In 2022, 156 million pounds of cucumbers were harvested in North Carolina, the vast majority by seasonal farmworkers on farms in Eastern North Carolina. Tyner and Sons' Farm, which grows tobacco, sweet potatoes, and cucumbers, employs about 50 H-2A workers for the 3,000-acre farm.
Ernesto Francisco, 22, has worked for Tyner and Sons' Farm for three years. Francisco is from San Luis Potosi State, in Eastern Mexico, which sends roughly 15% of the 15,000 H-2A visa holders to North Carolina yearly.
Mexican-owned catering services often are hired to provide meals to farmworkers in the field. Growers will sign a contract with a particular family for lunch and dinner for their workers for the entire growing season.
The tobacco industry is the leading employer of Seasonal Farmworkers in North Carolina. Farmworkers arrive in April and handle all aspects of tobacco cultivation, with the harvest taking place from July through October.
Workers at Gardner Farms outside Wilson, NC search for cucumbers in a late-June harvest.
Workers sort through vast amounts of tobacco each day, discarding spoiled or damaged leaves.
Newly arrived farmworkers head back to the host farm after buying groceries and homewares at a Walmart near Smithfield, N.C., southeast of Raleigh. The yellow school buses used to transport farmworkers fill Walmart parking lots across North Carolina April through November.
Farmworkers live on relative islands as host farms are typically 20 to 30 miles from the nearest town.
Latino-owned tiendas offer H-2A workers and immigrants from other countries in Central and South America a point of connection to home. These establishments also demonstrate farmworkers' important role in the local economies of rural towns across North Carolina.
North Carolina's labor-intensive Christmas tree industry has become another major employer for H-2A workers over the past five to 10 years. The state produces over 5 million trees annually, the second most in the country, with the majority of farms located in the highlands of Western North Carolina.
Farmworkers spend 15 hours a day hauling Christmas trees during the harvest, which lasts the entire month of November. A fully-grown Christmas tree weighs up to 300 lbs.
Workers at Severt's Christmas tree farm in Sparta, N.C., pack a 40-foot trailer. With 15 farmworkers, Severt's is a medium-sized Christmas tree farm, producing around 25,000 trees in 2023.
A crew at Bottomley's Evergreen Farm in Sparta, N.C., waits to begin packing a 40-foot trailer. Bottomley's is the largest Christmas tree farm on the East Coast, with 600,000 trees harvested last year.
Bottomley Evergreen Farm employs over 700 H-2A workers each year. During the harvest, the farm's four-acre shipping facility in Southwestern Virginia becomes a hive of activity, with trucks getting packed for orders to box retailers up and down the East Coast.
The nature and quality of accommodations vary greatly from host farms throughout the system. One constant is the communal space that kitchens provide workers.
Mexican soccer is one of the strongest cultural connections with home for farmworkers while they're in the the U.S.
Some farms have hired H-2A workers since the program's inception in 1986.
A group breaks during the tobacco harvest in Deep Run, N.C., about an hour-and-a-half hours east of Raleigh.
H-2A worker groups are run by crew leaders who supervise the majority of the day-to-day operations. Generally, these workers are those who have been at the farm longer or have greater English proficiency.