Linwood Scott III climbs two-story tobacco cropping machines with real agility and apparently no thought to falling. The sixth-generation tobacco farmer is proud of his machinery, upgraded 20 years ago and therefore relatively new. He delights in every tool and accoutrement of the cropping, curing, and baling process: every trailer, every sawed-off school bus that pulls those trailers, every conveyor belt, every one of his 200 small curing barns.Scott, in his early fifties, is from Lucama, North
Eleazar was 24 in 2014, when he began working seasonally with a H-2A visa for temporary agricultural workers at a tobacco farm in Benson, North Carolina.
Farms are allowed to hire foreign workers through the H-2A visa program to help fill labor gaps. But some farms favored H-2A farmworkers over U.S.-based farmworkers.