Migrant farm workers

Television crime shows often are set in cities, but in its third season, ABC’s “American Crime” took a different tack. It opened on a tomato farm in North Carolina, where it showed a young woman being brutally raped in a field by her supervisor. “People die all the time on that farm. Nobody cares. Women get raped, regular,” another character tells a police interrogator. The show’s writers did their research. Studies show that 80% of Mexican and Mexican American women farmworkers in the U.S. have experienced some form of sexual harassment at work. Rape is common enough for some to nickname their workplace the “fields of panties.” For comparison, about 38% of women in the U.S. report experiencing some kind of workplace sexual harassment. In a recent report, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization called for transformative changes to the formal and informal social systems that disempower women who work on farms and in the food s...

The 2023 Georgia peach harvest is looking bad, although the details are sketchy. By some accounts, it’s the worst since 1955. Or maybe since 2017. There are estimates that a mild winter and late spring frost have cost Georgia growers 50% of their crop. Or perhaps 60%, or 85% to 95%. Consumers, say the growers, should expect less fruit, though what’s produced may be “fantastic and huge and sweet.” And they should expect to pay quite a bit more. As ominous as this may sound, the unpredictability of Georgia’s peach harvest has been predictable since the industry’s earliest days. So has public hand-wringing about it. It can be hard to say what a “normal” year is. In 1909, growers produced just over 826,000 bushels. In 1919, it was up to 3.5 million, then 4.4 million in 1924, then back down to 1 million in 1929. There may be plenty of peaches on Georgia license plates, but according to the University of Georgia’s 2021 Georgia Fa...