Finding America’s Farmworkers
Fully revised and updated through 2024, my book Finding America’s Farmworkers: Reaching Out in North Carolina is now available in a web version. To begin reading visit findingamericasfarmworkers.com When I moved to North Carolina from Chicago in 2005, I had no idea that so much of our nation’s food was still harvested by hand. Now,…
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To Feed Those Who Feed Us
It’s a sad truth that tens of millions of people in the United States depend on free food to keep their families from going hungry. Many of these moms and dads plant and harvest fruits and vegetables or raise and package chicken and other meats, all for the lowest possible wage. As a result, the…
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The Death of a Farmworker
We know he was 30 years old, a citizen of Mexico, working at a North Carolina tobacco and sweet potato farm. It was just the second week of his first year working there, authorized by an H-2A temporary seasonal work visa. We know area temperatures neared 100 on the fifth day of September. It was…
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The New Bracero
In 1981, the travel writer Tom Miller made a spot-on prediction. President Reagan was then planning an experimental program to allow US growers to hire 50 thousand Mexican farmworkers each season on temporary contracts, a program that would be enacted into law in 1986 as the H-2A visa program. Writing in The New York Times,…
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You grow what?
“Qué tipo de cultivo están cultivando aquí?” I asked the men. “What type of crop are you growing here?” We were huddled in the frigid and rundown trailer where these North Carolina farmworkers cooked and ate their meals. I was just starting some research for a book, visiting labor camps to introduce myself. It was…
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The crux of the farmworker debate
We live in an era of deeply polarized politics. But anyone who gives it much thought is likely agree on this: Our nation’s agricultural economy would grind to a halt without farmworkers, nearly 400 thousand of whom leave their families in Mexico for the better part of each year to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops…
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The Secret Lives of America’s Migrant Farmers
Published on Narratively on September 3, 2014… An innovative college program opens privileged young eyes to the million undocumented laborers who toil away in an invisible America. Story and photos by Michael Durbin… It’s early June at Camp Chestnut Ridge in Efland, North Carolina. Towering pines outside the dining hall are still dripping after a…
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Considering the farmworker: What I’ve learned
I’m a Wall Street technology manager. Two years ago I set out, citizen journalist style, to learn and write about people whose lives are very different from mine: migrant farmworkers. These are the men, women and children who harvest most of the fresh produce you see at America’s grocery stores. I’ll share what I learned…
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The Nice Camp
From my 2014 blog The Considerate Omnivore… Last summer I accompanied some college students doing educational and health care outreach at migrant farmworker camps. They were generally dismal places, ill-maintained and no place I’d ever want to spend the night. Except for one. It was mid July. Hot. I’d been traveling all day with Julie…
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The lives of child farmworkers in their own pictures and words
From my 2014 blog The Considerate Omnivore… Each year, a little-known contest by a little-known agency in Washington, DC lets children of migrant farmworkers portray their lives in essays and drawings. The annual contest by the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs invites these children to submit essays and artwork for judging by a panel, with…
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Michael Durbin 