A North Mississippi farm worker died of extreme heat exposure in early September amid one of the hottest summers in recent state history.
Obed Azahel Hernandez Perez, a 24-year-old man from Mexico, died Sept. 8 from prolonged heat exposure while harvesting sweet potatoes, according to Chickasaw County Coroner Larry Harris. In an email, Harris said the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration are investigating the incident.
OSHA began an inspection on Sept. 9 into a worker heat-related death at Alexander Farms LLC, a Vardaman sweet potato farm owned by Ryan Alexander near the Chickasaw County and Calhoun County border. It’s the first death inspection conducted by Mississippi’s only OSHA office that was listed as heat-related this year.
An OSHA Eastern Regional spokesperson said in an email to Mississippi Today that she was unable to immediately respond to questions about the incident.
Mississippi has some of the most dangerous working conditions in the country. In 2024, workers in Mississippi died at a higher rate than anywhere except Wyoming, according to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data.
This year was Chickasaw County’s hottest summer since 2011, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The temperature in nearby Calhoun City reached a high of 98 degrees Fahrenheit, according to federal data.
When Mississippi Today called Alexander Farms, an employee acknowledged the death but said she wouldn’t get into the details before hanging up the phone. The company didn’t respond to an email asking what Hernandez Perez’s job was, how long he had worked there and how the farm protects employees from heat-related dangers.
An Alexander Farms job application on the U.S. Department of Labor website says that the company planned to hire 117 seasonal farm workers this fall. The farm worker responsibilities include “all duties involved in planting, growing and harvesting corn, soybeans and sweet potatoes.”
On the application, listed duties include stooping and kneeling to pick vegetables, removing weeds, carrying bags of potatoes weighing up to 50 pounds and driving trucks and tractors. Alexander Farms lists the pay at $12.50 per hour, with a deduction of $1.15 per hour for immigrant workers who stay in company housing.
The job’s start date was about two weeks before Hernandez Perez died. Debbie Berkowitz, a former chief of staff for OSHA, told Mississippi Today that heat-related deaths are common when seasonal employees first begin their jobs.
“They’re not acclimated to do this work in high heat,” Berkowitz said.
Both the federal and Mississippi governments have few heat protections for workers. In 2024, the Department of Labor proposed a federal rule that would’ve required companies to provide their employees with shade or air-conditioning, cool drinking water and regular rest breaks whenever the felt temperature was over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. It also would’ve required employers to acclimate new workers to high heat conditions and create plans to quickly spot heat illnesses.
Two years after the rule’s initial proposal, OSHA has yet to finalize workplace heat standards. Last November, U.S. Rep. Mark Messmer, a Republican from Indiana, proposed a bill to ban OSHA from ever implementing it.
Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary for the federal agency, told Mississippi Today that national workplace heat regulations could have saved Hernandez Perez’s life.
“If that had become a standard and the employer was in full compliance with that standard, that worker would likely be alive today,” he said.
Some states implement their own workplace heat standards, but Mississippi isn’t one of them. The state uses federal workplace health standards and is one of five states that doesn’t have its own labor enforcement agency.
Other Mississippians, experiencing health effects tied to increasingly hot summers, may have died of heat exposure on the job, according to Barab. Berkowitz said it’s common for heat-related workplace deaths, like Hernandez Perez’s, to be undercounted. Workers exposed to high temperatures can die with little public notice and no follow-up investigations.
“There’s no press, nobody knows about it,” Berkowitz said.
Harris, the Chickasaw County coroner, said Hernandez Perez’s body has been transported back to Mexico.
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