Inside Green Empire Farm: Upstate NY’s biggest coronavirus outbreak slams migrant workers
By: Marnie Eisenstadt
Oneida, N.Y. — Every day, more than 300 workers walked in and out of the sprawling Green Empire Farm greenhouse on the edge of the city of Oneida.
Even when the whole world mostly shut down, the 32-acre farm under glass kept going. There were millions of strawberries to pick after growing ripe under miles of glass. And there were half a million tomato plants to tend.
The company, Mastronardi Produce of Canada, took measures to protect those workers from the coronavirus, officials from Madison County and the company said.
But it didn’t matter. At the end of each workday, 186 workers left the giant farm in vans and on buses, to return to hotels where they lived four to a room and slept two to a bed.
The workers’ living conditions, chosen for them by the labor company that hired them and brought them to Oneida, were perfect for the coronavirus to dig in and take hold.
And it did.
The indoor farming complex is now the site of the biggest coronavirus cluster in Upstate New York, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office. The only cluster outside of New York City that was bigger was in New Rochelle.
By Thursday, 169 of the 340 workers had tested positive.
“They were living in close quarters, together, so it was ripe for spread,” said Eric Faisst, Madison County public health director. “The conditions were perfect.”
The farmworkers living in the hotels are migrant workers who speak little English, county officials said.
Faisst said many of the workers are scared. They came here to the U.S. to work and send money to their families. Some are from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, others are from Haiti. Now they are stuck: They can’t work, and they can’t go home.
The county had to get 12 interpreters to help with tracing the sick and exposed workers’ travels through the area.
The outbreak was so shocking that it caught Cuomo’s attention. He mentioned it in his nationally viewed news briefing Wednesday. He compared the cluster to outbreaks in meatpacking plants across the nation.
“It’s when you run a facility with a large number of workers in a dense environment,” the governor said.
But county officials say it’s not the workplace, but where the workers live that have been making them worry since the pandemic started.
Until last April 29, it seemed like everything was under control. That’s when Faisst got the first bad news: The night before, Oneida Health, the hospital nearest the greenhouse, saw two workers.
Both were sick with COVID-19. Both lived in those hotels, four to a room. Workers live in the Super 8 and the Days Inn in Madison County and the La Quinta Hotel in Verona in Oneida County.
When Faisst heard of about the two positive tests among the workers, he knew he was facing a potential cluster that showed the virus’ ability to jump from person to person at an exponential rate. All the farmworkers, migrant and local, had to be tested.
The county called in the state for help. Two days later, an army of state and county workers set up rows inside the greenhouse.
The farmworkers filed in, speaking to each other in Spanish and French. One by one, nurses swabbed their noses and took down their contact information, aided by interpreters. Then the workers boarded the buses and vans back to the hotels to wait.
By Monday, the results came back. All but 47 of the contract workers had the virus.
The county and state tested the second wave of workers, mostly local help, on Tuesday in the same way. That turned up 31 more positives.
Part of the Flavor Army
All of the workers at the farm do the same jobs and make roughly the same pay on paper, employees said. But they live in two different worlds and work for two different employers.
The workforce drawn from Central New York makes a little less than $13 an hour. They pick, plant, sort and pack. They work for Green Empire Farm, which is owned by Mastronardi Produce, a 70-year-old company in Kingsville, Ontario, that was started by an Italian immigrant who decided to grow hothouse tomatoes. The company has at least six hothouse farms in North America.
Most of the produce is sold under the Sunset brand. The new amphitheater in the company’s hometown bears its name: Sunset Stadium.
The company prides itself on how it treats its workers, a company spokeswoman said, and is devastated about the outbreak at the new farm in Oneida.
Mastronardi calls its workers the “Flavor Army.”
But more than half the workers in Oneida, those in the buses and the hotels, are migrant farmworkers employed by an Indiana company called MAC Contracting. A Mastronardi spokeswoman said MAC supplies workers to many of the company’s greenhouses.
Faisst said the contract workers did not bring the virus into the community. The county’s first coronavirus case was at the greenhouse, but it was a local worker.
A worker who has been at the greenhouse since it opened said the migrant workers were hired to take local jobs that went unfilled. Both sets of workers are supposed to make the same amount: a little less than $13 an hour. The contract workers are paid by MAC, who takes money out of their checks for the hotel rooms.
Since the outbreak, the county has been pushing MAC to put fewer workers in the rooms and to pay them when they’re not working, said John Becker, chairman of the Madison County Board of Supervisors.
“You’re going to comply, or we’ll take further measures,” Becker said the county told MAC.
He said he was “aghast” when he found out how many workers were living in a room, together, while public health officials were trying to space people six feet apart.
Becker said he was concerned the workers would not be paid when they were quarantined, which made him worry they would keep working while they were sick.
The county, he said, pushed Mastronardi to pay them while sick. Becker said the county is delivering food to all of the workers in the hotels in Madison County while they are quarantined to keep them inside. It is costing the county $3,000 a day.
Becker said the outbreak is peeling back the curtain on how factory farms work.
“We can’t fill the jobs with American labor, so these folks come up. They send money home. These conditions are throughout the country,” said Becker, who ran his family’s dairy farm for decades.
‘We followed social distancing’
Becker said it’s unclear whether the workers have the documents to work in the U.S.
“That’s one of those questions I don’t want to ask,” he said. “That’s MAC’s deal.”
Farm labor contractors, like MAC, traditionally handle the certifying that the workers’ papers are legal for the companies that hire them. They also handle transportation and housing.
The Oneida greenhouse had always planned to bring in some labor. There is a bunkhouse on the grounds, but it’s not finished.
The greenhouse just opened in August. It took five years of work to get the farm to come to Madison County, Becker said. The county was jockeying with others to get the huge operation. In the end, Madison County had the most land and the sweetest deal: a 20-year tax break worth millions.
Company documents show that the project will be built in four phases on 600 acres of land. Each phase is a 32-acre greenhouse. The total cost is more than $100 million. It’s unclear how much of the project has been completed.
Cris Schultz, a MAC employee in Indiana, disputed the county’s account in an interview Thursday with syracuse.com. She said the workers never stayed more than three to a room. She said the workers pay for some of the housing out of their paychecks, but she would not say how much.
She disputed that the workers’ living arrangements made them ill.
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” Schultz said. “We followed social distancing.”
She declined to say how MAC helped the workers follow social distancing when they were on the buses or at the hotels. County officials said that, after prodding, MAC spaced the workers out on the buses and vans and began wiping down the vehicles several times a day.
Schultz would not say how many workers were sick with symptoms from the virus. At one point in she said “enough” were sick; then she said none were ill. County officials said two of the workers had been hospitalized. They have since been released and are recovering back at the hotels they were living in.
“I am worried about them, their health,” Schultz said. Then she hung up.
“They came here to work”
Oneida feels more like a village than a city. The population is 11,000. People mostly know each other, and now they know the workers who have been picking and planting under the glass at the edge of the city.
The outbreak has put a spotlight on the laborers in a way that makes county and city officials worry.
“They came here to work and send money back to their country,” said Oneida Mayor Helen Acker. “They want to work; they don’t want to be sick.”
Now they are being watched, not just by public health officials, but by people who are angry they are here. Madison County publicly identified nine local businesses, including a laundromat and the Walmart, as places the farmworkers frequented.
Faisst said he feels the virus is under control. The workers have been tested and quarantined. He is not worried about them spreading the virus.
“They’re scared as hell and then on top of that, you’re starting to see this mob mentality. They’re victims of this virus … they acquired this here,” Faisst said. “My concern is for their safety.”
None of the county officials thought the greenhouse would be closed.
All of migrant workers have been isolated in their hotels since the mass testing last Saturday.
The infected workers will be released in roughly two weeks.
Workers who have recovered and workers who tested negative will be back at work sooner.
Next week they will be picking the millions of tomatoes under acres of glass at the edge of the city.
Article Obtained from
https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus/2020/05/inside-green-empire-farm-upstate-nys-biggest-coronavirus-outbreak-slams-migrant-workers.html
