Growing up in the Midwest I know a little bit about farming; my dad rents out 110 acres of arable land to the local family farming operation near Argyle, Wisconsin. I know that farmer’s work long, hard hours. I also know that farmhands don’t get paid well, and the dirtiest and toughest jobs are done by those lowest on the totem pole. The Flannery’s (the family that farms my dad’s land) are a close-knit group, and most of the family is involved somehow in the operation. I think they have one farm hand, though I can’t attest to which jobs he does. They do not employ migrant farmworkers, in fact I am not entirely sure anybody in the area does, probably because of the short growing season.

Coming into this studio, I would put my knowledge of the migrant farmworker world somewhere about a 1.3 out of 10. I know they exist, and are often almost always the reason I can afford to eat food instead of pieces of graphite from the DuckStore. That’s about it.

After reading the bit about migrant farmworkers in the CQ Researcher, I feel like I have a better understanding of the arrangements… maybe I’d bump up my knowledge to a (tentative) 3. What struck me about the current situation as something architecture can alleviate, is the health of the farmworker family. The constant exposure to pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers, all with their pores wide open due to excessive sweating, is staggering. While, as architects, we can’t do much to change the situation in the fields, it is imperative that those chemicals be kept out of the living spaces, away from things like the couch, dinner, and children. Fresh air and cleanliness seem to be the easiest ways to defend against the daily chemical bombardment faced by the farmworkers.

Constant air exchange throughout the household is imperative, at a rate greater than that for a normal home. It is equally important that the air coming in be as clean as possible, and for this reason siting the building to bring in the freshest possible air is a cheap fix. Another way is to purify the air would be to “scrub” it, like in a clean-room environment at a high-tech manufacturing plant. This can be made much more economical using living plants to scrub instead of machines. Programming can help, too. Perhaps a side entrance to the home, leading directly to a sort of clean-up area with laundry and a smallish shower should be included. This room could be physically removed from the living space, as well, but if so the new transition space should probably be completely private.

About two pages into the proscribed excerpt from Fields of Toil, I told my girlfriend, Lisa, that I thought she would really like the book.

“You mean, this one?” she asked, pulling it from our bookshelf. “If you are interested in that, you might like this one, and this one, and this one, too.” It turns out Lisa took an anthropology class on the American Migrant Farmer Experience at the U of O some years ago. We have had some good conversations about migrant farmers, and now I would say my rating is a trepidatious 3.5 out of 10. (For the record, I think a score of somewhere approaching 5 would be solid.)

We talked about education, and cultural divides. She said something about how their is a great cultural divide between adults that does not always exist between children, and that is because of schools. The reason many people choose to live the life of the migrant farmworker is because they want their kids to live happy, full lives with more options than they had. By sending their kids to public school, they are opening those doors. Even eighth-grade dropouts speak English far better than their abroad-born parents. We talked about the historical context of immigrant workers, and how this has always been the case.

On that note, it would be interesting to get some heritage information from the class. I bet we can find some interesting parallels in our pasts….