Oregon and Washington state, for instance, are planning radio ads to reach migrant farmworkers and a digital ad campaign entirely in Spanish.
A couple months after my story published, I drove up to visit farmworkers with VOSD’s Maya Srikrishnan for a different story about an apparent increase in immigration checkpoints in the area.
Many farmworkers were hesitant to talk to me, let alone let me follow them around with a camera, because of their immigration status.
Slowly but surely, things started to come together, and I learned that the pandemic wasn’t just affecting farmworkers.
Irrigation crews still laid sprinkler pipe manually, and farmworkers would harvest this cauliflower crop when the time came, but it isn’t a stretch to think that one day, no person will ever lay a hand to the ground around these seedlings.
His income fell from $1,340 per month selling produce to less than $250 per month, as he resorted to work as a hired farmworker.