Building Power Among Farmworkers

In 1996, the Farmworker Association of Florida created the Lake Apopka Project to address the issues of the impact to farmworkers of the (at that time proposed) buy-out of the vegetable farms on the north shore of Lake Apopka.  Initially, the FWAF project opposed the state’s attempt to buy out the farms, stating that the public overall would be better served by implementing measures to transition the farms towards sustainable agricultural practices, rather than just paying farmers to leave the area and go other places to farm.   However, the momentum to stop agriculture on Lake Apopka was great, and between 1996 and 1998, the St. Johns River Water Management District negotiated contracts to buy the majority of the farms that made up the Zellwood Drainage District of farmers on the lake’s north shore. 

At the end of May, 1998, over 50 years of farming on Lake Apopka came to a halt forever.  In the wake of the closing of the farms, close to 3000 farmworkers found themselves with no jobs to go back to, and those that had lived in the labor camps found themselves with no seasonal homes.  In the winter of 1998-99, the former farmland was unseasonably flooded, attracting thousands of migrating water birds to the area and resulting in the largest Audubon Christmas Bird Count ever on the lake.  However, the excitement was short-lived, when the birds began dying at alarming numbers.  Eventually, the bird deaths, which totaled close to 1000, were linked to a very toxic pesticide, toxaphene, that had been banned decades previously.  Hence, the farmworkers’ concerns shifted from jobs and housing to health and safety. 

Farmworkers had been exposed for decades, even generations, to the same chemicals that killed the birds and that years before had been implicated in alligator reproductive problems and anomalies in Lake Apopka.  The class of chemicals, known as organochlorine pesticides, are now known to be endocrine disrupters and persistent organic pollutants.  Scientific studies are discovering the chronic human health impacts of these types of chemicals. 

To learn more about this issue, check out the report, the videos and the news articles to learn more about this issue.  And, check out the Lake Apopka Farmworker Memorial Quilt Blog Here.