Romaine Lettuce Harvest

by Robert Bales

Title

Romaine Lettuce Harvest

Artist

Robert Bales

Medium

Photograph - Photo

Description

Unless you are a homesteader, a Sunbelt resident who eats only food from your local farmers market, or an extremely devout carnivore, you have almost certainly eaten lettuce from Yuma, Arizona, a city of 93,000 at the nexus of Arizona, California and Mexico. The Yuma area, including the Imperial Valley across the California border, produces about 90 percent of all the leafy vegetables grown in the United States from November to March, when it is too cold to grow produce in most of the rest of the country.
Six days a week, about 45,000 farm laborers many of them legal guest workers who commute across the border into Yuma every day harvest, trim and pack lettuce in crews ranging from two to 30 people.
The laborers work through the fields, accompanied by workstations attached to trailers. Sometimes, as in the following picture, they willll work in teams of two, with one person (usually male) picking the heads of lettuce and then passing them to another person (often female), who trims them.
Huge trucks stand at the ready to take lettuce away. At the height of the vegetable season, one grower told me, 1,000 trucks, each carrying about 1,000 boxes of produce destined for grocery stores and restaurants from Seattle to Miami, leave Yuma every night.

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December 13th, 2016

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