By Mónica Cordero, Investigate Midwest/Report for America and Eva Tesfaye, Harvest Public Media for Investigate Midwest.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Michigan News Connection reporting for the Investigate Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration

Juan Peña, 28, has worked in the fields since childhood, often exposing his body to extreme heat like the wave hitting the Midwest this week.

The heat can cause such deep pain in his whole body that he just wants to lie down, he said. It sucks his desire to work, as his body tells him he can't take another hot day on the job. On those days, his only motivation to get out of bed is to earn dollars to send to his 10-month-old baby in Mexico.

Farmworkers, such as Peña and the crew he leads in Iowa, are unprotected against heat-related illnesses. They are 35 times more likely to die from heat exposure than workers in other sectors, according to the National Institutes of Health, and the absence of a federal heat regulation that guarantees their safety and life - when scientists have warned that global warming will continue - increases that risk.

Over a six-year period, 121 workers lost their lives due to exposure to severe environmental heat. One-fifth of these fatalities were individuals employed in the agricultural sector, according to an Investigate Midwest analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration data.

One such case involved a Nebraska farmworker who suffered heat stroke alone and died on a farm in the early summer of 2018. A search party found his body the next day.

In early July 2020, a worker detasseling corn in Indiana experienced dizziness after working for about five hours. His coworkers provided him shade and fluids before they resumed work. The farmworker was found lying on the floor of the company bus about 10 minutes later. He was pronounced dead at the hospital due to cardiac arrest.

"As a physician, I believe that these deaths are almost completely preventable," said Bill Kinsey, a physician and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Until we determine as a society the importance of a human right for people to work in healthy situations, we are going to see continued illness and death in this population."

Peña harvests fields in Texas and Iowa. This summer, he's overseen five Mexican seasonal workers picking vegetables and fruits in eastern Iowa. With its high humidity and heat, Iowa's climate causes the boys, as he affectionately refers to them, to end their day completely wet, as if they had taken "a shower with their clothes on," he said. They work up to 65 or 70 hours a week to meet their contractual obligations.

"I'm lucky because my bosses are considerate (when it's hot)," he said in Spanish, recalling that he managed to endure temperatures as high as 105 degrees in Texas. "I've had bosses who, if they see you resting for a few minutes under a tree to recover yourself, think you're wasting your time and send you home without pay."

Some of his friends have been less fortunate, and a few minutes of rest have been cause for dismissal, he said.

The fatalities scratch the surface of what is a more extensive issue, according to health experts, academics and advocacy groups, who say the data on heat illnesses and death is inadequate.

"There is a massive undercount," said Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for United Farm Workers.

She said it is common for the death of a person who died after a heat stroke to be classified as a caused by a heart attack on an autopsy.

Strater said a few reasons make it difficult to quantify the problems farmworkers face. The population's size is unknown. Many are undocumented. And, in general, they move around a lot and live in isolated areas. "Everything to do with farmworkers is particularly difficult because we don't know," she said.

An estimated 2.4 million people work on farms and ranches nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's census of agriculture. This population, mostly Latino, is roughly equal to the population of Chicago. About half are undocumented.

A possible federal standard

Although employers are generally responsible for ensuring a safe working environment that protects their employees' well-being and lives, no federal regulation stipulates a specific temperature threshold that mandates protective measures.

Nearly four in 10 farmworkers are unwilling to file a complaint against their employer for noncompliance in the workplace, mostly out of fear of retaliation or losing their job, according to survey data of California farmworkers conducted by researchers at the University of California Merced Community and Labor Center.

Only four states have adopted outdoor workplace heat-stress standards, and none of them are in the Midwest. California was the first to implement such standards, followed by Oregon, Washington, and Colorado.

This leaves the protection of agricultural workers from heat stress at the discretion of their employers in most states.

OSHA has been working on a heat-stress rule since 2021 that will require employers to provide adequate water and rest breaks for outdoor workers, as well as medical services and training to treat the signs and symptoms of heat-related illnesses. However, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report, this process can take from 15 months to 19 years.

OSHA officials would not comment on the pending federal heat standard.

Last year, the Asuncion Valdivia Heat Stress Injury, Illness, and Death Prevention Act, which would force OSHA to issue a heat standard much faster than the normal process, failed to advance through Congress.

The bill was named in honor of Asuncion Valdivia, who died in 2004 after picking grapes for 10 hours non-stop in 105-degree heat. Valdivia collapsed unconscious and, instead of calling an ambulance, his employer told his son to take his father home. On the way home, he died of heat stroke at 53.

A group of Democratic lawmakers reintroduced the bill last month.

"There is definitely a political decision to be made by members of Congress, in both the House and the Senate, because they have the power to pass legislation to tell OSHA to issue a standard more quickly," said Mayra Reiter, project director of occupational safety and health at the advocacy group Farmworker Justice.

Reiter added that the legislation would also help shield that standard from future legal challenges in court.

As in several recent years, the summer of 2023 has broken records for heat.

In response, President Joe Biden announced new measures to protect workers - including a hazard alert notifying employers and employees of ways to stay safe from extreme heat - as well as steps to improve weather forecasting and make drinking water more accessible.

But farmworker advocacy groups are calling on the administration to speed up OSHA's issuance of a rule protecting workers. They are also pushing for the 2023 farm bill to include farmworker heat protections.

"Farmer organizations and many other worker advocacy groups are hoping that there'll be a federal regulation," Reiter said, "because, going state by state, we have seen that there isn't that urgency to develop these rules."

Long way to a new rule

Creating a new rule to protect workers from heat must overcome several hurdles, from bureaucratic procedures to lobbying industries, including the agricultural industry.

"OSHA is uniquely slow," said Jordan Barab, who served as OSHA's deputy assistant secretary of labor during the Obama administration.

He said the 1970 act that created OSHA imposes many requirements on the rulemaking process. The agency has to determine the current problem and whether the new standard will reduce risk. OSHA must also ensure that the new standard is economically, technically and technologically feasible in all industries.

The road to regulations to protect workers from the heat also has to overcome industry lobbying, including big agricultural and construction groups. One group that has expressed hesitancy to new federal rules is the American Farm Bureau Federation, which has spent on average about $2.3 million on lobbying over the past two years, according to OpenSecrets.

"Considering the variances in agricultural work and climate, (the Farm Bureau) questions whether the department can develop additional heat illness regulations without imposing new, onerous burdens on farmers and ranchers that will lead to economic losses," said Sam Kieffer vice president, public policy at the farm bureau in a statement.

Vulnerable populations

To make a living, Javier Salinas fills 32 sacks of apples each day in Missouri. His daily quota is one ton, or about 3,200 apples. His wife used to walk ten miles a day to harvest fruits and vegetables when she worked in the field.

He said when he gets too hot, he sits in the shade to drink water but feels pressured to keep working due to the method of payment, which depends on the amount harvested.

Strater, with Farmworker Justice, believes that the way farmworkers are paid is one of the main obstacles that must be overcome to ensure their safety because it often incentivizes volume, forcing them to expose themselves to continued work without regard to the signs of a heat-related illness.

Kinsey, the University of Wisconsin professor and the director of a mobile clinic, said the demographic has a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension, and chronic kidney disease.

"Climate stress," he said, "has introduced an additional layer of complexity to these existing challenges."

Seasonal visa workers are especially vulnerable because they depend completely on whoever hires them: from the house they live in to the food they eat.

"You're going to endure as much as you can with the hopes of continuing to provide for your family," Strater said. "The thing is the endpoint for that is death."

In Tama County, Iowa, Dave Hinegardner owns a small farm called Hinegardner's Orchard, where he grows apples, strawberries, corn and soybeans. He sells his crop to supermarkets, farmers' markets, schools, and colleges.

The farmworkers are immigrants from Latin America who reside in the surrounding area, and some of them have been working on his farm for decades. One of the measures he takes during the summer to avoid risks to his workers is to change the work schedules to avoid the hottest part of the day.

"I think they do a much better job when they're treated with respect and taken good care of," he said.


This story is part of a collaborative reporting initiative with Investigate Midwest and is supported by the Joyce Foundation.


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Two coal plants in Arkansas have received an exemption from the Trump administration and will have two additional years to comply with updated clean air regulations.

As part of an amendment to the Clean Air Act, former President Joe Biden required additional limits on mercury, lead, arsenic and other toxins be in place by 2027. President Donald Trump has given 68 coal plants an additional two years to comply.

Tony Mendoza, senior staff attorney for the Sierra Club, said while Trump is within his constitutional rights, the move is perplexing.

"The president is allowed to extend compliance for two years if he finds that the technology to reduce the emissions is not available and there's a national security interest," Mendoza explained. "I don't think allowing these Arkansas plants to emit more mercury into the air is a national security concern."

The exemptions come on the heels of a Trump executive order to boost coal production. The two Arkansas locations are the White Bluff plant between Little Rock and Pine Bluff and the Plum Point plant in Northeast Arkansas. The White Bluff plant is scheduled for retirement in 2029.

Members of the Sierra Club said they will urge plant operators to curb the pollutants coming from the facilities. Mendoza noted research has shown exposure to pollutants is responsible for countless deaths, heart attacks and asthma.

"More mercury in fish, more mercury in water, more advisories against eating fish in certain rivers and streams and lakes," Mendoza outlined. "Mercury is a serious neurotoxin that causes harm to newborn children. Babies are at harm if their mother is exposed to too much mercury."

The Trump administration invited power plants to apply for the exemption. The president also wants to exempt coal mining projects from environmental reviews, remove restrictions stopping companies from mining coal on federal lands and require the Energy Department to provide funds to support developing coal technologies.

The Washington State Pollution Control Hearings Board is ordering state officials to rewrite pollution discharge permit regulations for concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.

The order was issued after a challenge from community and conservation groups, complaining that previous regulations violated state and federal law. The complaint alleged that the state failed to control the discharge of excess nutrients, bacteria and other pollutants from dairy factory farms.

Tyler Lobdell, a staff attorney for Food & Water Watch, said the state must better protect its water, wildlife and communities.

"The state of Washington hasn't been requiring what are called nutrient management plans or the newer pollution prevention plans to be robustly developed by every CAFO," he said, "and they haven't required those plans to be available to the public to make sure they're actually doing what they're supposed to do."

The ruling ordered the state Department of Ecology to require CAFOs to control pollution from animal waste runoff. CAFOs are industrial farming and dairy operations that can generate substantial amounts of animal waste, which must be appropriately managed to prevent water and air pollution.

Lobdell said it's essential that the order stipulates the public's right to review and comment on all regulations before they are issued, noting that the state has a poor track record of protecting waterways from nitrate pollution. He said having the Environmental Protection Agency involved strengthens the process.

"The state of Washington issues a single, combined permit that covers both the Federal Clean Water Act, which is authority delegated by U.S. EPA to Department of Ecology," he said, "but it also covers Washington state law, which is more expansive."

Several conservation groups, including the Waterkeeper Alliance, the Center for Food Safety, Friends of Teppenish Creek and the Sierra Club, participated in filing the complaint. The appellants were represented by the Western Environmental Law Center.


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By Sara Hashemi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Johnson County's long saga with PFAS started in 2022, with an influx of calls to Detective Dana Ames, an environmental crimes investigator for the Texas county located just south of Fort Worth. The calls sounded like "desperate pleas for help from all over the state," Ames says, as residents were suddenly seeing dead animals. "We're getting report after report after report," she recounts, with people telling her, "Yeah, they applied this stuff across the street from us, and our animals are dead." More than two years later, county officials declared a state of disaster, as testing pointed to high levels of PFAS in the county's farmland. PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also dubbed "forever chemicals" because they require much longer spans of time to break down in soils. But in Johnson county, officials attributed these high levels of PFAS to a form of processed waste called biosolids - also known as sewage sludge - that were applied to farms as fertilizer to boost crop fertility.

More than two million dry tons of biosolids were applied to U.S. farmland in 2018, according to a report from a biosolids industry group. Biosolids are sourced from treated sewage - waste flowing from homes and factories, everything from basic manufacturing facilities to slaughterhouse operations. In a press release, county officials characterized the test results as an "immediate threat" - to farms, drinking water and public health.

The process works like this: first, wastewater treatment plants filter out the water from sewage, Christopher Higgins, an environmental chemist at the Colorado School of Mines, tells Sentient. The solids left behind can then be processed and turned into fertilizer. One problem, however, is that so-called forever chemicals do not break down during that process, which means these chemicals travel into soils along with the biosolids.

Johnson County is now at the center of two lawsuits: local farmers are suing the biofertilizer company Synagro Technologies, and, along with the county itself, are also suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Biosolids, Explained

Nearly 4.5 billion pounds of sludge were used in the United States in 2023 alone, applied to farmland or used in compost for gardens and landscaping. The EPA has long promoted agricultural use of sewage sludge as an environmentally friendly way to reuse municipal waste.

Last year, a New York Times investigation revealed that even though the EPA was aware of the potential risks of biosolids since at least 2003, the agency continued to encourage the practice.

The strategy of applying excess waste - whether from livestock operations or city wastewater - is a common one on farms. Fertilizer, whether synthetic or manure, is used to boost yields and enhance crop fertility. But there are other consequences, as the waste and its contaminants don't tend to stay put. In Iowa, for example, fertilizer is so over-applied or misapplied that it ends up contaminating nearby waterways. Manure storage tanks can leak or break down. Dangerous pathogens like E. coli linked to food outbreaks have been traced back to dust particles from manure.

In early January of this year, the EPA released a draft risk assessment that warned of the PFAS contamination that can occur from sewage sludge used as fertilizer. The assessment found that around 31 percent of sewage sludge was used on farms. Any land that has had biosolids applied will have some amount of PFAS, says Higgins, but not necessarily at the levels seen in Johnson County.

Johnson County officials who spoke with Sentient expressed hope the area would receive federal assistance. Yet the Trump administration's moves to slash EPA programs and aid provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could complicate the response, though so far EPA regulators working on biosolids risk do appear to still be employed by the agency.

Other advocates are not so confident about future funding, in part because Texas governor Greg Abbott is a staunch supporter of the president. "I don't have a lot of faith that it will get approved by the governor, but I hope it will," says Kyla Bennett, the director of science policy with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and a former EPA attorney. "I guess we're just going to have to wait and see."

'Shocking to the Conscience'

When Detective Ames first received a complaint in 2022, it was from a rancher seeing fertilizer that had been smoking on a neighboring farm for days. "He was just complaining that it was horrible. He couldn't breathe. It smelled bad," Ames tells Sentient. The smoke had caused the valley where the farmer lived to fill up with smoke.

Ames drove out to the farm and found 12 to 15 large piles of smoking biosolids. She then brought what she learned to her boss, Constable Troy Fuller, and County Commissioner Larry Woolley. From there, Ames launched an investigation that involved calls with scientists, environmentalists and EPA whistleblowers. "It was shocking to the conscience, honestly, what all I learned," she says.

"We tested the well water. We tested soil, we tested the pond water. From animals that were dying, we tested their livers. We tested fish in the ponds," she says. "We had PFAS contamination in everything."

A stillborn calf's liver had over 610,00 parts per trillion (ppt) of PFAS. Fish had 57,000 ppt of PFAS. They found PFAS in a property's well water too, according to Ames.

The levels of PFAS found in Johnson County were unusual - "really, really high," confirms Higgins, a researcher who was not involved in the investigation but reviewed the public test results. He says there could be two reasons for that. Either the farmers applied more biosolids than is typical, or the levels in the sludge were just unusually high to begin with. "It's more likely the latter," he says.

Ames feels an obligation to uncover what happened. "I think we owe our citizens to know what's happening here, to listen, to believe them when they tell us there's something wrong, even though we can't put our finger on it," she recalls telling the commissioners. "And we need to test, because if what I'm reading is accurate and what I'm being told is accurate, we may have a very dangerous contaminant that has been land applied, and that could have a lot of far-reaching consequences."

County and Watchdog Groups Pursue Lawsuits and Legislation

"The more we allow these biosolids to spread, and the more we allow this to continue without cleaning it up, or at least attempting to clean it up, is just sentencing the farmers of Texas to decades of unusable land, inedible meat, milk, fish, dairy," says Bennett, who works for the watchdog group PEER.

PEER is representing Johnson County and other plaintiffs in their case against the EPA, which aims to compel the agency to address the PFAS and biosolids under the Clean Water Act. "It's rendering the farmland useless, and harming the people themselves."

Christopher Boedeker, the county judge who issued the declaration, tells Sentient that one of the primary purposes of the declaration is to work with the state government to pass legislation that addresses and stops the contamination. "We've done all of this out in the daylight with the intent of shining a spotlight on what's going on here," Boedeker says.

"And then the other part of it is, of course, making our citizens who have been impacted eligible for federal aid." The affected farmers in Johnson County have kept their cattle, but are not selling them, and county officials would like to see the farmers compensated.

"I've had, strangely enough, a few negative interactions, and those have all been questions of, well, why didn't you all do more sooner?" says Boedeker. "I feel like that's in some ways validating, that people believe we're doing the right thing here. I think we're doing the right thing here."

The EPA told Sentient it does not comment on ongoing litigation.

"It's really important to recognize that this is not a partisan issue," says Laura Dumais, legal counsel at PEER. "No one wants toxic chemicals in their food. No one wants farmers to be poisoned. Johnson County is a rural, conservative county, and everyone's reaction is: how come the EPA hasn't regulated this."

How to address PFAS under current regulations can quickly get complicated, says Bennett, who is the director of science policy for PEER. "We don't know how widespread the contamination is. We don't know how much it will cost to try to remediate it, or whether it can be remediated. There are a lot of unanswered questions."

Texas lawmaker Helen Kerwin has already filed a bill to require biosolids to be tested for PFAS levels. Other states have already taken steps to restrict their use. Michigan, California and Wisconsin require wastewater treatment plans to test biosolids for PFAS, while Connecticut and Maine have banned the use of biosolids on farmland all together.

If anything, says Higgins, the situation in Johnson County "indicates we need more testing. As an environmental chemist, I would not be disappointed if every single soil farm that had received biosolids over the last 50 years was tested. I think that's not an unreasonable ask."

Ames put it more bluntly: "Stop using our [agricultural] land as the city's toilet."


Sara Hashemi wrote this article for Sentient.


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