Farmworker Awareness Week at Frog Song Organics

March 25th-31st is Farmworker Awareness Week .

When you see food in the grocery store, or at our farmer’s markets, an incredible amount of skill and physical labor has gone into making that food possible.

In anticipation of Farmworker Awareness Week, our friends at the Farmworker Association of Florida invite you to learn about the essential work that farm workers do, and the challenges they face. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is another organization working to support fair food in Florida, and raising awareness about worker abuse and modern-day slavery recently prosecuted in Georgia. We hope that our communities will stand up for the rights of farm workers to stop abuses, and appreciate the skill and effort it takes to produce the food we need to survive and thrive.

Learn more about HB 1718 and HB1617 and why these bills will harm the 40% of farm workers who are working without legal authorization.

Recent bills SB 706 and HB 903 are aimed at protecting workers from heat injury. Heat injury on farms is a risk that can be fatal. We do not pay for harvesting based on piece rates. That has been shown to lead to increased risk from injuries and heat stroke when workers don’t take breaks and hydrate.

Some of the things that we do to support our team members include:

• providing on-farm housing at no cost
• helping to arrange healthcare appointments and providing transportation and translation services when needed
• free food & beverages from the farm
• a health care stipend
• paid sick leave
• a prepared meal that we eat together weekly as a team on the farm.

We also pay employment taxes and for workers compensation insurance. While this may seem like the bare minimum for operating a business, it is not necessarily standard practice on all farms. Cheap food in the grocery store often has externalized costs, including environmental damage and harm to workers.

We exist within this larger system and sometimes it can be a struggle to compete. We appreciate it every time you choose local and organic.

Thank you for supporting local agriculture and helping us build better alternatives to the industrialized food system, step by step.

It is our hope that we will see some of these changes below in our lifetimes. We will continue to work where we can to help raise awareness and push for these changes.

We advocate for:

• An education system that teaches about agriculture and food production, giving kids hands on experience in producing food for themselves
• Removal of externalized costs of “cheap” industrial food to show the true cost of food production at the grocery store
• Changes to trade regulations to end cheap imported produce. This makes it difficult for local farmers to compete with an international market of cheaper labor.
• Agriculture being a desirable and respected vocation, and compensated in a way that makes young people want to choose that career path
• More financial and technical support for conservation practices and organic agriculture to help farmers convert to organic or sustainable practices
• Reform of the FLSA to include basic protections for agricultural workers like minimum wage and the right to organize
• Immigration reform that allows motivated and skilled workers from other countries to work in agriculture legally, and remove some of the expense and legal burden on farmers to participate in the H2A program
• Reform to the H2A program, and the enforcement of existing labor and pesticide laws to make sure labor contractors and farmers are not abusing farmworkers.