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“It’s not normal to go through these heat waves and, you know, act as if nothing is happening,” he said. “And we just continue to normalize this, then, and nothing is going to be done to protect workers.” Climate change makes extreme heat more likely and more intense. Farm work is particularly dangerous because workers raise their internal body temperature by moving, lifting and walking at the same time they’re exposed to high heat and humidity, said Dr. Jonathan Patz, chair of health and the environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Pedro Murrieta Baltazar, a worker in sweet corn and vegetable fields at Way Farms in Waverly, Ohio, said this week that this year’s heat hasn’t felt as bad to him as some prior years. But the farm where he works takes precautions nonetheless. During the summer, they work at one side of the field in the early morning when it’s cooler, and then “afterward, they put us on the other side, where there is more shade,” Murrieta Baltazar said, speaking in Spanish. If workers don’t take breaks to get out of the sun, drink water and rest, they can experience nausea, vomiting, dehydration, muscle cramps and more — all the symptoms of a fever without any infection, said Roxana Chicas, an assistant professor in the nursing school at Emory University in Atlanta. Chicas, who researches the health effects on farmworkers of environmental and occupational exposures, described what it was like to work with fern cutters coming in from the fields to have their blood drawn for samples, even after their bodies had had some time to cool.
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