In the labor camps, the adults will tell you kids don't work in the fields.

They'll say the children stay within the clusters of wooden shacks that house migrant workers and their families, or attend summer school while their parents tend to the crops.

"Los niños no trabajan," a woman at a farm near Salem told a visiting reporter in July.

Minutes later, foreman Leonidon Mendoza Morales arrived and told a different story. The farmworker offered a seat in his flatbed truck and sped down rocky dirt roads, past the landowner's home and into a field containing endless rows of green.

There, his 12-year-old daughter, Diana, toiled in the summer heat with four younger children. Diana's 9-year-old brother, Elvin, intermittently crouched and stood in a bramble of blackberries. Elvin's small hands, wearing stained and torn latex gloves, felt between thorns for berries to place in the bucket harnessed over his shoulders and around his waist, laden with 15 pounds of fruit.

Lax enforcement of underage labor laws and inadequate safety rules for teens are threatening the long-term health of thousands of children who work on American farms, advocates say.

Efforts to pay for closer monitoring have failed, and farm lobbyists have blocked tighter restrictions on the work children can do. The industry's most recent victory came in April, when the Obama administration killed a

plan that would have rewritten child farm rules for the first time since 1974.

The safety of children in the fields is a pressing issue in Oregon, where agriculture is an essential part of the economy.

The true extent of child labor in the state is hidden because official data do not include underage workers like Elvin. But visits to fields and interviews with farmworkers indicate it is far more widespread than statistics show.

Nearly everyone involved has an incentive to allow underage labor.

Read more

Why the White House says it's

about the decision to kill new rules for children working in agriculture.

Farmers need crops picked, farmworkers need money children bring home and advocates for workers risk alienating whole families if they broach the subject. The tenuous residency status of many Mexican-born workers also plays a role.

Parents and farm owners say much of the work done on farms can, under the right conditions, be safe, build character and benefit families.

But all children working in agriculture -- farmers' kids, teens on summer jobs and underage migrants -- face significant risks. Children on farms

as in other industries. Extreme heat, repetitive strain and exposure to toxic substances such as pesticides can create chronic health problems.

"As a society, we're basically blind to the huge health consequences incurred by children working as migrant farm laborers," said Martin Donohoe, a physician at Kaiser Sunnyside Medical Center who

. "And those effects are going to last their entire lives and impair their ability to live a happy and functional life."

The history

Elvin Jesus Mendoza Sanchez was 8 -- four years shy of the legal age -- when he first worked in Oregon's fields last year, according to the boy and his father. Diana started at age 10, she and her father said.

Elvin and Diana submit fruit buckets under their father's name.

A typical summer day for Elvin and Diana starts at 3 a.m. They help ready their younger brother and sister for Migrant Head Start, an educational program. Then, from 6 or 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., they work.

Elvin's first picking season was cut short when he developed asthma. He, Diana and their mother all suffer from the respiratory disorder, which started a few years ago.

But Leonidon Mendoza Morales, who gained U.S. citizenship in April, said his children have maintained straight-A report cards. Elvin often stays up late into the summer night with a book, reading during the only chance he gets 10 or more hours of picking.

Mendoza, 33, said he is aware of child labor laws and wanted to share his family's story publicly because "nuestra historia es la historia de todos que tienen este trabajo." Our story is the story of all who do this work.

In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act removed children permanently from coal mines and factories. But the law said almost nothing about children in the fields except to prohibit their presence during school hours.

The federal labor department went on to declare dozens of tasks too hazardous for children in nearly every U.S. industry; in agriculture, Congress did not enact any curbs on the type of work children could do until 1966.

Children today must be 18 to use heavy machinery in all other industries; the cutoff in farming is 16 for children who are unrelated to the farmer. The minimum age for hired hands to do most farm work is 12, a floor created in 1974.

No task is off limits and no age limit exists for the estimated

who work on farms run by their families.

Some parents say sending children into the fields instills a strong work ethic.

"People know there's dangers in any job they're going to do. They know what their kids are getting into. But they look at it as a good source of income and experience," said Matt Terjeson, 60, of Beaverton, who grew up working on a Pendleton ranch. Five years ago, his son Cason, 16, died after he lost control of a loaded wheat truck and slammed into a dirt embankment.

From 2001 to 2006, more than 500 children died in agriculture nationally. At least 12 children died in Oregon and Washington. Among the Oregon fatalities were a

mauled by a combine and a

crushed between two pieces of machinery.

According to the

, child farmworkers suffered more than 3,100 injuries in 2009, the last year farmers were

.

The workers in most need of protection, advocates say, are the

into agriculture each year by landowners who are not relatives -- and an unknown number of children who work off the books.

Unseen children



The experience of the Mendoza family hints at the extent to which underage children work, concealed, on farms across Oregon.

The

said Oregon farmers employed

in 2007, the latest agency estimate. There is no precise estimate of how many are age 12 to 17, much less an official count of underage workers. The

, citing informal surveys, says close to 10 percent of U.S. farmworkers are under 14.

At the farm where Mendoza's children worked in July, the work crew appeared to consist of five children and about 20 adults.

In June, the farmworkers union

found children working on three of the seven Oregon farms that union representatives visited. The share of underage workers ranged from 2 in 40 to 20 in 60.

"These kids should be at home, not exposed to dangerous pesticides," said Ramon Ramirez, the union's director.

Fears of attention from authorities, retribution from employers and lost income keep farmworker families tight-lipped about child labor.

Mendoza said his farm's owner -- fearing retribution, the foreman asked that the farmer not be named -- is probably in the dark as to how many kids pick his fruit.

Limited enforcement

Concealing the use of underage workers like Elvin is easy because state and federal agencies rarely check whether farms violate child labor law.

The

in the 1990s had a 12-person farm labor unit with full-time field investigators. Inspectors would appear unannounced to spot underage workers and other labor violations.

Budget cuts reduced the unit to one person, whose time is spent managing paperwork the bureau collects from farm employers. The agency now looks for child labor violations only when it receives complaints, which are uncommon. In the past 10 years, the labor bureau took

of farmers breaking child labor rules and issued six fines totaling $12,850, state records show.

said he has asked lawmakers about restoring the farm unit but doesn't expect to add positions soon.

The only government agency that routinely checks on farmworkers is the

, which inspects

of Oregon's 38,000 farms each year, records show. The workplace safety agency has no jurisdiction over underage labor but can refer cases to the Bureau of Labor and Industries.

An OSHA inspector visited the farm where Elvin and Diana were working with their parents in June. Leonidon Mendoza said -- and OSHA confirmed -- that the inspector saw his children and told workers to keep their children out of the fields or the state would intervene.

The inspector made no mention of the children in her report. Instead, state records show, she cited the farm labor contractor for failing to give workers a "safe practices" booklet.

Diana and Elvin spent the rest of that day at their cousin's house, away from the farm.

The next day, they returned to the fields.

Hidden hazards

When the government created safety standards for children in the fields in the 1960s, far less was known about the long-term consequences of farm work done by children like Elvin and Diana.

"From my own perspective, a lot of that labor doesn't involve machinery. It's very low-risk work," said Bruce Sorte, an Oregon State University agricultural economist. "And when I was out there picking, the whole family was there."

But traumatic and fatal injuries are not the only concern for children in agriculture.

Medical studies in the past 30 years have provided extensive evidence that farm work can create chronic health problems. Farmworkers have higher rates of cancer, reproductive problems and asthma, from which the Mendoza family suffers.

The danger to children is higher still because their immune systems are not fully formed and their bodies are small. Exposure to pesticides can cause them neurological damage, including memory loss and decreased coordination.

"We're warned not to eat the berries because of the pesticides," Diana said.

Children 12 and older are allowed to work 10 hours a day, six days a week.

Long hours of repetitive bending and picking take a toll on young bodies, including musculoskeletal breakdown, studies have found.

"We do not address ergonomic work hazards for anyone but should for youth," said Mary Miller, child labor specialist with the Washington Department of Labor and Industries.

Children are also overlooked in federal protections against pesticide exposure. The average 12-year-old weighs about 100 pounds, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has long used the body weight of 154 pounds to calculate

a typical farmworker's system can tolerate.

As a result, children are allowed to re-enter sprayed fields just as quickly as adults are.

"Chemical hazards can be a bigger issue even for older adolescents than for adults," Oregon OSHA Administrator Michael Wood said, "and that's probably a shortcoming of the entire body of protections."

New rules quashed

Pointing to the harms children face, the nation's leading occupational health institute in 2002 proposed a

of safety rules for minors in agriculture. But little happened until last year, when the Labor Department said

to act.

"Children employed in agriculture are some of the most vulnerable workers in America," U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said

. "Ensuring their welfare is a priority of the department, and this proposal is another element of our comprehensive approach."

Children would be prohibited from using

, working with

,

, working in

, or climbing to

.

Farm communities and industry leaders were outraged. More than 10,000 comments reached the Labor Department, many claiming the rules would destroy family farms -- although family farms were specifically exempted.

Cattlemen, dairy associations and farm bureaus in a dozen states hired lobbyists to fight the plan. Sympathetic members of Congress introduced the

, designed to block the regulations.

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, called the Labor Department's proposal "an outrageous assault on America's farmers."

Avakian, the Oregon labor commissioner who has lamented his small budget for inspecting farms, joined in opposition to the federal labor department initiative. He sent Solis a letter in March, citing the small number of workers' compensation claims for minors on farms as evidence the rules were unneeded.

In a recent interview, Avakian said he supported parts of the proposal, but he dislikes blanket regulations and was concerned the plan would reduce learning opportunities for children.

Meanwhile, the White House prepared to weigh in.

The

last year had determined the impact of the proposed safety rules would not be "economically significant," posing no real threat to U.S. productivity or jobs. But as opposition mounted, the office contacted the labor department with a direct request.

According to a department spokesman, the White House sent wording for a news release to be issued under Labor Department letterhead. It said the agency, out of concern for family-owned farms, was dropping its child safety proposal.

"To be clear," the

said, "this regulation will not be pursued for the duration of the Obama administration."

Tony Schick, a graduate student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, spent the summer reporting this story with funding from the school's Larry J. Waller Fellowship in Investigative Reporting and from Investigative Reporters and Editors. Contact him at 573-882-8969 or tony@ire.org.