‘An impossible choice’: farmworkers pick a paycheck over health despite smoke-filled air

Workers who pick our fruits and vegetables are out in the field through wildfire, pandemic, drought or storm, putting their health in jeopardy

The strawberries that Juan Reyes hand-picked had turned gray from the ash falling from the sky, yet nobody provided him and his fellow farmworkers with any protective face coverings until the next day.

As hundreds of fires burn across California, blanketing swaths of the state in smoke so thick that it muted the sun, low-wage farmworkers continued to toil in the fields, working through grueling conditions, now made even worse by the air quality.