We are at the end of Sayres Neck Road.

This is all bell pepper.

Around here it was asparagus up to last year and we took the asparagus out, which had been in there for 15 years and we took it out and planted pepper.

If we didn't have the Mexican harvesters, we'd have to grow crops that were machine harvested.

Sweet corn can be machine harvested.

It's a really expensive machine, but then it would have to be packed inside.

There's very few born and raised people in this country that would do that.

When I was a kid, we did it.

But no, no more.

So if we didn't have the imported labor, we couldn't do what we do.

In the summer when it's 100, 102, we try to start them as early as we can in the morning and get them done by noon so that they don't not out in the worst part of the heat in the day.

My husband and I started working with farmworkers in 1982 during the summers of our of medical school.

So I've been working with farmworkers in federally qualified health centers and then also in my own private practice since the early eighties.

CORN Because it stands up so high that there's not a breeze running through there.

So it gets really, really hot in there.

In the peppers.

They have to lean over it.

So there's a lot of squatting and cucumbers where all our cucumbers now are on stakes, but not quite as high as the corn.

But so that's a little easier.

But you still have to search for the cubes.

So it's it's it's all hard.

So I had five patients that I know of that died of heat stress or heat stroke.

Heat stress is a preventable illness.

If they wear their hats and they drink the water and the farm provide shade for them and provides them a break in the middle of day, it's a preventable illness and it was just really sad when people died of heat.

People didn't usually complain to me about heat.

It was one of the known factors of the kind of work that they were doing, and they wouldn't come to me with that as a complaint.

They would come to me with their blood pressure, their rash or their back pain, and I would always bring heat into the conversation because I wanted to prevent them from having trouble down the road.

But that wasn't usually their complaint.

Definitely after years of being hotter than normal.

But we we have an ice machine at the packing house, so the guys put ice in all their water cans, so and they go get it anytime they need it.

And if they need to stop earlier in the day, the guys will say, so the crew falls right out there with them.

They're not anywhere else.

We bought various farms over the years and they had migrant labor housing on them.

A lot of it was concrete block construction and it was built 50, 60 years ago.

So it was what it was.

You know, it's concrete block can be cooler because that is what it is.

But then we decided in the 2000s that we want to start building modern camps, and they're all air conditioning.

They've got satellite TV, they've got washers and dryers in the place.

So, you know, we tried to make it good for them.

The housing is really important because they have to be able to rest and rehydrate at night.

But that's not when they die.

People are going to have more and more issues from heat because we need to eat, we need to grow food, they need to work and we need to figure out how to work within the limits that that the heat, extra heat is is causing.

We have to be more cognizant.

We have to educate them better.

We have to provide water in the fields.

We have to give them breaks.

Yeah, I'm concerned.