Without it, parents face the difficult choice of either bringing their kids to the fields or not working at all.

It’s the open secret of American agriculture: The nation depends on foreign-born workers to produce its food. Seasonal, arduous, and traditionally low-paying jobs may be the backbone of the American food supply, but they’ve long fallen to laborers without American citizenship. Now, as critical labor shortages stall production across the industry, that reliance has become painfully clear. At wineries and dairies, on strawberry fields and shrimp boats, many employers have found the once-steady stream of available workers has all but dried up.

As fishing vessels stay docked, and crops are left out to rot, a question remains: Why? Especially considering that desperate agricultural employers often pay well above the minimum wage, what’s causing these positions to go unfilled? Media reports have suggested that charged rhetoric and an increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids have been factors. But the Trump administration’s hardline stance on immigration can’t fully explain why fewer laborers from Mexico are coming to work the fields since that longer-term trend began in 2005.

Now, a pair of new reports— one from the perspective of employees and the other from the perspective of employers — point to an overlooked (and far more mundane) culprit behind a growing labor crisis: lack of childcare. Seasonal farm labor is tough work for anyone. But for parents with young children, the situation can be simply untenable.