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Consumers know virtually nothing about the farms where their blueberries come from. Until something changes, they won’t be able to make choices that could make a difference in the lives of the people who pick them. by @maxblau.bsky.social

I reached out to more than 75 blueberry brands, grocery stores, fast-food chains, farmers, trade groups and labor contractors while reporting this series. Only one brand responded.

Instead, you’d have to embark on a maddening quest, like I did, to find the source of your grocery store blueberries. H/T to @zisiga.bsky.social (design), Mauricio Rodríguez Pons (videos) and Shoshana Gordon (visuals): projects.propublica.org/blueberries-...

Right now, only a few small blueberry farms participate in the program. Until that or something else changes, consumers won’t be able to make choices that could make a difference in the lives of our farmworkers.

Fruits and vegetables from those farms are labeled with a green sticker of a woman holding a basket of tomatoes. When I’ve found produce with these stickers in my grocery stores, they don’t cost measurably more than others without the label.

Supermarkets commit to paying a little more for produce — a cost so negligible, only a few pennies per pound, that one expert said it shouldn’t drive up prices. For those few pennies, grocers get crops from farms that offer their workers stronger protections.

So if you’re not an investigative reporter, how can you know if the people picking your fruit are being mistreated? I spoke with experts who said the gold standard for preventing worker abuse is the Fair Food Program: www.propublica.org/article/h-2a...

I also found that some existing protections for workers could be going away, as a result of the farm industry’s successful push to seek financial relief from the Trump administration. www.propublica.org/article/h-2a...

This wasn’t the first case of the abuse of farmworkers at the hands of labor contractors. Or the last. Many of these harms might have been prevented if the workers had received the protections they were promised by the U.S. government. www.propublica.org/article/h-2a...

Farmers struggle to find workers, so they hire contractors to bring foreign laborers to the U.S. and oversee their work. That outsourcing can shield farmers from responsibility for — or even awareness of — harm against their workers.

I had written about the case, which revealed that thousands of farmworkers were illegally charged fees by labor contractors to work in the U.S. Some were forced to work for little to no pay in what prosecutors described as a form of modern-day slavery. projects.propublica.org/h2a-visa-far...

I was able to trace one brand’s berries back to an individual farm. I’m not naming the farm, because its practices are hardly unique. Sure enough, the farm had hired a labor contractor responsible for some of the abuses in one of America’s largest labor trafficking cases.

You might find the location where the berries are grown/distributed. But not the farm. To keep up with demand, and to help keep prices low, a brand will buy berries from a whole bunch of farms and sell them under one label. Here’s an illustration of where you’d find that info.

Federal regulators don’t require blueberry brands to disclose on their packaging any information about the individual farms they buy from. I began by looking at labels, snapping photos, researching brands and going through government records.

So I set out to investigate where the blueberries I buy come from — and if those farms have a record of mistreating workers. projects.propublica.org/blueberries-...

I eat a lot of blueberries, which happen to be the fruit grown most where I live: Georgia. Every time I reached for berries in my fridge, I struggled with the disconnect between the problems on America’s farms and the limited awareness of those problems in most households.

I’ve reported at length about abuses of foreign farmworkers who come to the U.S. on H-2A visas: stolen wages, guns pointed in their faces. One woman I met was kidnapped, raped and nearly killed. I wanted to know: How do I tell if the produce I buy is part of the problem? 👇

NEW: Farmers want the Trump administration to overhaul the H-2A visa program to make it more favorable to their businesses. But cutting red tape could cut labor protections, too.

NEW: @maxblau.bsky.social spent a year reporting on abuses of farmworkers. It left him wondering: Is there any way to find out whether the produce he buys at the grocery store comes from farms with a record of mistreating workers?

Do you administer Medicaid or SNAP benefits? Help @propublica.org report on America’s safety net. We want to hear from you if you currently work for (or have worked for) government agencies involved with implementing changes related to work requirements: www.propublica.org/getinvolved/...