There’s no question the employees on two Half Moon Bay mushroom farms lived in desperate circumstances. Many of their homes were flimsy shacks propped up on wooden pallets. The roofs leaked. There was often no running water or kitchens.
“There are laws on the books, but they just aren’t enforced,” said Ann López, director of the nonprofit Center for Farmworker Families in Santa Cruz County. “I see the issue as systemic.” “These are large farms,” Callagy said. “We don’t typically have a right to go onto a location in an exploratory look for housing or violations. Mostly it’s complaint driven.”
“I think finding unpermitted housing is one of the things that counties do, and penalizing people who construct housing without permits,” Alkon said. “It’s kind of their job, in my opinion, to seek out these exploitative practices and find them and enforce their laws. But that doesn’t tend to be the way they work.”
The company, however, isn’t new to farming in California. State records show California Terra Garden was incorporated in 2013 as a privately-owned “fresh mushroom wholesale” company, initially in Foster City and most recently in Commerce. It lists Xianmin Guan as chief executive and Liming Zhu as secretary. They also are associated with a Pescadero Terra Garden Inc. “mushroom farm,” down the coast from Half Moon Bay, incorporated in 2015, as well as Ventura Terra Garden Inc.
Bay Area News Group spoke to a married couple who worked at Concord Farms for seven years and said they slept on the property in a tiny room just big enough for a bed and two drawers to hold their belongings. The couple — Chinese immigrants who declined to give their names out of fear of retaliation by their bosses — described a dormitory-type structure where people lived in small, individual rooms, many of which had no running water, they said.