This story aired in the 11/04/26 episode of Crosscurrents
Farmworkers are exposed to lots of different kinds of pollution: dust, pesticides, wildfire smoke, and even the diesel pollution from farm working equipment. But right now, understanding where, when, and how bad those exposures might be, is really hard.
In Santa Cruz County, one man is bringing together students, community organizations, and farmworkers, to better understand where and when air pollution poses the biggest threats — and what could be done to make the work safer.
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Story Transcript:
Sound of drone, ascending
REPORTER WENDY REYES: It sounds like we’re inside a bee’s nest.
REPORTER MARY CATHERINE O’CONNOR: But what we’re listening to is a drone. It’s early spring and we’re in the small town of Pajaro, part of the larger Pajaro Valley In Santa Cruz County.
JAVIER GONZALEZ-ROCHA: I'm just sort of paying attention to what the winds are doing.
WENDY: Javier Gonzalez-Rocha, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the pilot. He’s watching a screen on his controller — seeing what the drone sees.
JAVIER: So here you can see we're looking eastward. As you can see down the fields …
MARY CATHERINE: He’s paying attention to something that’s hard to see.
JAVIER: If you look at the horizon, if you look at the mountains, the mountains are always a great backdrop for seeing how hazy the air is.
WENDY: That haze is pretty common. Most people here who work outside, like farm workers, might not even notice it. But the drone does.
MARY CATHERINE: The haze could be carrying dirt kicked up by the wind, industrial emissions or even wildfire smoke. It's pollution. Javier's goal is to figure out when, where, and why farmworkers get exposed to it.
It might not seem hard to know but …
JAVIER: We don't have any sensors, regulatory sensors here within the Pajaro Valley.
How can these measurements inform decision making for farmers? The more information that we have, the better that we can work together.Javier Gonzalez-Rocha
MARY CATHERINE: Regulatory sensors are really fancy air monitors deployed by the government. They’re very accurate, but are designed to track the average air quality across a big area.
WENDY: They don’t capture what’s happening on, say, a farm level. So when a farmworker checks the air quality on their weather app, they might think the air is clear, when in fact, it’s hazardous.
JAVIER: A great portion of our community suffers from asthma.
WENDY: So Javier wondered: how could he help, quickly?
JAVIER: And that's what gave birth to this idea, this is where aerial robotic systems can play a very important role.
MARY CATHERINE: Aerial robotic system is engineer talk for drones. Javier is taking drones into the fields. The fields he used to work as a kid.
WENDY: This research isn’t just a professional interest for Javier. It’s personal. His parents, like many farmworkers, immigrated from Mexico. They worked as strawberry pickers.
JAVIER: My parents would bring us along and they would have us wait in the car while they picked. So that was my very first memory in the fields.
WENDY: And toward the end of middle school, Javier joined them.
JAVIER: I wanted to buy a computer and I asked my parents if they would buy it for me. And so they said they would love to, but they couldn't afford it. But they said, “but you're welcome to come and work and whatever money you earn, you can keep it and invest it in the computer.”
WENDY: Javier was a bright kid. On his block, kids called him “profe”, short for professor, but out in the fields he struggled to keep pace.
JAVIER: They put me with –– in Spanish, the word is “zacatero” –– basically the people that are pulling out weeds that are competing with the strawberries. So I worked with them, they work at a bit slower rate, and that was a beautiful thing because I got so much wisdom from them. And so one of the things that they impressed on me early on was that I had a unique opportunity in this country to seek education and to take advantage of that.
MARY CATHERINE: From Pajaro, we head to Watsonville, where Javier lives.
LILIANA GONZÁLEZ-AGUILAR: Buenas tardes. Ah, mi nombre es Liliana González Aguilar. Soy hermana de Javier.
WENDY: That’s Javier’s sister, Liliana.
MARIA GONZÁLEZ-ROCHA: Buenas tardes, soy María Guadalupe Rocha y soy madre de Javier.
WENDY: And his mom, Maria.
MARY CATHERINE: They live just down the street. We all sit around the dining room table. Javier’s mom says he seemed destined for academia from childhood.
WENDY: He would take things apart –– radios, blenders –– just to see how they worked. But putting them back together? That was harder.
MARY CATHERINE: But he faced bigger challenges at school....Javier’s high school counselor actually advised him to aim for vocational school, not a four-year college. But Liliana says her brother just turned that into another problem to try and fix.
LILIANA: Más que presentarse como una barrera, como que le, le dio, no sé, le, le dio lo que necesitaba para decir, "No, no, no, le voy a echar las ganas.”
TRANSLATION: More than presenting itself as a barrier, it gave him what he needed to say “No, I’m going to give it my all and I will prove that person wrong.”
MARY CATHERINE: And he did. He studied mechanical engineering at California State University in Sacramento, then on to Virginia Tech for his PhD.
WENDY: Then onto UC Santa Cruz, where we visit him and his team.
SANKRITYA ANAND RAI: Well, Welcome to UCSC.
MARY CATHERINE: As we make our way to Javier’s lab on campus, we meet Sankritya Anand Rai, or Sankie for short. He’s one of the graduate students working with Javier on air quality monitoring.
SANKIE: Right. Come on in. He [Javier] is really the boss.
JAVIER: No, no, he’s too nice.
MARY CATHERINE: Oh man, there’s a lot of buzzing in this room.
JAVIER: Yeah, it's really alive.
MARY CATHERINE: The lab is filled with all sorts of drones, work benches, buzzing tools, and whirling fans. It’s noisy. And it’s kinda messy in here.
JAVIER: My mom wouldn't approve of this.
WENDY: Javier is studying the atmosphere, and Sankie is helping build the tools to measure it.
SANKIE: With the drones, the opportunities, we can do even greater granular sensing. So instead of having these stationary fixed points, you could cover a much larger area.
MARY CATHERINE: The thing about a drone is, it only collects data when someone is flying it. So to get more air quality data, Javier worked with locals to mount low-cost outdoor sensors in different places around town …
JAVIER: … Residents that are maybe closer to the forest just to see about, you know, across the different environments, what are the differences that we see?
MARY CATHERINE: And that matters in agricultural communities, where pollution levels vary from place to place. So the team is also developing sensors that can be deployed without Wi-Fi — because Wi-Fi access on farms is usually difficult or impossible.
SANKIE: As Javier mentioned, the idea is really to bridge the gap in places that don't have Wi-Fi to do air quality monitoring.
MARY CATHERINE: For Sankie, this work hits close to home. He grew up in India, where air pollution was part of everyday life.
SANKIE: We've had air quality advisories where even before COVID you've had to go to school with an N95 mask.
WENDY: He says that experience shaped the way he thinks about air pollution here in California.
SANKIE: Air quality, just like all kinds of pollution, has a way of finding its way to communities that can least afford it. And we want to try and change that.
WENDY: Together, Javier and Sankie are trying to make something that communities can actually use: that’s information about the air they're breathing.
MARY CATHERINE: And one way they’re doing that now, is by taking the data to farm workers — some of whom we visit next.
Sound of people greeting each other
MARY CATHERINE: There’s a squat, cinderblock building, amid industrial sites on Pajaro’s main drag. That’s where we find Casa de la Cultura, a nonprofit community center that supports farmworkers.
Inside, Javier is about to lead a workshop with a room of about 20 mostly Spanish-speaking locals. Everyone greets each other as they take their seats.
JAVIER: Hoy les quería presentar algunos datos…
TRANSLATION: Today I wanted to present some data from the information we have gathered.
MARY CATHERINE: Javier stands in the front of the room and points to his slides. One pollution source he’s tracking is smoke from wildfires and even prescribed burns.
JAVIER: Una es de que sí, estos incendios son positivos en el sentido de que ayudan a controlar la maleza …
WENDY: Javier tells the room, “One thing is that these prescribed fires are positive because they help control vegetation. But second, they are having an impact on the air we breathe while we are working.”
MARY CATHERINE: Then he points to a set of graphs on the monitor. He shares what his team has uncovered.
JAVIER: Estas barras abajo nos están hablando de la temperatura. Entonces, justo cuando la temperatura estuvo más baja …
TRANSLATION: These bars at the bottom show the temperature. We observed that the concentrations spiked precisely when the temperature was at its lowest. So, there is a link between the cold and pollution.
MARY CATHERINE: In other words, pollutants are concentrated close to the ground when it’s cool out, first thing in the morning … right when farm workers start their shifts.
So then he turns to the folks in the room.
JAVIER: Qué podríamos hacer para no respirar esta contaminación?
WENDY: He asks: “What could we do to avoid breathing this pollution?”
ATTENDEE: Tener muchos dólares. (Laughter)
ANOTHER ATTENDEE: Quedarse en la cama.
WENDY: The first responses are light-hearted: If they had lots of money, or if they could just stay in bed and not go to work, then they could avoid the smoke. But of course, they’re kidding.
MARY CATHERINE: The suggestions quickly become more pragmatic. At home, they could use air purifiers. Keep windows closed. But what about staying safe at work? For that, Javier has an idea:
JAVIER: Qué tal si pudiéramos hacer, tomar una decisión en junta y decir, por ejemplo, comenzar un poquito más tarde?
TRANSLATION: What if we could make a decision in a meeting, say, for example, to start a little later?
MARY CATHERINE: It sounds reasonable. Some people nod. But of course, what time they start work is not up to them. An attendee asks Javier:
ATTENDEE: Ustedes pueden compartir esta información con los empresas y los growers de esta área?
TRANSLATION: Can you share this information with the companies and growers in this area?
MARY CATHERINE: These questions reveal something larger. Safety at work is normally out of the hands of the workers. California does have strict workplace safety laws that farm owners are supposed to abide by, but the enforcement agencies are understaffed and can’t reach every field.WENDY: So farmworking is still one of the most hazardous jobs in the state. That’s why Javier is sharing this information with workers, so they can advocate for themselves … and each other.
Javier lecturing in the background fades
JAVIER: Esto lo estamos haciendo en junta, no solo yo, no solo Eloy.
ATTENDEE: Somos todos.
JAVIER: Somos todos.
WENDY: Javier says, “We’re doing this together. It’s going to take all of us.”
JAVIER: Muy bien. Muchas gracias.
Applause
MARY CATHERINE: And with that, Javier wraps up his presentation for the evening.
Sound of leaving the cultural center
WENDY: Outside, I can feel the heat radiating off the building. It’s a record breaking spring heatwave. Jesus Padilla is behind a large van, trying to stand in its shade. He's lived in Pajaro for over 30 years and has picked strawberries for just as long. I ask him what he thinks of Javier’s suggestion. What if work started later, to avoid early-morning pollution spikes? That, he explains, would bring its own challenges.
MARY CATHERINE: The later he works, the hotter the day gets. It changes how much work there is to do.
JESUS PADILLA: Digamos, esta semana hemos trabajado nomás cuatro horas, cinco horas por la calor ...
TRANSLATION: Like this week, for example, we've only worked four or five hours because the heat won't allow us to keep going. At the end of the week, our paycheck is smaller.
MARY CATHERINE: For someone living paycheck to paycheck, losing even a few hours can have an immediate impact.
JESUS: Porque especialmente la renta es muy cara. Y si se atrasa uno o dos días …
TRANSLATION: The rent is so high. And if you fall behind by a day or two, your paycheck is cut.
MARY CATHERINE: And here’s the thing. Air pollution and heat can hurt a lot more than just your income. Combined, they can trigger fatal illnesses like heart failure. Heat makes your body work harder, pollutants strain your system. In recent years, heat illness may have contributed to nearly 100 farmworker deaths in the state. And yet, all of us rely on this work in order to eat.
Birdsong, then drone sounds
WENDY: A few months later, we reunite with Javier –– and his drone –– on a farm in Watsonville. He’s reckoning with what his research has uncovered.
MARY CATHERINE: He acknowledges that his finding that cool temperatures overnight tend to force polluted air down, close to the ground, is basically bad news.
WENDY: He’s heard that from farmworkers directly. They ask him: what am I supposed to do with this information?
JAVIER: It's not very helpful to know that the air quality is not good and then at the same time there isn't any meaningful policy to supplement the money that I'd be making otherwise if I decide to stop and safeguard my health.
MARY CATHERINE: He recognizes this is a deep systemic issue. His drone can’t fix everything, but science and technology are the languages he speaks. They represent the path he took out of the fields, and they’re how he wants to give back to the community that raised him.
JAVIER: So we're here at Esperanza Farms on the west side of the city of Watsonville and we're at this beautiful place where farmland are connecting with wetlands.
WENDY: Esperanza Farms is a nonprofit that supports small organic farmers. He’s doing research here, but hopes to move onto bigger commercial farms soon.
JAVIER: So today, we’re going to take measurements, we have a system that's going to carry a temperature pressure and relative humidity sensor.
MARY CATHERINE: Javier is thinking toward the future … how can he use drones that don’t just measure air quality but give info that farmers need for growing crops. That way he could marry workplace safety …
WENDY: … Like shifting work schedules to avoid bad air …
MARY CATHERINE: … With increased productivity …
WENDY: … Like better understanding soil or plant health with drone-based sensors.
JAVIER: How can these measurements inform decision making for farmers? The more information that we have, the better that we can work together.
Drone descends and powers down
MARY CATHERINE: The drone comes down. Javier checks the data and another flight is finished. Another set of measurements. Another small piece of a much bigger picture.
Javier Gonzalez-Rocha and his team are continuing their research into air quality, including a deeper look into how smoke from wildfires and prescribed burns impacts agricultural communities.
