When Jon Esformes was in his 20s, farmworkers staged protests outside one of his family’s tomato farms, in California’s Central Valley, calling out the fact they were paid less than 50 cents for each bucket of produce they picked. The summer of 1989 was particularly memorable: The demonstrations were tense — strikers warned that anyone who crossed the picket line would “pay with your blood” — and then turned violent. Someone threw a rock at Esformes’ head, leaving him with a scar.

By the time Esformes became a vice president of Pacific Tomato Growers in 2008, the family’s relationship with workers hadn’t changed much. Pay had barely increased. He and the rest of Pacific’s leadership still considered outside efforts to improve working conditions in the fields to be a threat to the business. “When we heard ‘worker organization,’ the initial response was to put on the flak jacket and get ready for war,” Esformes recalled during a panel in 2018.

Many of the issues that workers had been protesting still persist at farms nationwide, fueled by the constant pressure for cheap produce and the high demand among foreign workers for U.S. jobs. But Pacific, one of America’s largest tomato growers, is a rare outlier. The company changed course by adopting reforms that many farms across America have resisted, starting with the daunting task of getting rid of the labor-market middlemen who are instrumental in recruiting foreign farmworkers — and are largely responsible for the abuse and exploitation of those workers.