HAMMONTON, NJ – Workers on the northeast’s largest blueberry farm move through the fields in small groups, finger-dancing to musicians’ speed as they gather bushes laden with fruit.
The more they meet, the more they are paid during a season that lasts only about seven weeks.
Except for the rain, they work seven days a week; There is no time for illness.
But everywhere there are reminders of the coronavirus and its power to sweep quickly through tight agricultural camps.
It is the reason why workers who live and work together wear handkerchiefs in the face in the sun and work separately by Plexiglas at fruit packaging facilities.
It’s what made them stand in line on a wet morning, weeks before collection began, to test for the virus at the big farm in southern New Jersey, the Atlantic Blueberry Company in Hammonton.
“It feels a little awkward,” said Angel Rodriguez, who works at the farm’s packaging facility. “You don’t know if someone is contagious.”
Rodríguez, 34, left Puerto Rico in March to start working on the east coast, stopping for two months in Florida before arriving in late May in Atlantic County, the center of New Jersey’s thriving blueberry industry.
He is one of approximately 22,000 seasonal workers who care for and harvest crops in New Jersey, nicknamed Garden State for its robust agricultural industry.
Like Mr. Rodríguez, many workers follow maturing crops all the way to the east coast, beginning in Florida, where migrant homes have been devastated by the virus, and head toward northern Maine.
Making life even more dangerous this year, they have been considered essential workers, exempt from the stay-at-home orders and a 14-day quarantine rule in New Jersey for people coming from states where the virus is spreading rapidly. With every flow of new workers comes the risk of a new outbreak.
In New Jersey, 3,900 farmworkers had been screened through Thursday and 193 tested positive for the virus, according to the state Department of Health. Of these, 14 migrant workers who had nowhere to stay isolated were quarantined at a state field hospital at the Atlantic City Convention Center.
“It’s kind of dangerous,” said Felix Nieves, 56, who works as a supervisor at Atlantic Blueberry. The 1,300-acre farm is considered the largest producer of blueberries in the Northeast.
“But agriculture never stops. The fruit will not wait for this to happen. “
The first round of testing at Atlantic Blueberry was held earlier in the season, before most of the workers arrived. Three of the first 56 people tested tested positive for the virus.
According to owner Paul Galletta, the health risks posed by the virus have made testing a priority on the sprawling farm.
“As often as they can come, we will do the tests,” Galletta said of health workers wearing white suits, masks, face shields and gloves while picking up nasal swabs. They have returned three times.
A sick workforce during a short growing season could be financially catastrophic.
“This crop arrives, with or without a virus,” said Denny Doyle, chairman of the New Jersey Blueberry Industry Advisory Council.
Atlantic Blueberry bought 3,000 scarves and gave each worker two, one to use and one to wash, and hung fire retardant clothing between the beds in the bedrooms where hundreds of workers live during the season. Doyle said the farm also bought several additional buses to create additional space on the ferries that run to and from the fields.
Agriculture is New Jersey’s third largest industry. The state is among the top blueberry, blueberry, peach, and eggplant producers in the country.
In May, state health officials arranged for four federally qualified health centers to begin testing and issued safety guidelines that offered a range of ambitious suggestions, some impractical, for farm owners. Farmers were told to avoid bunk beds, need masks, and create separate homes for anyone who tested positive for the virus, among other recommendations.
There are no penalties for non-compliance.
New Jersey’s 5 percent infection rate among farmworkers may be higher. Day laborers who do not live on farms are unlikely to be among those evaluated by health centers. Workers who are evaluated in private medical practices are not included in the count.
The testing program is also voluntary, and 57 farms have banned medical teams from conducting on-site tests, according to Dr. Lori Talbot, who treats migrant farm workers and saw the list of nonconforming farms that was sent to departments of health and work of the state. .
Dr. Talbot, who runs a clinic in Bridgeton, NJ, said that 18 percent of the 200 farmworkers she tested in May tested positive for coronavirus; many were asymptomatic, but two patients died of Covid-19.
“This is just a new level of pain for farmworkers,” said Dr. Talbot. “They are coming now, and they are coming from places with high infection rates.”
State Commissioner of Health Judith M. Persichilli has cited the prevalence of cases among farmworkers as one of the possible reasons why the positivity rate in South Jersey is now higher than in other parts of the state. .
Linda Flake, executive director of the Southern Jersey Family Medical Center, one of the four health centers coordinating the tests, said the perception that workers can carry the virus raises a fear that is in some ways worse than risk. of the disease itself.
“The fingers point to the farm workers,” he said. “I am more concerned that they are stigmatized.”
In May, in a large agricultural greenhouse in Oneida, New York, the Green Empire Farms, one in four workers contracted the virus, according to Madison County spokeswoman Samantha Field. The community’s reaction continued, playing on social media and panicking phone calls.
“There was a lot of outrage from the community,” Field said. “A lot of people blamed them.”
However, the risk of spread is more pronounced within narrow camps. According to the Florida governor, of every 100 workers tested at a watermelon farm in Florida, 90 had the virus.
In New Jersey, at Cassaday Farms in Gloucester County, 70 of the 90 workers contracted the virus, according to owner George Cassaday.
Mr. Cassaday asked the South Jersey Family Medical Center to conduct tests after an older worker became ill and was hospitalized for approximately a week. None of the other workers showed severe symptoms, said Cassaday, who also contracted the virus; he was examined after he could no longer smell his favorite flowers, hyacinths.
Most of their employees travel each spring from Mexico on H-2A worker visas, staying for the harvest of early and late season crops such as broccoli, corn, strawberries, and squash.
He says his business depends on both his health and his confidence.
“As with men. I visit them in Mexico, ”said Cassaday. “We are a great family”.
At least half of the country’s agricultural workers are believed to be undocumented, according to Bruce Goldstein, president of Farmworker Justice, a national advocacy organization focused on labor standards and job security.
“What we hear from everywhere is that people are too afraid of being fired or deported to ask for an improvement in health and safety practices,” Goldstein said.
Migrant farm workers are not included in the categories of foreign workers that President Trump banned in June from entering the country. But finding enough people to work in the fields has been a problem on America’s farms long before the coronavirus.
There has been a five-fold increase in the number of H-2A visas applied for and approved since 2005, reaching 258,000 last year, “one of the clearest indicators of agricultural labor shortages,” according to a Department report. of the United States of Agriculture.
On New Jersey blueberry farms, labor shortages in recent years have led to increased use of machinery to harvest the fruit, which can be damaged in the process and then must be sold frozen, not fresh.
The guidelines issued by the United States for the safety of the approximately 2.4 million agricultural workers in the country are not mandatory. A New Jersey state senator, M. Teresa Ruiz, introduced a bill to make the state’s recommendations binding.
“Each state is independent,” said Amy Liebman, director of environmental and occupational health for the Migrant Clinic Network, a nonprofit organization for healthcare organizations. “In some cases, each farm is independent.”
Sara A. Quandt, a professor and medical anthropologist who teaches epidemiology and prevention at Wake Forest School of Medicine, has begun a survey of farmworker understanding of the virus and social distancing.
She said she was frustrated by “blaming the victims” and suggestions that the infection rate in migrant communities is somehow linked to poor hygiene.
“There is an inherent racism,” said Professor Quandt, “that perhaps their lives are not worth that much and perhaps it is their own fault.”
