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Several occupants of the trailer said a labor contractor arranged the housing. They said they pay $30 each, every week, to a landlord who comes on weekends to collect rent. That amounts to about $650 a month in rent, roughly the same as a North Raleigh apartment with amenities such as air conditioning and a community pool.

Greg Schell, a Florida lawyer who has sued Ag-Mart over housing, said that not owning housing allows flexibility for the young company, whose tomatoes have been on the market only a decade.

"The farmers who have been there a long time, they have their housing set up," said Schell, head of the Farmworker Justice Project for Florida Legal Services, which advocates for the poor. "But anybody coming in new, like Ag-Mart, it's really expensive. And if they want to move to a different area, they don't want to be stuck with a bunch of housing."

Hidden workers

Worker advocates say the company's housing policy leaves many of its workers without resources that are important to public health and child welfare. When housing isn't registered, workers are often hidden from those who provide health care or child care.

Christine Alvarado, who runs Migrant Head Start, a federally funded child-care and resource center, said that when she can't reach workers, they don't have access to immunizations that protect against contagious disease, dental care or health clinics that could save them visits to emergency rooms. They don't benefit from English classes or parenting classes, which help their children in school. Without child care, they often leave their children home alone or take them to the fields.

"Every year, we have a child bitten by a snake or somebody who falls in a ditch," Alvarado said. "Every single year, we have something that happens because kids are in the fields."

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