Ag Commissioner on Heat-Related Farm Deaths: Blame Humans, Not Climate

Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson told state lawmakers Tuesday morning that human error was to blame for heat-related deaths on farms, which he described as few and far between.

Between 2017 and 2024, employers in the state’s farming industry reported seven deaths from heat stroke, heat exhaustion, or other heat-related illnesses to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Florida’s sweltering heat became one of the hottest topics for lawmakers last year as the Republican-led Legislature passed a law prohibiting local governments from enacting their own heat-safety protections for employees.




“It is unfortunate that with 2 million people a day going to work in agriculture that, you know, maybe we have a fatality every 10, 15, 20 years, you’ll hear a fatality at a farm or something, a heat-related fatality,” he said during a meeting of the House Housing, Agriculture, and Tourism Subcommittee. “And so, then what happens is government and its infinite wisdom comes in and says, ‘Oh, well, we need to fix this. We’re going to regulate agriculture.’”

Florida temperatures and heat indexes — what the temperature feels like — can reach deadly highs outside of summer. The most recent heat-related death OSHA is investigating on a farm happened on Dec. 4, 2023, when a 42-year-old man harvesting oranges in DeSoto County started to act erratically and died from heatstroke and rhabdomyolysis, which causes muscle tissue to die from heat stress and prolonged physical exertion.

Simpson addressed heat safety regulations in front of the committee after South Florida Democratic Rep. Felicia Robinson asked him whether heat protections were necessary for agricultural work. The commissioner, who has recently been cast into the dispute between the leaders of the Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis over handling of unauthorized immigration, characterized the deaths as inevitable but said regulations weren’t necessary because farmers don’t want to harm their workers.

“Generally, when you have any type of fatality, there was a human error involved in the fatality. That’s the unfortunate downside, as long as you have people doing these things, those things are going to happen,” Simpson said.

A House Democrat is still trying to pass protections

Despite last year’s defeat of heat safety regulations, Broward Democratic Rep. Michael Gottlieb filed a bill in December to require employers to provide shade and drinking water to outdoor workers. Specifically, the bill calls for 10-minute water breaks every two hours when the heat index reaches 90 degrees.

“I really don’t understand how difficult it is to allow ice breaks, water breaks, access to water without having to walk 15 minutes,” Gottlieb said in a phone interview with Florida Phoenix. “I’ve heard stories from farmworkers that they have to walk 15 minutes but they only get a 15-minute break, so it’s prohibited. So, from my perspective, I really don’t understand why there’s so much pushback against the bill that could really save people’s lives and make Florida more productive.”

Simpson on Tuesday said such regulations would harm the farming industry.

“What you’re doing is you’re putting another regulatory structure in place that hampers the farmer from being able to get that crop out of the field, and so I think that farmers have clearly shown the ability to manage their employees and manage these types of problems,” he said.

–Jackie Llanos, Florida Phoenix