American farmworkers die 20+ years earlier than everybody else
The Brutal Reality
My friend Rishi Pethe recently wrote a LinkedIn post about the shockingly low life expectancy of American farmworkers. Rishi points out that the average life expectancy for American farmworkers is 49 years old.
The information that Rishi shared is directionally useful and true-ish. It is not, however, without a few flaws, worth clarifying.
That data is coming from a Bugarin & Lopez’s “Farm workers in California,” a 1998 California Research Bureau study. It was then popularized by a comprehensive literature review by Hansen & Donohue, “Health issues of migrant and seasonal farmworkers,” published in 2003. The data for that 1998 study was pulled from NAWS. I can’t find the original 1998 paper online, so I can’t easily review its methodology.
I did a little bit more research on demographics to provide myself with some context. In 1998, the average American life expectancy was 76.7 years. The latest official US life expectancy data is from 2023 and has us living an average of 78.4 years.
The average life expectancy for Americans living in poverty in 2023 is ~65 years - ~10 years lower than the overall average, but still ~10-15 years higher than that of farmworkers.
Career choices (barring adrenaline junkie extreme sports) should not have that kind of impact on life expectancy.
Why Life Expectancy is so Low
1. Workplace dangers. Agricultural workers (farmers and farmworkers) have one of the highest workplace fatality rates, at 18.6 deaths/100,000 workers compared to 3.7/100,000 workers for all US industries – a 6x difference. The causes change a bit when you separate out farm owners and farmworkers.Tarmers generally die more in equipment related injuries—flipped tractors, thresher malfunctions, grain bin drowning, etc.—and they also generally face much higher risks after age 55. Farmworkers are much more susceptible to heat exposure and pesticide exposure; heat stroke surpassed pesticides decades ago. Rishi covered this point pretty well, too.
2. Lack of health care access. Estimates vary; farmworker data is really difficult to track given the concentration of undocumented people. Various studies show that between 33-65% of farmworkers are uninsured, about 4-7x the national average rate of uninsurance.
3. High infant (and maternal) mortality rates. Farmworkers’ children suffer from 2x the average infant mortality. I wouldn’t assume that this data would be factored into the study for life expectancy, but I don’t have access to the full study, so I don’t know for sure.
Farmworker maternal mortality rates have not, to the best of my knowledge, been formally studied, but it is very reasonable to hypothesize that they’re unusually high. There’s been some research done on Florida farmworkers and birth defects related to chemical exposure.
4. Poverty. All of the negative health implications of enduring extreme stress in order to gain access to basic necessities like safe shelter, nutritional food, and clean water take a huge toll on farmworkers.
5. Lack of citizenship. Again, data on farmworker populations is difficult to assess. NAWS (DOL) estimates that 40-42% of farmworkers are undocumented. That is almost certainly a significant underestimate. America’s court system generally serves to protect civil liberties for American citizens, perhaps most importantly, freedom of speech and freedom to organize. But these liberties don’t extend to folks who lack citizenship, and farmworkers, even those with legal status, are frequently unaware of all of their rights. This has implications for farmworker life expectancy because it forces folks to live under high stress, and it makes it dangerous for farmworkers to advocate for themselves in the workplace.
6. Suicide. Agricultural workers commit suicide at about 1.3x the rate of the general population. This actually impacts farm owners at a slightly higher rate than farmworkers, but it’s worth mentioning.
New Conditions Making it Worse
Reading about those drivers should make you feel pretty awful about the human toll of our agricultural system. Now I’m going to share some hypotheses that are going to make you feel even worse.
1. Women’s healthcare. Access to reproductive healthcare in rural America is terrible, and it’s only going to get worse. I’m talking about abortion, because access to abortion saves lives. This is obviously a very political, religious, and emotionally fraught topic, and it is objectively true that maternal healthcare suffers when doctors are constrained in what actions they can take.
It is also objectively true that female farmworkers experience sexual harassment and assault at elevated rates. There really aren’t many things that make me angrier than this reality, because I’ve had it happen on my watch, on farm operations for which I bore responsibility. The only reason I knew anything about those incidents is because a) it happened to white women and b) we were a very rare farm operation with women owners. I still lose sleep thinking about the shit that probably happened to the Mexican women working for us on our properties that we’ll never know about.
Sexual assault can obviously lead to unwanted pregnancies. Pregnant women are particularly susceptible to heat related risks. Farmworkers don’t get paid parental leave so there is financial pressure to work as far into a pregnancy as possible, increasing health risks for women.
2. Heat. Climate change is making extreme heat more frequent, increasing the risk of heat-related illness and death. It’s also making weed pressure worse in many regions, and, coupled with herbicide resistance, there’s increased pressure to use more manual labor and to use bigger, badder chemicals.
3. Pesticides. If the MAHA agenda follows through on its plan to arbitrarily ban certain inputs, there is a real risk that we increase the usage of more dangerous chemicals, driving the pesticide exposure risks back up.
4. Air quality. We’re not talking about this one enough. Heat generally makes poor air quality worse, for longer. At various times during fire season during slow news cycles, someone will publish something about the fact that the smoke is impacting wine grapes, and also farmworkers. In the Southwest US, there’s a soil borne fungal infection referred to as Valley Fever. Shust, short for “shit dust” is a consequence of dried manure in cattle feedlots, and it’s not good to breath in.
5. ICE. The aggressive, chaotic, inhumane approach that current DHS leadership is taking to deport undocumented folks is terrifying. People are afraid to go to work, let alone go to the doctor, the dentist, the pharmacy, grocery store, church, food pantry…the list goes on. The workplace raids, and the threats of workplace raids, are putting huge stressors on farmworkers, affecting mental health, and sense of security for millions of people who we depend on for our food security.
Things we can do to solve this problem.
Honestly, as individuals, there’s not much to do. But we can all be politically engaged around this issue. All of these factors are largely dependent on policy. We the people should have some amount of power in a democracy. Pick issues apart (don’t pick people apart!) and speak up for what you believe in. These issues that impact farmworkers and rural people aren’t on the front burner of most peoples’ minds. Remind your friends and your representatives to think about it and prioritize it, because farmworkers deserve better.
Even if the humanity of the thing doesn’t move you, if you want to be able to walk into the supermarket and buy fresh, American-grown food, you’d best say something, because we need people to want to engage in farming, or we’ll lose our farms and access to affordable food.