Giving Compass' Take:

• Faith Florez created the CalorApp, which alerts farmers when the temperature reaches 95 degrees. When that happens, they must provide their employees with a break in the shade as stated by the heat-illness protection laws. 

• The use of technology to protect farmers' rights will help them to voice legitimate concerns. However, who is accountable for responding to those concerns? 

• Read about organizations in food and agriculture that are doing it right.

Growing up in Shafter, a small city in California’s Central Valley, Faith Florez would pass farmworkers stooped over in the fields each morning on the way to school. “There were strawberries, carrots, almonds, cotton—everything you could imagine,” she says. The world of the farmworker was a familiar one. Florez’s great-grandparents had arrived in Shafter from Mexico and, with money earned by harvesting crops, built their own house from the ground up.

Not that it had been easy, of course.

I heard a lot of horror stories from family members about the brutal conditions,” says Florez, now a high school senior. “They would work 10 hours or more a day, through 100-degree heat, sometimes without breaks, water, or shade.”

“I wanted to start a project that was based on solving that specific problem,” she says. Her proposal, which USC accepted, sought to create a mobile application that would alert farmworkers to heat dangers and educate them about their rights. Over the past two years, Florez and a team of graduate students have met with growers, farmworkers, and state regulators as they designed their new project, called CalorApp. (Calor means “heat” in Spanish.)

The key feature of CalorApp is a notification system that alerts farmworkers when the temperature reaches 95 degrees. That’s when, under California’s first-of-its-kind heat illness protection law, farmers must give their employees 10-minute rest periods every two hours in a shaded area with access to cold water. The law is straightforward, but it’s not easy to enforce.

Read the full article by Gabriel Thompson about farmworker rights from Civil Eats