Enjoying that strawberry? How climate change is taking a horrifying toll on farm workers

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If you travel up the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles towards Santa Barbara, the surrounding hills suddenly fall away and you’re in a pancake-flat plain containing the twin cities of Oxnard and Ventura.

And surrounding these municipalities are thousands of acres of fields where farm laborers toil planting and picking, among other things, strawberries, celery, lemons, raspberries, avocados, tomatoes, peppers, cut flowers, cabbages and kale.

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Because of California’s climate, it’s a year-round thing, which is not much of a issue for workers at this time of year, when temperatures are relatively cool. But come the summer, and produce-picking — in addition to being back-breaking work — can become deadly.

It’s a particular problem in the state’s Central Valley, which doesn’t get the coastal breezes of Ventura County. And it has been made worse — much worse — by global warming.

The figures are horrifying, as detailed in Inside Climate News, which reports that scores of farmworkers have died in recent years from a combination of extreme heat and polluted air. Many of them succumbed to heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases; others died from respiratory issues or “natural causes.” As the article points out, heat stress is known to increase the risk of death from these underlying conditions.

“If a worker hadn’t been working in the heat,” Professor Daniel Smith of Villanova University’s College of Nursing told the outlet, “they likely would have never died from the myocardial infarction, the renal failure, the dehydration, the heat stroke.”

And it’s not just in the Golden State’s agricultural regions, where stifling temperatures have become more and more common. The incidence of fatal heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular events linked to high temperatures increased sevenfold globally between 1990 and 2019, researchers reported in the October edition of the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

Something to think about next time you munch on a delicious strawberry.