Rausser College’s impact extends far beyond campus and the Bay Area, with many of our researchers leading community-rooted projects that center the health and well-being of Californians in rural and agricultural areas. Read on to learn more about these highly collaborative projects that engage people and communities as active partners.
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Balancing farmworker productivity and well-being | Assessing barriers to care | Exposing inequities faced by Indigenous farmworkers | Dust matters | Uncovering the secrets of Valley fever | Uniting to deliver safer water | Tools for water literacy | Partnering for clean drinking water
Balancing farmworker productivity and well-being
California leads the US as the largest producer of agricultural products, growing more than a third of the country’s vegetables and more than three-quarters of its fruits and nuts. But in recent years, agricultural operators across the state have expressed concerns that they’ll be short on staff when the next harvest rolls around.
“When you talk to employers, you realize they mean that they can’t find enough qualified workers,” explains Alexandra Hill, an assistant professor of Cooperative Extension in the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics.
Farmworkers’ hourly wages have nearly doubled since 2006, but Hill says US workers avoid farm labor as it’s demanding and often seasonal.
Much of the existing labor force is aging, and many of California’s established farmworkers are less willing to migrate between regions to follow crop cycles. What’s more, people from rural communities in Mexico and other countries—once a reliable source of labor—are entering the US at lower rates than before.
Through conversations with growers, farmworkers, and advocacy groups, Hill learned how producers are investing in specialized machinery and equipment or hiring temporary workers through the H-2A visa program to address their labor shortages. Her research, which explores the intersection of agricultural production and labor, examines whether improving working conditions for farmworkers can boost their productivity—thus benefiting both farms and their employees. One recent project revealed that farmworkers working in high temperatures or poor air quality are less productive, which means they have to work more hours just to earn roughly the same amount as under mild conditions, since they are often paid per unit of crop harvested.
Hill is also investigating agricultural injuries and workers’ compensation claims filed by farmworkers. She is currently working on a project through the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety aimed at improving the classification of agricultural injuries and illnesses toidentify major contributors to farm accidents. And she’s analyzing workers’ compensation data to explore whether a shorter workday could reduce the number of farm injuries and claims.
Hill will bring her findings to industry stakeholders as a newly elected board member of the Equitable Food Initiative, a voluntary certification program that ensures farms meet high social standards concerning their workforce. “Workers’ compensation is not only expensive to the employer, but retailers and consumers also care about not buying produce from unsafe places,” she says. “Everyone benefits when we reduce workplace injuries.”
Assessing barriers to care
Associate Professor of Cooperative Extension Christy Getz is an expert on California farm labor issues whose recent research focuses on the factors impacting farmworker access to healthcare. Barriers include lack of health insurance, high costs, language, work schedules, and transportation challenges, among others.
Getz served on the research advisory board for California’s 2021 Farmworker Health Study survey, which was funded by the California Department of Public Health. A multi-institution team of researchers led by faculty at UC Merced, working in collaboration with community-based organizations and labor unions, surveyed farmworkers across five major agricultural areas in the state: the San Joaquin, Salinas, and Imperial Valleys; Santa Barbara; and Napa-Sonoma Counties.
Getz and colleagues are now assessing survey results to understand the social, economic, and political context that creates social hierarchies that impact farmworker health. “Factors like gender, age, race, ethnicity, legal status, income, and education shape the context in which a person lives and works, and they are intertwined with housing and working conditions, food insecurity, adverse childhood experiences, and family separation,” Getz says. “Many studies focus on individual-level factors, but our analysis is trying to understand health outcomes and healthcare access more holistically.”
As of 2024, California was the first state to expand health insurance to all low-income residents, including undocumented individuals of any age. Now, says Getz, this expanded coverage may be scaled back to only undocumented children. “It’s a complex moment to be looking at this data,” she says. “Things are constantly changing.” At the time of the survey, 23% of respondents reported delaying medical care in the last 12 months, 49% reported being without health insurance, and nearly two-thirds expressed high levels of fear of family separation due to deportation.
Getz and her collaborators have longstanding relationships with community-based organizations like Líderes Campesinas, a grassroots organization advocating for women and youth farmworkers, and Centro La Familia Advocacy Services, which offers social services and education programs in Fresno County. As a complement to the survey analysis, she and Ron Strochlic, academic coordinator at UC Agriculture and Natural Resources’ Nutrition Policy Institute, conducted in-depth interviews with organizations like these, as well as growers and healthcare providers. They learned more about innovative strategies being used to increase farmworker healthcare access, such as telehealth offerings and on-site health clinics provided by growers, some of which are available to workers on day one of employment, regardless of whether they opt in to health insurance.
Exposing inequities faced by Indigenous farmworkers
Medical doctor and cultural anthropologist Seth Holmes has focused much of his career on uncovering social hierarchies and health disparities related to US-Mexico migration and agriculture. One of his recent projects, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, focused on Indigenous farmworkers from Oaxaca, Mexico, who harvest fruits and vegetables across Merced, Madera, and Fresno Counties in California’s Central Valley and were deemed essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Indigenous workers from Oaxaca are one of the fastest-growing groups of farmworkers in the state,” says Holmes, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM). “COVID outbreaks were common for them due to low pay and high housing costs, leading to extremely dense housing and a lack of worker protections.”
Holmes and his team collaborated with the Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño—a community organization focused on health and education, led by and for Indigenous people from Oaxaca—to develop questions for 40 interviews with migrant farmworker families. Through participant observation and ethnographic interviews conducted in both Triqui (the native language of many of the interviewees) and Spanish, the team asked Indigenous migrant farmworkers about their experiences.
The interviews reveal how workers’ mixed documentation status compounds with institutional and employer racism, housing insecurity, food insecurity, and inadequate and discriminatory healthcare to super-exploit Triqui migrant workers and maintain profitability for the agroindustry.
Interviewees described experiencing chronic stress due to low pay and unreliable work hours related to extreme heat and rain, and they revealed that they were at times denied access to clean drinking water and work breaks required by state law. “Even while they were praised as essential workers during the pandemic, the very people providing food for the rest of society were themselves food insecure,” says Holmes.
Dust matters
Dust storms are pervasive across much of inland California, affecting nearly five million people and 55,000 square miles of the state’s cities, farmland, and desert. Besides affecting human health, dust negatively impacts water resources, solar energy production, weather, climate, outdoor recreation, and agricultural productivity.
The UC Dust Center, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from seven University of California campuses, released a report in spring 2025 showing that dust emissions inCalifornia are now greater than at any other period in history and will continue to grow as climate change intensifies and human activity increases.
“Dust emissions from drylands contribute to the loss of nutrient-rich soil particles, affect soil biogeochemical cycles, and impact human health with cascading effects on road safety, air traffic, and recreation,” says ESPM Professor and report co-author Paolo D’Odorico.
After detailing the sources of dust and the human activities that are causing its increase—like water diversion and off-road recreational activity—the report examines the effects of dust storms on the state’s natural and human environments. These include changes to the availability of vital water sources as dust can cause snowpack to melt earlier, as well as reduced crop yields due to windblown soil erosion. And the impacts on human health are broad, including respiratory, eye, and cardiovascular diseases, worsened allergies, fungal infections, and traffic accident injuries. What’s more, these impacts often disproportionately affect vulnerable communities, the authors say.
The report outlines how factors like global warming, agricultural practices, construction, and shifts in land and water management policy may increase dust emission and concentrations. The authors call for more evaluation of existing conditions and the development of dust forecasting systems that could result in early warnings, better connections among affected communities, researchers, and state agencies, and more consistent funding to support mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Uncovering the secrets of Valley fever
Valley fever, or coccidioidomycosis, is caused by Coccidioides fungi that live in the soil of California’s Central Valley and other arid regions of the Southwest. The spores become airborne if soil is disturbed, and when inhaled, they cause a fungal infection that results in mere flu-like symptoms for some, but leads to chronic illness, hospitalization, and even death for others.
“Treatment is complicated because physicians don’t often recognize Valley fever at first,” says John Taylor, a professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. “They’ll treat it like a virus, then pivot to antibiotics, and by the time they realize it’s Valley fever, the fungal disease may have really advanced.” Agricultural and construction workers, archeologists, geologists, and wildland firefighters are especially at risk.
The number of Valley fever cases in California has surged over the past decade, and according to the California Department of Public Health, the state is reporting record-breaking numbers for the second consecutive year.
Taylor and his colleagues are uncovering how the fungus operates in nature. His research has shown that cocci lives in rodents, not soil, knowledge that could prove critical for preventing infections. In 2009, a group from Taylor’s lab discovered that cocci had lost the genes other fungi use to eat plants and multiplied genes for eating meat. In 2019, Taylor and Bridget Barker of Northern Arizona University hypothesized that when rodents are infected by cocci, the fungus remains dormant in their lungs without making them sick. When the animals die, they cease to constrain the fungus, which produces hyphae that invade the carcass. As cocci eats the rodent from the inside, the hyphae produce spores.
This hypothesis stood after subsequent studies by Taylor’s former students and collaborators found cocci in the lungs of 10% of California rodents and detected cocci in rodent burrow soil at a substantially higher rate than surface soil or farmlands. Taylor attributes the lack of cocci on farms to rodent control, but notes that airborne spores most likely migrate to farms and contribute to the elevated risk of Valley fever among farmworkers.
Now, Taylor is collaborating with UC Berkeley Public Health Professor Justin Remais and others to sequence the genomes of cocci samples from various locations. If they find that there are discrete populations of the fungus, a next step would be to work with clinicians to gather and sequence samples from Valley fever patients around the state to establish the source of the infective spores. “Revealing where patients contracted the disease would greatly advance the epidemiology of the disease and aid in prevention measures,” Taylor says.
Uniting to deliver safer water
In 2012, California enacted landmark legislation making it one of the first US states to recognize the human right to water. But more than a decade later, more than 800,000 Californians rely on water systems that are failing.
While there’s no single factor that causes a system to fail, Assistant Professor of Cooperative Extension Kristin Dobbin notes,smaller water systems—which may only serve tens or hundreds of customers—are failing at higher rates than larger urban systems. “Some rely on only one well that could become contaminated or run dry, and others struggle to afford infrastructure upgrades or find the personnel needed to operate a compliant water system,” she explains.
California has provided approximately $130 million annually to failing water systems through the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER) program since 2019. SAFER funds provide short-term fixes for immediate issues while prioritizing long-term solutions like system consolidation.
Consolidation generally involves merging a smaller system (or systems) into a single larger one. Some systems may establish connections between their physical infrastructure to expand or improve services, while others merge administrative responsibilities—like billing or management—to reduce operational costs. “But even though state regulators consider this a top-priority solution, there’s very little research on consolidation or evidence from other states or countries that we can draw on,” she says.
Dobbin is leading a study to bring actionable insights to water managers and communities interested in consolidation. She first sent surveys to the 434 California water systems that had consolidated or were in the process of consolidating. Each of the 78 respondents reported that their consolidation was successful. Notably, systems in majority-rural counties were most likely to report that consolidation improved water infrastructure, stabilized water supply, and increased disaster resilience.
This fall, Dobbin released a set of case studies on successful consolidation efforts. One study centered in the Lake Tahoe region revealed how the Tahoe City Public Utilities District’s acquisition of the smaller Tahoe Cedars and Madden Creek water companies benefited all customers. Consolidation improved water reliability for customers previously connected to the area’s smaller systems, while the larger system was able to leverage its new infrastructure to improve wildfire resilience and finance systemwide upgrades.
In Lake County, Dobbin studied a 24-customer water system that required constant monitoring and operation and had trouble finding an operator able to meet the role’s demands. “Consolidation with a larger company resolved the system’s staffing and capacity problem, but in this case, more is needed to address quality concerns,” Dobbin says, noting that the system’s defunct equipment means water drawn from the nearby lake is still unsuitable for drinking. “This underscores how consolidation can fix parts of the problem but may not always be a cure-all.”
Tools for water literacy
A hodgepodge of federal, state, and quasi-public entities controls the distribution network that captures, transports, and distributes water across the state. And California has complex water needs, with the largest population of any state, nearly 10 million acres of irrigated agriculture, and several species of threatened and endangered fishes.
Ted Grantham, an associate professor of Cooperative Extension in ESPM, says there are “trade-offs with how we manage water,” but rejects the idea that it’s a zero-sum game pitting the needs of people, farms, and fishes against each other.
“We can often derive multiple benefits out of the same drop of water,” he says. “Water is constantly cycling through the system to support multiple uses—it’s not just a pie we have to divvy up. But to understand how decisions affect different water users, we need models to track the flow of water through our system.”
Grantham leads COEQWAL, a collaborative research project that aims to broaden participation in shaping California’s water future. Improving water literacy is crucial to increasing public engagement in decision-making, especially as the risks of severe droughts and floods increase with climate change.
Grantham and others are working with state agencies, nonprofits, tribes, and community-based organizations to make CalSim 3—a sophisticated water planning model for the state—more accessible. Government agencies and large water districts with teams of engineers already use the model to inform management strategies. By making the tool accessible to nonexperts, COEQWAL hopes that smaller communities, organizations, and California tribes will use it to identify strategies that more equitably distribute water.
The COEQWAL team also hosts workshops with community partners to design model scenarios that would improve access to clean drinking water, address rising salinity levels in the Delta, and balance the water needs of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon with those of other users. Some of the state’s most impoverished communities, for instance, receive their water through contracts with third parties. These contracts are currently overlooked in the CalSim model, so the team is working to ensure the risks to these communities are considered.
“By working closely with nonacademic partners, we’re exploring new strategies for managing water and learning how to share insights in ways that are more accessible and meaningful to others,” Grantham says.
Partnering for clean drinking water
More than 80% of Californians depend on groundwater for some portion of their water supply, and farmers often use it to irrigate crops during dry years. It’s one of the state’s most valuable and highly used natural resources—and one of its most threatened.
Habitual overpumping has caused significant groundwater depletion, and scientists warn that climate change may lengthen or intensify droughts. Wells and underground aquifers can become contaminated by farm runoff, naturally occurring chemicals like arsenic, or even industrial “forever chemicals” (also known as PFAS) linked to a range of health problems.
“Emerging research suggests that forever chemicals are a bigger problem in rural agricultural areas than we previously realized,” says Clare Pace, an assistant project scientist with UC Berkeley’s Water Equity Science Shop (WESS). “It’s important for people to know about what might be in their water—and what to do about it.”
WESS is a community-engaged research project addressing drinking water challenges in California, co-founded by ESPM Professor Rachel Morello-Frosch, UCLA Public Health Professor Lara Cushing (BS ‘03 Molecular Environmental Biology; MPH ‘11 Epidemiology; PhD ‘15 Energy and Resources Group), and the Community Water Center (CWC). The CWC is a California water justice organization that advocates for water access for all communities.
At the heart of their collaboration is the Drinking Water Tool, which CWC and WESS developed over three years. Released in 2020, the tool provides users with insights into drought risk and nearby drinking water threats, like nitrates or sources of PFAS. It also helps groundwater-dependent households connect with testing agencies and short- and long-term solutions. With support from the Berkeley Superfund Research Program, a campus research initiative funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Morello-Frosch expanded the project’s scope in 2023 to include testing of water samples from wells and small systems in rural agricultural communities in the Central Valley and along the Central Coast.
Project researchers are collecting 100 samples from communities near potential sources of PFAS or with a history of quality issues or high reliance on domestic wells. If tests reveal unsafe levels of contaminants, WESS and CWC guide affected households through enrolling in state-funded, free, bottled-water programs. Twenty of the 45 samples collected so far had nitrates or bacteria levels that exceeded safe drinking water levels, and several also had detectable levels of PFAS.
This story originally appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Breakthroughs magazine. Read the full issue on our magazine page.