Why is picking food still so dangerous?

"Her son Andy joined her when he turned 13.

'She needed help to pay for food,' Andy recalled.

But in the summer of 2021, things changed for Abalos. That year, a heat wave swept across the Pacific Northwest. Temperatures hit triple digits for weeks on end.

'He was so little,' Abalos said in Spanish. 'I no longer wanted to take him when we started to go in at 3 a.m. because it was very dangerous. We would run into snakes, other animals and we pick blindly because they gave us a little lamp and we barely see our hands.'

Due to the heat, the harvest times got earlier. Picking berries in the hot sun is a danger to both the fruit and the workers."

~ Ximena Bustillo & Andrea Hsu

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/10/1185766013/farm-workers-extreme-heat-protection-farmers-safety