Every so often I will drive by farmworkers toiling in the fields near my home in Davis, a town in rural Yolo County, California. Even in the middle of the summer, everyone will be covered from head to toe in long-sleeved shirts, khaki work pants or blue jeans, wide-brimmed hats, and work boots. It’s always a colorful scene. Cars of different shades, glinting in the sun, lined up along the dirt road running past the field. The faded reds, greens, blues, and browns of old work clothes. Rows of green crops, sunshine pouring down from a powdery blue sky, a line of rolling brown hills on the horizon.

When I saw several months ago that the Yolo Food Bank was looking for volunteers to do some harvesting, I signed up. I respected the work the food bank did, and I was curious about what went on in the fields of California’s Central Valley. In the back of my mind, too, were articles I’d read about how very few native-born Americans signed up to do farm work nowadays—and how those who did would quit right away. The articles would make shocking claims: Just a handful of the hundreds of Americans who apply for farm jobs in North Carolina last the season. A California grape farmer raised his average wage to $20 an hour, but his U.S.-born workers kept quitting: “We’ve never had one come back after lunch.” An Alabama tomato farmer said that in twenty-five years of farming, he could “count on my hand the number of Americans that stuck.” Was it true that migrant laborers were taking jobs that locals could be doing? Or was the work just too hard to attract Americans raised in relative privilege? I wanted to see for myself what harvesting was like.

From the outset, I knew that it’d be a stretch to compare what I’d be doing to what full-time agricultural workers do. It was true that the crops would be similar to what the Central Valley’s farmworkers regularly harvest. In April, we started with asparagus, beets, zucchini, butternut squash, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. We moved to melons, sweet and hot peppers, corn, eggplants, and apricots in the summer, and then finished with watermelons and pumpkins in the fall. Our methods were also pretty much like those of the professionals—hacking beets, cabbages, and cauliflower off their thick stems with big knives, twisting other crops off their thinner stems, plucking fruit off trees.

Yet the length and intensity of my workday were nothing like the real thing. From April until the end of the season, I did two-hour shifts once or twice a week. The average full-time fruit and vegetable harvester works forty-four hours a week, earning $13.25 an hour, according to a 2017–18 federal survey. I did my work early in the morning. The only time the California heat really bothered me was on a day the afternoon high was forecast for 105 degrees, with a thick dust that clung wet on my skin (Aliyah, our food bank supervisor, called off work early that day). Real farmworkers work through the heat: last summer, two crop workers died in the heat wave that struck Washington and Oregon, two states that are normally more temperate.

I found that vegetable harvesting itself was easy, a matter of just removing the vegetables from their stems. A few hacks with the knife or a twist of a stem did the trick. But the constant bending down and straightening up that the job requires takes a toll. And lifting and carrying the buckets and sacks of produce to the trucks—especially dense vegetables like beets, cabbage, cauliflower, and butternut squash—was another story. Those buckets were flat-out heavy, and I found myself slowing near the end of the two hours when the heat and humidity started to build. Harvesting apricots was surprisingly demanding as well, not just because it got tiring carrying around giant sacks full of apricots strapped to your chest, but because reaching up to pick the fruit with that sack dragging from your shoulders was literally a pain in the neck. Once, I tripped over a grassy furrow with a sack of apricots hanging from my chest, falling flat on my face.

I learned that the hardest fruits to harvest are watermelons and pumpkins. With cauliflower or cabbages, you can toss a head or two out of a bucket to lighten the load. With these larger fruits, you’ve got to pick up the whole thing and carry it to the truck. As one fellow worker growled to me when we started in on the watermelons, “Use your legs.” I’ve always done that, of course. But imagine lifting one of those monsters, getting its weight centered in the middle of your torso, and then stumbling through a tangle of ankle-grabbing vines to the truck.

One morning, I was twisting off watermelons for only a few minutes when I strained my lower back. I had to take two weeks off from volunteering while I recovered. The National Center for Farmworker Health notes that agricultural workers often experience musculoskeletal injuries because of the constant bending and twisting while carrying heavy items.

Wildfires in the mountains east and west of the Central Valley cast a pall of smoke over the valley almost every summer and fall now. One morning, I was driving to a harvest site outside Knights Landing, a rural farming community, when I noticed a layer of brownish smoke hanging above the horizon toward the coast. Toward the end of our shift, clouds of tiny white flies began drifting up from rotted eggplants. I started coughing and couldn’t stop. “Swallow some flies?” Aliyah asked.

“Could you get me a bottle of water?” I asked, choking.

After a few swigs of water, the coughing subsided. It wasn’t the flies. It was the dust—always present in the valley during the summer, but probably worse that morning because it was mixed with smoke. When I stopped to think about it later, I couldn’t help but obsess about whether I’d also gulped down a toxic mouthful of the pesticides that drift, like dust and smoke, across the valley’s fields—an unavoidable occupational hazard for many farmworkers.

The other volunteers I worked with were usually an equal mix of men and women, ranging in age from twentysomethings to retirees. They were almost always Anglo, sometimes with one or two Asian Americans. Yet the people who work full-time in the fields are mostly foreign-born: according to federal data, 67 percent of U.S. farmworkers were born in Mexico or Central America.

One prominent economist has argued that if farms would just pay more, U.S.-born workers would flock to the fields. “Believe me, if the wages were really, really high, you and I would be lining up,” George Borjas, a professor of economics and social policy at Harvard University, told the Los Angeles Times. (In the same article, Philip Martin, an economist at the University of California, Davis, predicted that farmers would start automating their labor “well before we got to $25” an hour in wages.) For their part, an expert panel appointed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reviewed the existing data and concluded in a 2017 report that there was “little evidence” that immigration reduces overall employment for native-born workers.

My volunteer experience was nothing compared to the work that genuine farmworkers do, but it was enough to help me understand why many U.S.-born workers don’t last long in the fields. I remember spotting a group of field laborers on my way to one of the food bank’s harvest sites. It was a little after 6:30 a.m., and a couple of them were standing together, talking, looking down at a furrow and sizing things up. Others were already bent over crops, hands at work, harvesting. And a few men were walking over to a battered white pickup truck. I noticed how the men walked slowly, with measured steps, as if pacing themselves for the day ahead. Now I know why.

Paul Michelson Paul Michelson lives and writes in Davis, California.