Meet the migrant workers Canadian farmers depend on to harvest their crops

To pick the perfect apple—or at least one that satisfies the fussy demands of blemish-averse Canadian shoppers—it takes swift hands and a strong back. A commercial picker has less than one second to assess an apple’s colour, size and quality, and then pluck it from a cluster of other fruit without knocking any to the ground. And they have to repeat that process a dizzying multitude of times each day, loading thousands of pounds of fruit into heavy harvest bags that will then be poured into bins bound for cold storage.

This, for the past 40 years, has been Roy Campbell’s job. Campbell lives in Montego Bay, Jamaica—or he does for four months of the year. For the other eight, he lives with seven of his fellow countrymen in a bunkhouse at Apple Hill Lavender Farm, just outside the town of Simcoe, in Norfolk County, a two-hour drive southwest of Toronto. Since first travelling to Canada in the mid-1980s as a seasonal farm worker—“I came the 23rd of July, 1985,” Campbell says, proudly rhyming off the date—he’s returned every year to the same small family farm, which grows apples and lavender. Each season, the 67-year-old earns roughly $25,000 after deductions, with he and his crew picking 50,000 pounds of apples a day.