Occupational and environmental health risks in farm labor

This essay provides an introduction and overview for this special thematic section. We discuss the general occupational and environmental health risks that those who provide farm labor - farmers, farm families, and farmworkers - experience as a result of commercial agriculture. We first briefly review some of the farm safety research literature, highlighting the important trend of listening to those who perform farm labor as they speak for themselves about their health and safety concerns. We then introduce the individual articles in the collection and highlight their common themes: (2) control; (2) economic stress; (3) beliefs; and (4) access to information. We conclude that applied anthropology has a key role to play in reducing occupational and environmental health risks for farm labor by conducting the research that indicates the most proximate causes of farm injury and illness, and by developing appropriate interventions to address these causes.