In a melon field near Papago Road, migrant farmworkers are picking and boxing ripe Golden Honeydew on a mobile packing platform.

It’s the dawn of another October harvest day in Hidden Valley.

The vermillion sunrise backlights workers’ laboring profiles gently stepping through the melon veins. They race against record-breaking temperatures as the mercury flirts with triple-digit temperatures by the end of a field shift at 2 p.m.

The crew of about 20 farmworkers are hustling the back-breaking harvest after riding in on a yellow school bus down a farm road of thick dust. The bus remains parked near the field to transport the crew to the next ripened field.

Ever Manfredo Samayoa Orozco, 37, is one among the Guatemalan melon-picking team working for Scottsdale-based Martori Farms, which specializes in growing cantaloupe, watermelon, traditional honeydew, Golden Honeydew and the Kandy Lemon Drop Melon in Arizona and California.

“I have been working as an agricultural worker with H-2A [work visa] status for 13 years,” Orozco said in Spanish through an interpreter, all but two of those seasons in Hidden Valley. He said he started in Trenton, N.J., then moved to work in the fields near Maricopa.

Asked about the migrant lifestyle of a farmworker, Orozco said: “It is very difficult to leave our loved ones, but we have to do it to give them a better life. Here, life is totally different from our country, both in terms of language and how difficult it is to adapt, however, we do our work with pride.”

Orozco’s wife, Emma Nelly Gonzalez Cardona, and his 10-year-old son, Dilan Manfredo Samayoa Cardona, live in the Jutiapa-El Progreso region of southern Guatemala.

“In Guatemala, I am a farmer of basic grains: corn, beans and vegetables,” said Orozco, who returns home during Arizona’s offseason. “Thanks to your country I have been able to build a house for my family and give my son an education.”

H-2A visas are acquired through the farm company. The company is required to reimburse farmworkers for any visa expenses.

The employer is also required to provide lodging and travel expenses.

Orozco said he was happy with his company’s living conditions nearby.

The migrant is required to provide receipts to employers. The employer pays for 75% of the worker’s contract and housing costs while in the U.S. as well as 100% of transportation and food. The government covers the rest.

The average earnings for a farmworker are $14.35 per hour, or about $115 a day.

That compares to only $24 a day in Guatemala, or $3 an hour.

Orozco has perhaps the most appealing job on the line, driving the tractor that pulls the mobile packing platform. He has performed every job in the melon field over the years because it is typical for farmworkers to rotate positions on the cutter and packer lines.

While Orozco slowly steers the tractor at a crawl, there are teams of pickers, packers and box stackers who move in tandem.

The first farmworkers are on the ground. Using curved box-cutter-style blades, they gently cut the melon stems from the fruit with deliberate and precise actions. They flip the melons to packers on a rolling platform who box up the melons on a tabletop. A third team stacks the boxes on the rolling platform pulled by Orozco’s tractor.

Across Papago Road at Rob’s Convenience Store, harvest crew supervisors park their pickup trucks and take 5-gallon jugs inside the store to fill them up with water purified using reverse osmosis.

Tap water in this part of Hidden Valley is not drinkable and is often considered unhealthy. It is tainted with nitrates and arsenic, toxic byproducts of agricultural chemicals of the past, said the store’s owner Rob Del Cotto.

The water problem gave Del Cotto an idea 16 years ago when he opened the store in the strip mall owned by his brother, Rand. Rob bought a reverse osmosis water treatment system and sells water to hydrate the agricultural workforce in the surrounding fields.

“I live right down the street,” Rob Del Cotto said. “You can’t drink the water. It’s horrible.”

Rob’s newly upgraded system today produces about 5½ gallons per minute. Residents living near the store also come in to fill up on water for cooking and drinking.

You could call Rob Del Cotto’s water system “trickle out” economics, a retail ripple effect of the farm-to-store economy.

He fondly calls the retired school buses painted white that move the migrants around “the magic buses,” after the 1960s song by The Who. They come and go at all times of night to capitalize on cooler temperatures and during store hours bring in that magic dollar to the Del Cotto family. Rand’s daughter, Randi, also works at the store.

Martori has an ice and water contract with Rob’s Convenience Store.

Alonzo Chavez, a longtime Martori supervisor, was filling up water containers and loading them in the back of his truck to refresh farmworkers, who are given plenty of breaks in the intense heat to hydrate in the fields.

“All of the people here in the field are Guatemalans,” said Chavez, himself a Mexican farmworker from San Luis Potosí.

He said he’s worked in the fields in and around Maricopa for 25 years.

There are an estimated 2.4 million hired farmworkers in the U.S., including migrant, seasonal, year-round and guest program workers.

Thousands of them work in fields around Maricopa.

The Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, which advocates for migrant farmworkers, describes each Maricopa migrant laborer as “the farmworker who much of society never sees or considers.”

“The farmworker who, in bitter cold and extreme heat, plants, tends and harvests the food we eat every day,” AFOP’s statement to InMaricopa continued. “The farmworker who often makes too little in pay to afford the very foodstuffs he or she picks. The farmworker who, despite these challenges, makes the necessary sacrifices to ensure his or her children get a good education. AFOP salutes these unsung heroes.”

Correction: A version of this story that appeared in print misstated that average migrant farmworker wages were $7.25 per hour. The correct number was $14.35 per hour.