Persistence, source building and originality leads to critical, in-depth coverage of working conditions in greenhouses

By Melina Walling, Dorany Pineda, Joshua Bickel, Donavon Brutus

When climate and agriculture reporter Melina Walling was covering the rise of vertical farming in greenhouses last year, she approached workers from the vertical farm AppHarvest to find out more about the trend. 
It quickly became apparent that the workers had negative feelings toward the company, and Walling visited them in Kentucky several times to find out more after publishing her original story. In time, through building trust with her sources, the workers revealed to her a series of problems with their working conditions: lack of training, sweltering heat that led to people fainting daily, and the pressure to work through breaks and over their hours. To investigate further, Walling teamed up with climate reporter Dorany Pineda, who focuses on Latin communities, to find out if the AppHarvest workers were an exceptional case in the greenhouse industry or the rule. 
Pineda’s contacts in the Latin community, of which many farm workers are part, led to nearly a dozen in-depth interviews with greenhouse workers that trusted Pineda and Walling with their stories over a series of months. Walling even took up evening Spanish lessons at a university for several months to better engage with the sources and gain their trust. From coast to coast, all the greenhouse workers they spoke to mentioned intolerable heat for eight or more hours a day. Many told harrowing accounts, from passing out on the job to soaking through clothes from sweat all while terrified of complaining to supervisors out of fear of losing their income. 
Visualizing anonymous sources is always a challenge, but Josh Bickel and animator Donavon Brutus thought outside normal methods to accomplish in both photos and video. 

After gaining the trust of workers, Bickel used a translucent plastic sheet to both obscure their identity and give a greenhouse-style feel to the photos. Brutus used the testimony of the greenhouse workers to create a compelling and original video that told the workers’ stories in their own words while protecting their identities. He used photo cutouts with a voiceover by Pineda. Both methods have never been done at the AP and together, they helped put people at the center of the issues around greenhouses. 

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