… But while Congress has had many chances to bolster labor protections in the 18 versions of the farm bill it has passed since 1933, it has instead largely ignored the needs of the workers who plant, tend, harvest, and process the nation’s food.

As climate change worsens, this disregard for the food system’s “essential workers” is increasingly hard to justify. Several studies have associated extreme heat with excess cardiovascular deaths. Last July, during a record-breaking heat wave in Florida, farmworker Efrain Lopez Garcia told his coworkers he was feeling sick. They found his body a few hours later near a grove of longan trees where he’d been picking fruit. That same month, Dario Mendoza collapsed and died in the fields outside Yuma, Arizona, where most of the country’s winter vegetables are grown; the heat index that day had hit 116 degrees.

Both of these men would have benefited from increased worker protections — safeguards the farm bill could provide. The legislation has long supported farm owners, through federal crop insurance and other programs; when things go wrong for farmers, the government is there to help. Yet Congress continues to treat labor as being outside the legislation’s purview…