By JAMIE SEARS RAWLINGS

Kentucky Correspondent

Los Angeles, Ca. – Everywhere you look there’s a farmer checking a mobile application, or app, to help gather data to keep his or her farming operations ahead of the game. There are countless apps that monitor weather conditions, apps that keep track of equipment maintenance, commodity market monitoring apps, apps that help manage a farm’s inventory and budget and even ones that help calculate fertilizer and chemical usage for a particular farm or field. If you get confused by all of the apps, simply Google “Best Farming Apps” and you can literally open a Pandora’s Box of information available to farmers from their smart phone.    

Taking much of the personal contact out of information gathering, mobile apps can provide a grower with everything he or she needs to know without ever having to talk to another person, or even tune into a local television station for up-to-date weather forecasts. 

It may seem strange, then, that 17-year-old Faith Florez turned to such an impersonal platform to help solve an industry issue that is quite personal for her and her family.

Years after her grandmother, Estella, a farmworker in California’s Central Valley, perished because of what Florez calls “brutal working conditions,” the teen has debuted what she believes could keep others from suffering the same fate—a mobile app called Calor that interfaces with the Apple iWatch to monitor a farmworker’s temperature and vitals as they work, signaling them if the number rises to a dangerous level and even contacting emergency services on their behalf if it does. 

“A lot of the inspiration and motivation behind the application is due to the fact that I grew up in the Central Valley,” said Florez, who lives with her family now in Los Angeles.

“Not only having farmworkers in my lineage and in my background, but also just growing up in the Central Valley and witnessing farmworkers working dawn to dusk, had a huge impact on my development.”

The senior at La Cañada High School has worked for two years on more fully coding her app with graduate students from University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. In addition, she’s met with growers, contractors, farm workers and state regulators to gather information for her idea.   

She believes the real power of the app lies in its multifaceted approach to solving the problem of heat stress.

“What’s interesting about our program is that it doesn’t only act as a safety net through the notification sent to farmworkers, but it also acts as a long term educational tool for the population,” she said.

“Not only is it informing them of when to take a break or in case of emergency, connecting them to 911 or Cal-OSHA, but it’s also functioning long term to teach them how to take care of their bodies while they are working in this very risky and dangerous profession.”

Heat-related illness: a real threat

Florez is correct. Farming is both risky and dangerous. In fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent report, fatalities among agricultural workers increased 22 percent from 2014-15.

In the same report, the Bureau reports that “fatalities due to exposure to temperature extremes rose” in 2015 compared the previous year. OSHA, on that agency’s website, reports that “every year, thousands of workers become sick from occupational heat exposure.”

These illnesses are part of what the National Center for Farmworker Health (NCFH) is fighting as they work through their network of community and migrant health centers to provide access to primary care for the estimated 4.5 million migrant farmworkers and family members in the United States.

“It is very, very real,” said Bobbi Ryder, NCFH President and CEO, of heat stress issues.

“I can only imagine what it must be like for someone who is earning their living in that way.”

Promoviendo Farmworker Safety (or Project FRESCO- Farmworkers Reducing Exposure to Sun and Cooling Off), is a program provided by the NCFH to act an educational intervention for farmworkers in the area of heat stress and sun exposure. Funded by the National Institute for Health and Safety (NIOSH) in collaboration with the Southwest Center for Agricultural Health, Injury Prevention and Education, Project FRESCO materials are made available to members of the NCFH network and provide practical changes to daily routines that could minimize the risk of dangers from overexposure to the sun and/or heat.

Bill Field, a Purdue University professor and head of the Purdue Agricultural Safety and Health Program, still emphasizes the need for heat education and awareness even though his region is not plagued by the extreme temperatures that can be found in other parts of the country.

“Here in the Corn Belt, we do have hot days during the summer, but it might be a week or so where eventually there’s more of a cooling that takes place,” Field said.

“That doesn’t mean we don’t have heat related problems.”

“Here, we typically do a lot of our work throughout the day, and there isn’t quite so much of that heat exposure that you might have in some regions of the country.”

“It doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous, it just means that where you’ve got high humidity and high temperatures, farmworkers are more apt to be exposed to raised body temperatures where they may end up having problems with dehydration that leads to all kinds of problems like disorientation, fainting and, then, it can actually lead to death,” he said.

Field noted the prominence of produce crops grown in his state, such as watermelons, tomatoes, cucumber and peppers, which are primarily harvested by hand by migrant workers.

“We’ve had discussions at farm meetings where I’ve talked about the importance of providing some kind of shelter, making sure they have a sun canopy, providing access to water regularly during the day and trying to avoid consumption of sugar products,” Field said.

“These topics have come up on a regular basis.”

Information is the key

If the heat index for the workday reaches 103-115 degrees F., workers should drink about four cups of water every hour to achieve hydration levels high enough to stave off heat exhaustion.

It may take a new worker up to 14 days to acclimate their body to working in high temperatures, making them especially susceptible to heat related problems in their first days on the job.

A crucial component to Florez’s Calor app, and to campaigns launched by OSHA and the NCFH, is providing practical information such as this. Knowledge that, those agencies believe, could save lives.

But does that work?

It’s just this question that John Luque, associate professor in the public health sciences department of the Medical University of South Carolina, has been given money to try to answer.

A $20,000 grant from the Southeastern Coastal Center for Agricultural Health and Safety has tasked Luque and his team with funds to run an 18-month pilot program to test the effectiveness of OSHA’s information-providing app, the OSHA Heat Safety Tool.

According to the agency, the Heat Safety Tool app “allows workers and supervisors to calculate the heat index for their worksite, and, based on the heat index, displays a risk level to outdoor workers.”

Once that calculation is in place, users receive reminders about protective measures that should be taken. Available in both English and Spanish, the app is compatible with Android and iPhones.

“The app hasn’t been tested with farmworkers, so we wanted to do, first, some qualitative research and talk to farmworkers about their strategies for staying cool while working in the heat, and then also to test the app with field supervisors and see if they would use the app to make sure they were monitoring their workers for water, rest and shade, which is what the OSHA campaign is all about,” Luque said of the first phase of his research project.

That phase included focus groups with migrant farmworkers, and though the data has not yet been analyzed by the team, Luque reports, anecdotally, that most participants reported owning a smart phone device and that they, when shown the OSHA app, “did find the information helpful.”

Further research will allow Luque and his team to hone the information provided in the app to better meet the needs of both farmworker and field supervisor.

Bringing Calor to the field

Simply providing information about ways to reduce the chance of heat stress is not enough, says Florez, which is why her Calor app is the first on the horizon that provides monitoring of an individual farmworker’s personal health. It’s why she and her team are working tirelessly to raise the funds needed to get Calor onto farmworkers’ wrists this summer, when temperatures begin to rise.

There is much work to be done to make that happen, however. First, the team must meet their fundraising goal of $70,000. Using online fundraising tool StartSomeGood.com, a platform dedicated to funding issues of social justice, education and community building, the team has already raised nearly $50,000 toward that goal.

“The amount of support we’ve gotten so far is really overwhelming,” Florez said of the fundraising boon.

With funds in hand, Florez plans to seek out coders who can turn her current web-based platform into an iOS application that’s compatible with the Apple iWatch. In tandem, she will work to produce the educational component of the program, through videos and documents covering a variety of topics, from heat stress prevention tips to legal rights of farmworkers.

With all that accomplished, Florez plans to fund the purchase of Apple iWatches and have them in the fields of California’s Central Valley during the upcoming summer. She has brokered a deal with several small graperies in Shafter, Ca. to test the app.

“They are very excited and eager about the project,” she said.

Pros and cons

While Calor may be tested this summer on small farms, Florez hopes that will soon change.

“The pilot farms are smaller scale farms, but ultimately, I am hoping to expand the reach of the application to larger scale farms, because the cases of heat stroke and heat related illness are higher amongst those types of farms,” she said.

While Florez’s intent for developing Calor is a personal one, she is not naïve to the business opportunity that it could provide for producers.

“My motivation in this is definitely humanitarian, but I try to communicate the fiscal feasibility of it,” she said.

“This application is basically a vehicle for lower worker’s comp and mod rates.”

“If growers can adapt this technology, ultimately, I think it serves in their benefit fiscally.”

Ryder, herself a former agricultural employer, sees a flip side to that coin for producers, despite saying that she is “delighted” at the potential that Calor has.

“I am very empathetic to both the perspective of the farmworker and the perspective of the employer,” she said.

“Most people think of them as being opposing perspectives, but I happen to think of them as complimentary.”

“There has been so much pressure put on employers to protect their workers, that I don’t know how willing a grower would be, regardless of cost, to put something on their employees that would track occupational risk, because there’s a liability implied there.”

She believes that this may be a key to keeping Calor’s implementation low.

“There are some growers that might be very cutting-edge and willing to take that risk, especially if it was about creating evidence that it saves lives, but I don’t think that’s going to be mainstream,” she said.

In his focus groups with farmworkers, Luque has uncovered another possible reason to reduce the effectiveness of Calor, and other technologies like it-it may simply be ignored.

“We heard that sometimes being able to take a break or not take a break depended on how a farmworker’s work was structured and whether they were paid hourly or piece rate, which means the more you picked the more you can make,” he said of his findings.

“The ability to take breaks would affect that.”

“Farmworkers may not be drinking enough water because they don’t want to take a break.”

For Field, the solution to this issue may very well be common sense.

“I’m more concerned about making sure that people implement what they already know,” he said.

“I don’t think they need an app, I think they need to implement what they know.”