Place Name: First Place Contestant Name: The Desert Sun Entry Title: Desert Sun: Fear in the fields Entry Credit: Rebecca Plevin Judge Comment: Overall, solid reporting on how the pandemic impacted farm workers in your community. I admired your success in getting former COVID sufferers to come forward and share their stories. The writing did a great job in placing a human face on the situation.
Place Name: Second Place Contestant Name: Los Angeles Times Entry Title: The struggles of California farmworkers Entry Credit: Anita Chabria Judge Comment: Overall, great job in capturing the challenges faced by farm workers in the Central Valley. I admire the reporter's tenacity in reaching out to the workers to record their stories. I learned more about how bad the COVID pandemic impacted the state's farm labor.
Place Name: Third Place Contestant Name: The Press Democrat Entry Title: Community in crisis struggling to survive (Oct. 18, 2020) Entry Credit: Martin Espinoza Judge Comment: Excellent reporting that gives readers a great sense of the challenges faced by undocumented farm workers. I admire your publication's work in giving them a voice and showing how the wildfires devastated the grape industry.
Place Name: Fourth Place Contestant Name: San Francisco Chronicle Entry Title: San Francisco Chronicle: California Agriculture's Climate Challenge Entry Credit: Esther Mobley, JD Morris Judge Comment: A nice set of stories that vividly illustrate the impacts of climate change on the different ag industries. The problem is that the profile of the small winery didn't fit the climate change angle - it was more of a COVID story. The Steinbeck Country angle was interesting, but the references to his writings were pretty thin.
Place Name: Fifth Place Contestant Name: Los Angeles Times Entry Title: The future of ag Entry Credit: L.A. Times Staff Judge Comment: Most of the stories were good - the strongest was the feature on the cattle market. The cow poop story had a great start, but it got bogged down in dry figures that often lost my attention. The phony meat guy was a great profile subject, but the feature was too broad and could have been broken into a series of shorter stories. I wanted to know more about how the hell those burgers are made but there were too few details.
