Strawberries, apples, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, leafy greens, pumpkins, peppers, broadleaf, shade tobacco and a variety of other fruits and vegetables are harvested yearly along the Connecticut River Valley.  Over 21,000 farmworkers and their families live in and work these fields in Western Massachusetts and Central Connecticut.

 

Covering more than 4,000 square miles, the "Valley" is the largest agricultural region in New England and includes sparsely populated rural areas like Turners Falls in Franklin County as well as large suburban communities like Springfield in Hampden County.  Each year, both returning and first-time farmworkers enter the Valley to work these crops at multiple locations, residing in either worksite housing or in nearby urban neighborhoods.

 

The Connecticut River Valley Farmworker Health Program (CRVFHP), a federally funded Section 330g Migrant Voucher Program of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, was created in 1998 to address the health care needs of these farmworkers. The program contracts with local community health centers and other service agencies in the Valley to provide year-round primary health care, dental, pharmacy and related health care services.  In addition, nine outreach workers provide a range of enabling services for farmworkers, including program eligibility determination, health education, case management, language interpretation/translation and transportation assistance.    
 
While some clinical services are provided out in the fields, most workers receive their care at eight health centers, including three in Massachusetts (Community Health Center of Franklin County in Turners Falls, Holyoke Health Center and Baystate Brightwood Health Center in Springfield). In 2009, the CRVFHP cared for 1,432 farmworker patients through 4,415 clinical encounters.  The most common medical diagnoses for farmworkers included hypertension, diabetes, disorder of lipoid metabolism and abdominal, pelvic and back pain.  According to the data, more than 90 percent of farmworker patients live below the federal poverty level, 68 percent are male and 76 percent are of Hispanic/Latino descent.    
 
In May 2006, a CRVFHP farmworker discovered he had cancer.  He began to receive treatment but was told he was in the final stages of the disease so he flew home to Mexico with his daughter in mid-November.  He died peacefully with his family the day before Thanksgiving 2006.  But before he left the Valley, he wrote a note about the CRVFHP and the dedicated outreach worker who supported him:
 
"I don't want to leave without thanking this program and asking that it be continued to help support us... We are people who work hard to earn our livings, but we do not count on health services.  It's just through your compassion that 'we' survive... I feel full of peace and valuable as a person."

 

For more information about the CRVFHP, please click here.