When Hurricanes Helene and Milton blew through the South in the middle of hurricane season, it was clear that despite past hurricanes carving paths through the region, this time would be different. This was true for so many people and communities that stood in the path of destruction—especially farmworkers. The flooding of fields with debris and stormwater would mean a loss of jobs for many farmworkers who had their season cut short. The damage was severe.

"Roofs were deposited into growers' fields all of a sudden," said Marianne Martinez, executive director of Vecinos, an organization that provides medical care to low-income farmworkers in Western North Carolina—an area that sustained a lot of damage from Helene. Martinez estimates that thousands of acres of land were damaged. 

An H-2A visa is a seasonal, temporary visa that more than 150,000 people have used in 2024, according to data from the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services. North Carolina is the fifth largest state that utilizes the H-2A program, outpaced only by agriculture giants like Florida and California. North Carolina farmworkers on an H-2A visa had their visas extended to work on the dangerous cleanup of damaged fields after Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Farm owners all over the South needed urgent help with clean-up; the arrangement made sense. But Martinez still has her concerns. 

"These are dangerous situations when you're cleaning up fields. It's a major focus for an entire region right now; how to use a chainsaw, how to safely clean up your yard, all of those kinds of things," said Martinez. "But it is very different for farmworkers because they're working on thousands of acres, trying to clean up all of these things. It's just the crew."

She said that she's heard from non-visa workers who were happy to switch roles and assist with clean-up, but in an industry that puts housing, immigration status, and working conditions of employees all entirely in the hands of the employer, the scale is tipped towards the exploitation of immigrant labor most times. 

But it gets even more complicated. "This impacts their future employment too. If they don't have a field to come to, they may not be able to renew their visa for the next year," said Martinez. 

Hundreds of miles away, farmworkers are reckoning with the very same things in Central Florida, according to Dominique O'Connor, a climate justice organizer at Farmworker Association of Florida. 

In a nearby plant nursery, "there were some concerns with farmworkers not having the proper gear to be able to protect themselves, working in flooded conditions that are probably contaminated with toxic chemicals like pesticides and other agrochemicals," said O'Connor. 

Pesticides can cause a number of problems, even when administered correctly, and the combination of unknown contaminants from floodwaters and debris with known toxic chemicals kept on farms could be even more detrimental. 

A Futuro Media, Center for Public Integrity, and Columbia Journalism School investigation found that in general, the disaster recovery and cleanup crews post-climate disasters are disproportionately made up of immigrants and often receive little if any formal training about how to handle any toxins they might come into contact with. Most workers have encountered either mold, asbestos, or lead on the job. 

"We've also heard from one of our partners that people are being recruited for the cleanup in the Tampa area, so they're being brought over from down South and other places, and [they are] not properly trained, not paid well, and not given protective equipment," said O'Connor. 

A post-disaster rush job with workers who didn't volunteer for cleanup jobs could also mean that farmworkers are being exposed to unknown contaminants. A continuous issue for nonprofits and community organizations that work with H-2A workers is the seasonal nature of the work. 

"H-2A workers go back to Mexico or Honduras or Guatemala, and you don't know what kind of health effects they have in their home country," said Jeannie Economos, Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Program Coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida. 

Another more urgent issue for farmworkers is housing that is in shambles. "It is hard when you are left with no home and electricity, with your children," Angelica Garcia, the wife of a farmworker, told Stateline. Garcia and her husband had built makeshift housing from salvaged materials when Helene tore through Georgia. 

Martinez told Scalawag that the damage caused to housing repeatedly by hurricanes has long been an issue. "We've had really impactful hurricanes several times, over the past couple of years, and they've caused extreme flooding in areas where our migrant farm workers, in particular, live in western North Carolina." 

She noted that there's an abundance of cheaply built housing in the area, often located in floodplains. Farmworkers across the country often live in mobile homes, which are disproportionately located in floodplains due to discriminatory zoning laws that keep mobile homes out of sight and out of mind from wealthier neighbors. Reporting from NPR shows that, before Helene, the North Carolina Home Builders Association resisted stricter codes for decades. Mandates that might have saved lives.

Mobile homes can often be deadly during high wind events, like Hurricanes, but in states like Florida or Texas, where anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy come from the top, it can be frightening for workers to go anywhere but home. 

"Anti-immigrant policies create a level of fear among the farmworker community," said Miranda Carver Martin, a researcher at the University of Florida and University of Illinois Chicago. "We heard time and time again about stories of farm workers who stayed home in their mobile homes and didn't go and access shelter because they were afraid of negative encounters with authorities."

Something as simple as translating hurricane warning materials into different languages could help immensely. As Martin points out, it's not just Spanish, but also Haitian Creole as well as various Indigenous languages like Mixtec and Q'anjob'al that immigrant farmworkers are speaking. Other solutions are more far-reaching, like overhauling our immigration system to ensure that the people who pick our food and feed the country can access the same post-disaster emergency services as everyone else. 

Martin's research, along with co-authors Amr Abd-Elrahman and Paul Monaghan,  investigated how being alienated by language and living in poor housing can increase social vulnerability to things like hurricanes. A disaster response that prioritizes English-speaking citizens often means that farmworkers fall between the cracks and community organizations have to step in.

Personally, though, Martin is concerned about how everyday people in the U.S. take farmworkers for granted. "As a society, those of us who aren't observing the realities of farm labor every day, we're eating the food and we don't necessarily understand what has taken place in order for it to reach us," said Martin. 

"I think we need to be better aware of how essential farm workers are and recognize the dangers that they're facing to feed us."

Siri Chilukuri is a freelance journalist who writes about environmental justice, climate change, and culture. Her work has been published in Mother Jones, Grist, Mashable, Teen Vogue, and The Guardian. You can find her on Bluesky @siric.bsky.social.