Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

by Barry Estabrook

  Ag-Mart had vigorously denied any wrongdoing but settled nonetheless. Now it was June, and Schell was trying to track down more than one thousand current and former Ag-Mart workers and sign them up for their share of the settlement before an October deadline. His firm had hired an administrator whose full-time job was to find eligible workers, some of whom had already headed north for the season, some of whom were back home in Mexico. The goal was to reach fifteen hundred pickers. “They will get a check for as much as two thousand dollars,” said Schell. “Will it change their lives? No. But it’s real money.”

  In addition to getting workers money that they have legally earned, Schell sees his lawsuits as an important deterrent to any farm owner who might want to cut corners when it comes to giving his workers their legal due. “A company takes a bus load of workers out there and lets them wait without paying them—who cares?” said Schell. “Well, once they’ve been successfully sued for a whole bunch of money, they care. We’re in the process of suing some of the other big growers for similar things. When we sue, we sue for a lot of money and hope it sends the message to people—to quote Santana, ‘To change your evil ways, baby.’” His work, he said, deals with matters that should be prosecuted by the U.S. Labor Department, but under Clinton and then Bush, there was very little enforcement. “That meant open season on farmworkers.”

  Unfortunately, early signs reaching Schell’s office indicated that the adoption of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Code of Conduct would not eliminate the need for the sort of strong-armed tactics that Schell has shown himself so effective at providing. “Enforcement is going to be a big problem,” he said, saying that he was joining forces with a private legal firm to file suit against one of the big Fair Food signatories, who was breaking the law by not paying for waiting time and transporting workers in uninsured vehicles driven by unlicensed drivers.

  Over the years, Schell has developed an approach to negotiation that, while effective, has not endeared him to corporate agriculture. “We give them one chance,” he said. “We say, ‘You can do this the easy way or the hard way. Here’s the easy way: It will cost you X dollars. The hard way, unfortunately, is war, and our backers have already agreed that whatever amount we need to spend, we can spend. We are going to sue you to oblivion.’”

  Recognizing that farmworkers’ exposure to pesticides has not gotten the attention that such issues as wages and involuntary servitude have received, Schell began taking steps in 2009 to rectify that. The problem, he said, is that no one has made an organized, concerted effort to bring pesticide complaints before the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is charged with regulating the use of agricultural chemicals. Some farmworker advocates have called for the control to be wrested from the agriculture department and given to the health department. Working with Schell, the Farmworker Association of Florida filed a half-dozen formal complaints. “We want to see what the state does with them,” said Schell. “If they do a great job, terrific. If they do a crummy job, then we have the basis to go in and say that we need a new agency in charge. We are poorly positioned to critique them if we don’t give them enough rope to hang themselves. So we’re giving them ample rope.”

  Schell’s battle to see that workers get their due is made all the harder, he said, because most of his would-be clients lack legal status in the United States. “You have a workforce that has no rights or perceives that it has no rights,” he said. Like many players in the tomato industry, Schell feels that giving migrant workers documentation would not only legitimize the illegal status of the majority of Florida agriculture’s workforce but reduce the migrants’ vulnerability to exploitation. “Until you resolve that issue, the potential for all sorts of human trafficking and other labor abuse is there. We feel that we’re sticking fingers in a dike and that we don’t have enough fingers. Until it’s resolved, it’s hard to see how things will dramatically improve. Even after it’s fixed, we’ll have plenty of problems.”

  Before I left, I asked him whether he has any regrets when he looks at his Harvard Law School peers like Chief Justice Roberts or the multimillionaire rainmakers on Wall Street. He responded unhesitatingly, “I probably enjoy my work as much or more than any of them. I can’t believe they are paying me, I’m having so much fun. I mean, we get together here and say, ‘Let’s take a run at this constitutional case. Let’s try something creative that a private attorney couldn’t risk the money on.’ We have the chance to move the law forward, and sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But it works often enough that it’s pretty cool. Plus, how could you not like this group of clients,” he continued. “All they want is to be paid what the law requires for their hard work. You don’t have to be a raving liberal to say that that is a pretty basic concept. And the system is stacked so heavily against them. I try to equalize the scales. That’s what I went to law school for—to give the little guy a shot. Our client in every case has been ripped off big time. The only question is who is going to pay. And in every case, we’re the only source of help. They come to us when there’s nowhere else to turn. I get to represent the best group of people imaginable.”

  THE TEACHER

  Barbara Mainster cracked open a door in a building behind the Redlands Christian Migrant Association’s head office in Immokalee, turned to me, and put her index finger to her lips. “Shhhhhhhh!” She led me into a darkened room. It was silent and the cool air inside provided welcome relief from the numbing humidity of an overcast autumn day. Even in the dim light, the room and all its furnishings abounded in reds, yellows, and blues. It was spotlessly clean. In a whisper, Mainster introduced me to two Hispanic women who both looked like they were in their late twenties or early thirties, Hilda Enriques, in a rocking chair, and Francesca Sota, who was stretched out on the floor. Both women cradled infants in their arms. One other baby slept in a crib. “We usually have eight babies in this room,” said Mainster, a gray-haired seventy-year-old grandmother. “The others have gone home for the day.” Enriques had been a caregiver at Redlands for five years; Soto for seven. Before that, both women had labored in the same fields where the mothers of the children in their arms were working at that very moment. “They have walked in the same shoes as the babies’ parents,” said Mainster.

  And that is the key to the success of Mainster’s association, which provides free or low-cost child care and early education to the children of migrant farmworkers and other rural, low-income families. The organization began in 1965, when a group of Mennonite Church volunteers decided to provide daycare for the children of workers who lived in two migrant camps in Redlands, an agricultural district about twenty miles southwest of Miami. The goal was to keep the kids safe and out of the fields.

  Initially, it seemed that the Mennonites’ plan was fated to be just another well-intentioned charitable effort that fizzled. The founders opened the centers, but no one came. The immigrant mothers were not comfortable leaving their tiny children with white Americans who spoke no Spanish or Haitian Creole and had little understanding of the parents’ cultures. Only when the association began hiring from the migrant community itself did the centers begin to fill.

  Daycare for the children of immigrants provides a double-edged benefit. Kids who might otherwise be hauled out into the fields or warehoused by the dozen in filthy trailers supervised by the uneducated wife of a crew boss are given a clean, safe environment and acquire the basic skills necessary to enter the American school system. The women who care for them are able to leave the fields to work in comfortable, secure surroundings. They are encouraged to continue their education and earn living wages, creating pockets of upward mobility in the migrant communities.

  When Mainster, who has been executive director since 1988, joined the association in 1972, it had three centers in one county, with an enrollment of seventy-five kids. Today, thanks to her single-minded drive, which has not diminished an iota over nearly four decades during which she raised four of her own chil
dren (three of them adopted), the association has more than eighty centers and charter schools in twenty-one counties. It serves eight thousand children, making it one of the largest nonprofit child-care programs in the United States, and employs fifteen hundred caregivers, most of them Latinas. Redlands kids get a hot breakfast, a hot lunch, and an afternoon snack and learn enough English to enter the American school system.

  Mainster and I strolled into a shaded courtyard that houses three separate age-appropriate playgrounds with plastic tunnels, slides, tricycles, swings, a playhouse, and a pretend gas station and café, all painted in riotous primary colors. The space, located in the former Sunday school of a Baptist church, now provides care for 180 children. An additional 220 first- to sixth-grade students attend a charter school run by the association on an adjacent piece of property. “We want to keep them with us as long as possible,” said Mainster.

  Mainster credits much of the success of Redlands to her philosophy that there are good people and bad people in every profession, including Florida agriculture. Mainster works closely with major growers—Michael Stuart, chief executive officer of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, a trade group, was president of the Redlands board of directors. “Agriculture is a very important, well-connected force in this state, and they can lobby very effectively for funding and other things we need,” she said.

  A sign in Mainster’s office reads “We don’t believe in miracles. We rely on them.” In truth government grants through programs such as Head Start and federal child care grants cover 85 percent of the association’s $56-million annual budget. Donations and charter school fees make up most of the rest, with only 2 percent coming from parent fees. Despite being called the Redlands Christian Migrant Association, the group is completely secular. “I don’t know why we stick with the name,” Mainster said. “We are no longer based in Redlands. We are not affiliated with any religion. We work with nonmigrants as well as migrants. And we are a nonprofit organization, not an association.”

  Ultimately, Redlands’ goal, according to Mainster, is to level the playing field for the children under their care. A child of English-speaking native-born American parents has a vocabulary of about three thousand words at age three, she explained. The child of an uneducated, non–English speaking mother has only five hundred. Some Redlands students in the sixth grade, she said, have never been out of Immokalee, except on school field trips. “They start out at a huge disadvantage.”

  A dozen years ago, a Guatemalan boy who came to one of their centers at about age two certainly faced more than his share of challenges. His mother was illiterate and spoke only her native Amerindian language and some fragmentary Spanish. The child was completely nonverbal. Mainster arranged for him to be tested for hearing loss and mental disabilities. He had none. Caregivers continued to work with him, and slowly he began to speak. By third grade, he was not only fluent in Spanish and English but was reading at levels deemed age-appropriate by the state. In sixth grade, he asked to speak to a guidance counselor and came into her office carrying a thick envelope from the Florida Board of Education written in English and aimed at educated American parents. Consulting a document, he said, “It says here that it’s time that I do a little career exploration.”

  “This kid would have been considered gifted in an upper-middle-class school setting,” Mainster said. The boy is in high school now, and Mainster intends to make sure that Redlands gets him scholarship money and anything else he needs to attend college and, who knows, maybe get a fair shot at the piece of the American dream denied to his parents.

  THE BUILDER

  Hurricane Andrew made landfall near Homestead, Florida, at about five o’clock in the morning on August 24, 1992. The powerful storm’s 150-mile-per hour winds ripped into the coastal area just south of Miami, slamming into a dilapidated, county-owned trailer park that for two decades had served as a “temporary” labor camp for the migrants who picked citrus, tomatoes, and other crops grown in Dade County’s gravely soil. Miraculously, no one who lived in the park was injured. At that time of year, most migrant workers are in northern states. However, all but two of the four hundred trailers were demolished, reduced to heaps of splintered two-by-fours, twisted aluminum siding, and ripped-apart furniture. Andrew left the 154 families who lived in the camp at the time homeless. That hurricane turned out to be one of the best things ever to happen to Florida’s farmworkers.

  In the aftermath of Andrew, South Florida found itself awash in offers of federal disaster relief funding. Farmers desperately needed shelter for the workers that would soon be arriving to pick the winter’s harvest. The board of the Everglades Community Association, which managed worker housing in the county, hired Steven Kirk to oversee reconstruction. It was a classic case of the right person for the right job. Kirk, who had studied public policy at Duke University, became a passionate advocate for farmworker justice after spending a summer in the mid 1970s interviewing vegetable pickers in North Carolina under the supervision of the oral historian and author Robert Coles. One day he stumbled across a couple of African American men running down an unpaved road. They told him that their boss had tied them to a tree to prevent their escaping. Kirk rented them rooms in a motel until authorities came.

  Kirk spent the early part of his career knocking around Washington, DC, working for various farm laborers’ groups and other antipoverty organizations, gaining insight into how to manipulate levers of power and loosen purse strings in the nation’s capital. Upon arriving in Florida, he saw two courses of action for the Everglades Community Association. They could simply replicate the ugly, crime-ridden old camp by acquiring a few hundred replacement trailers and slapping them down in straight barrackslike rows on cement pads, or they could do something no one else had attempted: build a functioning farmworkers’ community.

  Today, Everglades Farmworker Village, as the one hundred and twenty acre development that sprang up on the ground occupied by that old trailer park is called, is one of the country’s largest farmworker housing projects. In one of the electric golf carts that provide the primary mode of transportation for village maintenance people and other employees, Kirk gave me a tour. Short, wearing jeans, with mussed, thinning hair, Kirk is in his mid-fifties. As we purred through a pleasant network of curving streets bordered by palm trees, he told me that the community is home to nearly two thousand mostly Hispanic workers whose average family income is between $16,000 and $18,000. The 493 housing units, pastel stucco over cement block, are either stand-alone single-family structures, side-by-side duplexes, or two-story townhouses. A couple of dormitory-style buildings provide accommodations for 144 single men. The streets have curbs and gutters, and the landscaping is immaculate. The community has its own ten-acre park and soccer fields. A small grocery store, a branch of a larger Hispanic supermarket in Homestead, provides a wide range of traditional products at reasonable prices. A Community Development Credit Union maintains an office here, and workers can get fairly priced loans, open bank accounts, and make other financial transactions so they are not gouged by check-cashing companies and costly wire transfers.

  Kirk made a deal with Mainster’s Redlands organization to run three day care centers at Everglades serving three hundred preschoolers. An additional 250 older kids participate in organized after-school activities. The community has a space for religious services, a community hall for wedding receptions and quinceañeras (celebrations of a Latina girl’s fifteenth birthday), a computer lab, two self-service laundries, and a health clinic. “There are a lot of people involved with low-income housing whose attitude is, they are just going to tear the places apart, why make them nice,” Kirk said. He takes the opposite view, believing that if you have high expectations of tenants and give them quality accommodations, they will respect them. “And that has proved to be true,” he said.

  In the world of migrant housing, the lowest of the low are single men. They are typically the ones relegated to sleeping ten or twelve to a trailer in p
laces like Immokalee—if they have any place to stay at all. The backcountry of Florida is pocked with makeshift encampments of single workers who cannot find shelter. Even farmworkers with families shun their single brethren, associating them with loud music, drunken rowdiness, and unwanted interest in teenage daughters. But Kirk was determined to make a place for single men in Everglades Farmworker Village.

  He stopped the golf cart and opened a gate that led into a shady courtyard surrounded by a U-shaped building whose facade was regularly interrupted by doors, giving the effect of a motel that had turned inward on itself. Gazebos and clusters of benches, chairs, and tables filled the courtyard. The principle, Kirk said, was to provide the men with a space to mingle and socialize outdoors that would also contain their activities and provide a measure of control over who entered the compound. Kirk opened the door to a unit, exposing us to a puff of air-conditioned air. The living room consisted of a heavy wooden table with benches set on a spotless linoleum floor. Off that room was a kitchen with a stove and two refrigerators. “Eight guys share this space, we want them to have room to store their food,” Kirk explained. Four bedrooms extended off the main living area, each with two built-in twin beds. Toilets and showers were in separate rooms.