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LIVE OAK – The hum of a tractor’s motor fills the forest as a worker heaves an armful of pine needles into a rusted red baler. He flips a metal lever over the tawny leaves and pushes down sharply, making room for more.
A bale of pine straw takes about 10 minutes to make, five if you’re paid by the unit and have mouths to feed. But even speedy baling doesn’t guarantee a livable paycheck. Many workers make less than a dollar per bale and aren’t paid an hourly wage for their time – sometimes days – spent preparing the needles.
Federal labor laws require employers to supplement their employee’s earnings if they don’t meet the prevailing wage at the week’s end. Most employers do, but Department of Labor records and migrant worker lawsuits show a number of exceptions.
Since 2006, 31 pine straw operations in Florida have shortchanged workers by a total of $150,000 and paid $66,000 in civil penalties, according to WUFT’s analysis of Wage and Hour Compliance Action Data. The number of violations is outsized for an industry many don’t even know exists.
Worker recruitment
Since dead pine needles accumulate naturally on the forest floor, timber landowners faced with rising landscaping demand in the 1980s saw pine straw as a “gimme”, according to Florida attorney Greg Schell. The needles didn’t sell for much, but enough annually to pay the land’s taxes.
Landowners recruited marginalized workers who had few other options to do the repetitive, manual labor. “This is a job nobody made any money at,” Schell said. “Nobody would do it.”
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Schell’s pine straw clients were, “all African-American men recruited by labor contractors from inner city missions for farm labor jobs.”
In the early 2000s, the industry experienced, “a shift from hiring local Black manual laborers for fieldwork to subcontracting Latino H2-B guest workers and undocumented migrant and immigrant workers,” according to Vanessa Casanova, who interviewed 42 pine straw harvesters in the Southeast in 2007.
The vast majority came – and still come – from Mexico: a remnant of the World War II era “Bracero” program that recruited Mexican laborers to the U.S.
Today, workers are driven by the promise of higher wages. Mexico’s daily minimum wage is about $13.75. A Florida pine straw harvester – if they’re legally compensated – makes more than that in an hour.
The dramatic difference in pay makes it hard for seasonal workers to turn down U.S.-based jobs, even if conditions are poor.
“They pay us very cheaply,” said José, a pine straw harvester and crew leader based in Live Oak, in Spanish. “It’s not enough to pay for insurance.”
Poultry and pine are the two biggest migrant employers in Suwannee County. José, who requested that he share only his first name, chose pine twelve years ago and stuck with it.
“There’s nothing else to do but to endure and continue to work.”
The baling process
In the December morning chill, the ten-person crew works with solemn mechanical precision. By 10 a.m., they pile an impossibly high stack of bales onto a small flatbed trailer.
Workers begin by removing all debris, including pinecones, to expose a clean bed of pine straw.
Once the pine straw is pristine, they rake it into loose piles. The mounds dotting this field are six feet tall, pitchforks and gloves balanced at their edges. After raking, the bare forest floor looks like concrete, its microbes and ground-dwellers stripped of their protective blanket.
Cleaning and raking is a full day’s work, so piles usually sit out overnight. When morning comes, it’s time to bale.
Workers use a rectangular box on wheels, metal or wooden and about the size of a barstool. With fast fingers, they pull orange twine through the back of the apparatus. They fill it with straw and use a stiff level to tamp the needles down.
They tie off the twine, unlatch the box’s front and reveal a dense brick destined for a garden bed.
Workers load the bales onto a trailer and haul them to a semi waiting at the forest edge. To minimize transport costs and maximize worker productivity, semis are filled with bales from floor to roof in perfect rows.
The whole process takes about two days. But the vast majority of prepping, cleaning, raking, moving and loading never shows up on a worker’s paycheck.
The Department of Labor mandates that foreign workers receive the average hourly wage for their occupation, known as the “prevailing wage.” But harvesters are commonly paid by piece rate, meaning their compensation depends on the number of bales they make.
A 2025 job order for a pine straw harvesting role in Georgia lists a per-bale rate of 85 cents. To make the state’s prevailing hourly wage for forest and conservation workers, $16.89, workers would need to make a bale every three minutes. To make up for a previous day of uncompensated prep work, the pace would increase to a bale every 90 seconds.
In reality, it takes an average worker about five to 10 minutes to make a single bale.
“If you look at the job order, both the hourly rate and the piece rate are advertised,” said Solimar Mercado-Spencer, an attorney with Georgia Legal Services. Sometimes, once workers arrive, “they're told: ‘no, you're going to make a piece rate, forget about the hourly rate.’ And well, that's illegal. But we see that happen a lot.”
An enigmatic industry
Between 2006 and 2018, the Wage and Hour Division investigated 32 pine straw companies in Florida. It found violations ranging from not displaying workers’ rights posters to paying sub-minimum wage in 31 of them, 21 of which were assessed financial penalties.
It’s unclear exactly what proportion of today’s Florida pine straw industry this represents. Thirty-three Florida-based companies are registered on the Florida Forest Service Vendor Database as having pine straw operations, but Suwannee County Forester Jacob Earnest cautioned some may be missing and others no longer active.
Florida pine straw producers don’t have their own industry groups or growers’ associations, common for other crops including peanuts and dairy. A 2003 study estimated Florida’s pine straw revenue at $79 million, around the value of the state’s blueberry sales and a sliver of the state’s $25 billion forestry industry.
“I think that’s an overestimate,” said Pat Minogue, an associate professor at UF and extension specialist in forestry, “but there have not been any kind of economic studies at this point.”
Part of what makes the industry difficult to quantify is the number of players involved. Some pine straw producers don’t own the pine plantations on which they harvest, but rent them from a landowner. Many producers hire labor contractors to recruit crews, which consist of both harvesters and truck loaders.
Revenue from each bale is split between the landowner, producer, labor contractor, baler and loader, a tall order for a product that fetches about $10 per bale.
While Schell, the Florida lawyer, focused his cases on undercompensated workers, he recognized pine straw’s low price point affected each stakeholder. Without consumers paying more per bale, he said, “the business model doesn’t work.”
A double-edged sword
Paul Meador started the labor contracting company Everglades Harvesting in 1990, recruiting workers to harvest specialty crops including jalapenos, strawberries, peppers and grapefruit. He turned to the H-2 program around 2001.
“We were desperate for laborers,” Meador said. His company advertised year round to recruit American workers, but, he said, no one applied. “They don’t want a seasonal job and they don’t want to get dirty,” he said.
Foreign workers, on the other hand, came in droves.
“I’ve had the same families work with me since I started,” Meador said. “We bring in fathers, sons, uncles, cousins, even grandsons.” (The male-only list was no coincidence. Since the H-2 program has no anti-discrimination laws, around 90% of recruits are men, most 20 to 29 years old.)
“You always hear about how terrible agriculture is with its laborers,” he said, “and that’s a bunch of garbage. We provide housing for them, safe transportation and they look forward to coming back every year.”
Meador, too, looks forward to bringing them back, but it’s becoming more expensive to do so.
Florida’s minimum wage for H-2A (ag) workers is $16.23. For H-2B (non-ag) workers, the prevailing wage is often higher. Both are more than the state’s minimum wage to prevent recruiters from replacing domestic workers with lower-paid foreign ones.
Between hourly pay, transportation benefits, and housing costs, Meador estimates he spends $20 an hour on guest worker labor. With net farm income falling nationwide, it’s hard to justify that cost.
“It’s running us out of business,” he said. “Something has to change.”
Fritz Roka agreed. He directs the Center for Agribusiness at Florida Gulf Coast University and teaches a class in “farm-2-table” sustainability.
“I ask the question, more to myself than to my students, is the guest worker program sustainable?” he said. “And I really come down on no, that it’s not sustainable.”
In the short term, the program fulfills an employer’s need for a dependable workforce, but in the long term, it increases production costs. If a producer doesn’t have a plan to offset this expense, their bottom line could be at risk.
“We’re not building human capital with guest workers,” Roka said. “We’re just renting physical labor.”
Missing resources
The Department of Labor hasn’t closed any investigations into Florida pine straw operations since 2018, a trend some labor rights advocates say is more reflective of a lack of resources than systemic change in the industry.
Wage and Hour investigations of farms reached a record low in 2022 according to the Economic Policy Institute. Since then, investigative staff shrank a further 9.5%.
“The Department of Labor is vastly understaffed,” said Jeannie Economos, pesticide safety and environmental health project coordinator of the Farmworker Association of Florida. “Unless there's a large number of workers, I mean, 15, 20 or something, then they won't really have time to investigate [wage theft]. If it's one or two workers, they don't have time for it.”
Since 2003, more than 250 pine straw harvesters have participated in lawsuits against their Florida and Georgia-based employers for wage theft and workers’ rights violations.
But no pine straw labor cases have been filed in Florida since Greg Schell left Florida Legal Services in 2016.
Georgia, on the other hand, has had a flurry of pine straw cases since then, owing to Mercado-Spencer joining Georgia Legal Services.
“Who cares about this stuff? The legal aid programs. That’s it,” Schell said.
As far as they’re aware, Schell and Mercado-Spencer are the only two attorneys in the southeast who have routinely represented pine straw workers. They’ve had no shortage of cases.
“We cannot take every case that comes through our door,” Mercado-Spencer said. Even if they could, “what we get is like a grain of sand at the beach,” she added.
For advocates and lawyers alike, pine straw harvesters are one of the most difficult populations to reach.
Pine forests and their workers are concentrated in North Florida and South Georgia, rural regions where farmworker advocacy groups have little presence. The Gainesville-based Rural Women’s Health Project serves some pine-prolific counties including Suwannee and Gilchrist, but head west along the Panhandle and resources drop off.
The region is outside of the Farmworker Association of Florida’s reach.
In North Florida and the Panhandle, “the people are much less informed. They are much more marginalized and vulnerable,” Economos said. “We’ve had farmworkers tell us, ‘we thought we were slaves’ and they literally mean that.”
Since H-2 work is seasonal, workers come and go frequently. They may harvest pine straw in Live Oak for part of the year, but watermelon in Newberry or peanuts in Williston for the rest. Constant movement between cities or states makes it hard to form community ties.
Sometimes, employers encourage worker isolation.
“A lot of times, they’ll keep their workers very secluded,” said Dominique O’Connor, the group's climate justice organizer. “They have housing, they have a bar, they have a laundromat, they have a grocery store, like a closed loop system,” she said, making it hard for advocacy groups to connect.
“They’re never unsupervised,” added research coordinator Ernesto Ruiz. “Some of our organizers would go to Walmarts and try to approach them, and they'd be really suspicious or they'd be like, ‘well no our supervisor's right there.’”
If advocates connect with a worker, the stakes for sharing their story are high. If the worker gets a reputation as a troublemaker, they won’t be recruited again next year.
The next generation
Back in the pine stand, José gestured to his crew, explaining that many of them will next travel to New Jersey to pluck blueberries or Kentucky to harvest tobacco.
They’ll come back to Live Oak in September or October once the pines have dropped their needles.
“There are some people who stay,” he said. “Like us, we stay the whole time.”
Pine straw harvesting, however difficult it may be, is José’s livelihood.
His eldest child started college an hour away and his youngest just turned four. They’re on a path with more options and opportunities than their father’s, one he forged with amber-toned needles.
Copyright 2025 WUFT 89.1
