04 Mar New Rules Aim to Protect California Farmworkers After Extreme Heat Cut Last Year’s Work Short

Ximena, a farmworker in Brentwood, Calif., poses for a portrait after meeting with the Hijas del Campo team in November 2024. 

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Story by Erica Hellerstein, El Tímpano | Photos by Hiram Alejandro Durán for El Tímpano/CatchLight Local/Report for America corps member

For the past 14 years, Ximena has spent her early mornings in the fields of Brentwood, a quiet agricultural community at the eastern edge of Contra Costa County. The work begins before most people are awake. By dawn, the 47-year-old has been up for hours, preparing the farm’s soil for crops such as beans, tomatoes and corn.

But this past season, relentless heat made the already grueling work even more punishing. Last year was the hottest on record globally; it was also one of the most scorching twelve-month periods in Northern California’s history. In Brentwood, at the height of summer, temperatures soared past 100 degrees, according to Dorina Salgado-Moraida, co-founder of Hijas del Campo, a nonprofit that supports farmworkers in Contra Costa County. The organization began hearing from agricultural workers who saw their hours cut during a critical period in the high season — typically from March to October — as the extreme heat damaged plants and rendered outdoor work unsafe.

Some workers saw their seasons end midway through the summer, months earlier than usual, Salgado-Moraida said. The unanticipated slowdown left them scrambling to save enough to get through the winter, when work is scarce. The extreme heat, she added, is just the latest in a cascading series of crises for local farmworkers, beginning with the pandemic in 2020, followed by wildfires and an unusually severe storm season in the winter of 2022–23, all of which have left workers struggling to regain stability.

“The heat and the weather has been a disaster for these families,” Salgado-Moraida said. “There’s a lack of confidence that what they’ve been doing for the past 30 years is going to be promising to them now. And not only that, but there’s no retirement. Some of them are getting elderly, and there’s no safety net for them. So then what will they do?”

This season, Ximena worked less than usual — fewer than 40 hours a week — making it harder for her to keep up with inflation and the rising cost of living. “It is more difficult because everything is expensive now,” she said in Spanish. “Rent, food, bills.” Even covering the cost of her diabetes medication has become a persistent source of anxiety. “Sometimes we say, ‘This month we won’t be able to make ends meet,’” she said, “but we have to find a way to move forward.”

Some support is on the way. A new state law will allow farmworkers to use sick days during designated climate emergencies so they do not have to work through hazardous conditions. But with farmworkers like Ximena still reeling from back-to-back blows to their livelihoods, many are looking ahead to next month’s upcoming season, wondering whether last year’s aching heat was an anomaly or a postcard from the future, previewing a new normal for the country’s top agricultural producer.

It is estimated that between one-third to one-half of all farmworkers nationwide live and work in California, a state at the frontlines of the climate crisis. As climate change intensifies extreme weather across farming communities from the Central Valley to the North Bay, the agricultural workers powering California’s $50 billion annual agricultural industry are struggling with the fallout: less work and few safety net protections to help them make it through seasons cut short by wildfires, deadly floods, storms and record-breaking heat. Some are questioning if this once-reliable line of work will be enough to sustain them and their families.

These realities come as the Trump administration moves to scale back federal funding for disaster recovery. On Feb. 20, the administration announced steep cuts to The Office of Community Planning and Development, part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, responsible for rebuilding homes and critical infrastructure destroyed by large natural disasters. The decision could ripple through the state’s agricultural sector, limiting the resources available to rebuild and support workers in agricultural communities devastated by major wildfires.

Another farmworker in Brentwood, Armando, has been working on a local farm for the last 14 years. He has seen firsthand how the heat has affected his colleagues. Armando spends most of his time working in a truck to ensure crops are watered, so the high temperatures don’t interfere as much with his work as they do for coworkers who are exposed to the sun. “This year there was less work because of the heat,” he said. “There are people who only work six hours a day and it impacts them a lot. That’s why some people ask to work longer, no matter how hot it is. Because it affects their economic situations.”

Further south, in Watsonville, Ann López, executive director of the Center for Farmworker Families, which advocates for agricultural workers across the Central Coast, said the past year has been the worst she has seen in her 25 years supporting farmworkers in the region. Some workers have seen their normal working hours cut in half because of the weather, while others on the clock endure brutal conditions under the blazing sun. “It’s been a disaster,” she said.

López recalled a conversation she had in August, when a group of farmworkers called her to share that it was more than 100 degrees on their farm, and some workers who were not permitted to leave by their superiors were fainting in the fields. Others reported failing and dying crops during prime harvest time — like strawberries rotting on the vine —leaving them with less to pick, and consequently, less money to take home.“They’re calling me constantly begging for rental assistance,” López said. “They have no extra money…People don’t have enough work to survive.”

A multi-layered crisis

California agricultural workers cultivate half the nation’s fruit and vegetables under duress. They are among the state’s lowest-wage workers, lack access to many social services, live in substandard housing, are subjected to wage theft and hazardous working conditions and struggle with health issues. At least half of the state’s agricultural workers are estimated to be undocumented and face increasing political and cultural hostility as the Trump administration vows to conduct the largest deportation operation in American history.

The effects of climate change compound these vulnerabilities, said Michael Méndez, an assistant professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine. Even before natural disasters or triple-digit heat, farmworkers are “exposed on a daily basis to chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers, dust and other types of elements that impact our health,” he said. Agricultural workers suffer from a range of poor health outcomes and chronic illnesses — such as asthma, diabetes, hypertension and obesity — and research has found they are uniquely susceptible to the health risks associated with climate change.

Méndez’s research has documented how climate disasters disproportionately impact undocumented Latino and Indigenous farmworkers in California, even as they have “a total lack of a safety net to protect them,” he said.

Undocumented farmworkers do not qualify for most state and federal safety net protections, including unemployment insurance, that could help sustain them during periods without pay. As a result, many continue working through hazardous conditions to earn a paycheck. During the wildfires in Sonoma County in 2020, Méndez said, farmworkers continued harvesting grapes in areas that the general population was asked to evacuate because they were unsafe, exposing workers to hazardous air quality. Exposure to wildfire smoke has been linked to health problems ranging from worsening heart disease and asthma to premature death.

California labor law requires employers to provide water, shade and regular breaks when temperatures exceed 80 degrees, but experts have found that enforcement remains inconsistent. Researchers at UC Merced surveyed farmworkers across the state and found that just half of respondents said their employers provided shade when temperatures rose past 80 degrees and just 43% of farmworkers said they received state-mandated heat illness prevention training from their employers.

According to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics fatal occupational injury data, farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat exposure than workers in other industries. A 2022 study by California’s Legislative Analyst Office found that Latino workers, who make up 38%of the state’s workforce, account for 60% of employees in outdoor industries vulnerable to extreme heat and wildfire smoke exposure.

Meanwhile, agricultural workers remain ineligible for unemployment benefits when they must stop working due to heat, a support that farmworkers like Ximena say would help them get through the increasingly volatile seasons. For years, advocates have pushed lawmakers to address the growing risks that climate change poses to farmworkers’ health and financial security.

“These are people who are not only paying taxes and contributing to our economy, but they’re also our food source,” Salgado-Moraida said. “If there’s no farmworkers, then we’re not going to have the food on our tables. They should have some type of support.”

Efforts to fill the gap

Legislators have sought to fill some of these gaps. Though their efforts have faced setbacks — Gov. Gavin Newsom recently vetoed a bill that would have streamlined farmworkers’ ability to file workers’ compensation claims when their employers violate heat safety regulations — there has been progress at the state and federal levels.

A new state law that took effect on Jan. 1 grants farmworkers the right to use sick days during state or locally declared “climate emergencies.” The policy makes it illegal for employers to deny sick days to farmworkers when the Governor or local jurisdictions announce an emergency due to heat, smoke or flooding, a change that supporters say will ease the financial burden on farmworkers who work outside when it’s dangerous to earn a paycheck.

The Disaster Relief for Farmworkers Act, introduced by California Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat, would provide financial relief to farmworkers who cannot work because of natural disasters. The legislation, which is currently in committee, addresses what Diego Iñiguez-Lopez, director of government affairs at the United Farm Workers Foundation, says has been a longstanding issue: the exclusion of farmworkers from federal relief programs allocated after natural disasters.

Proponents of the legislation say that the federal government, which provides financial support to farm owners and agricultural companies impacted by natural disasters, should extend the same kind of relief to farmworkers, who have historically been exempted from federal disaster relief.

“We believe it’s fundamentally unjust that the farmworkers who put food on our tables cannot do the same for their families when they’re excluded from federal disaster relief,” Iñiguez-Lopez said. “The Disaster Relief for Farmworkers Act provides a model to change that historical norm.”

The bill would create a funding stream to support farmworkers who lose work because of extreme weather and other disasters like public health crises, by allocating grants to farmworker-serving charities to provide financial relief and support to impacted agricultural workers.

Back in Brentwood, Armando hopes there will be enough work this season. He dreams of becoming a makeup artist, posting tutorials on Facebook between shifts, and sometimes stops by friends’ houses to glam them up. In the meantime, he’s waiting for spring. “By the time March arrives,” he said, “we are looking forward with joy to go back to work.”

This story was originally published by El Tímpano on Feb. 25, 2025. It has been reproduced with permission.