Farmworkers

As food production in the United States has grown increasingly industrialized, the consolidation of small family farms into larger, and often vertically integrated, farming operations has become more commonplace. Since the end of World War II, these consolidation and industrialization processes have been spurred by a growing presence of large-scale agricultural corporations that now dominate the majority of food production in the United States and abroad. Alongside this consolidation, hiring laborers from off the farm has become the primary strategy of meeting [Page 472]the production needs of farming operations where labor needs exceed labor availability. Farmworkers labor in nearly all sectors and scales of the food system, from the smallest family farms to the largest corporate food operations, from diversified farms to enormous dairy operations. ...