Enter Collier county, Florida. A classic tale of two towns. On the one hand you have Naples, the nation’s second-wealthiest metropolitan area. On the other, Immokalee, dubbed by Barry Estabrook (of Tomatoland) the "tomato capital of the United States of America". Now, I know what you're thinking, "Oh Immokalee!? Yeah, they produce like 90% of the fresh domestic tomatoes consumed in winter/spring months in the US right? What are they, the nation's third wealthiest metropolitan area?". Well, believe it or not, despite keeping us rolling in tomatoes for the better half of each year, Immokalee is not one of the nation's wealthiest metropolitan areas. Indeed, with a per capita income of around $8,500 you would be hard pressed to find the words "wealthy" and "Immokalee" used in all but the most ironic of conjunctions.

In early December, our film crew arrived in Immokalee. We had passed through a number of times before on previous filming forays into Florida, however it was our intention this go round to spend a week learning as much as we could about the day to day life of the farm workers who have come from all over to scrape out a living in this muggy swamp town. With the help of the good folks at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers we were able to spend time sitting and talking with workers from a wide range of backgrounds, about their lives before coming to Immokalee, their hopes and dreams for their families, the daily struggles they face, and why we should care about where our food comes from and the people who labor to harvest it.

The series above is my attempt to capture a day in the life of these workers in Immokalee, from the 4am wakeup, to the long walk to drop kids off at a nursery (for which they might pay as much as half their day's wages), to the hours spent waiting on the bus and being shuttled back and forth to the fields (unpaid), to the muggy trudging of the rows deftly filling and rushing buckets to the waiting trucks in the hope of garnering a piece rate increase that will bump them over the minimum wage, another dirty exhausted bus ride back, the trudge home to a crowded trailer and family (if you're lucky), or to one of the downtrodden bars and a phone to call back to the family left behind out of love and a desire to carve a better path for them...to wake up another morning and repeat