Torres had been working in the fields of Delano, California, for more than a decade when he decided to head north. The summer heat, which he recalls approaching 100 degrees nearly every day, was forcing employers to stop field work after about five hours, and he simply wasn’t making enough money. Torres had migrated from Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2003, at age 16, to help support his mother after his father died, and now he had a family of his own to support. He’d heard rumors that field work paid better, and the weather was more hospitable, in Washington State. So in 2012, he migrated for the season to pick strawberries and blueberries on the Sakuma Brothers farm near Bellingham.

Ramón Torres, cofounder of the Cooperativa
Tierra y Libertad farm in Everson, Washington.

Summer temperatures there rarely rose above 80 degrees, far more tolerable than in the California fields. Some other differences, though, were less welcome. For instance, Washington labor laws allowed children as young as 12 to work in the fields for less than the minimum wage, while in California farmworkers were required to be at least 14 years old. But because he was returning to California after the season, he kept quiet and did his work.

Read the story from The Nation by Audrea Lim - “Climate Change Is Already Reshaping How We Farm.”