At a Watsonville, Calif., strawberry field, a gaggle of the agriculturally curious — a state representative’s aide, an anthropologist, a food service company employee — gathered around Ann Lopez, whose voice gained intensity as she careened through a farm worker’s tale of woe: pesticide exposure, low wages, backbreaking labor.

Lopez, a Santa Cruz-based activist and academic, was leading one of the “Farmworker Reality Tours” that her nonprofit, the Center for Farmworker Families, hosts about five times a year. Lopez is on an evangelist’s mission: to show and tell everyone she meets about the plight of Mexican migrants who toil in California fields.

“I think the only way it’s going to change,” Lopez said, “is if the public says, ‘No more.’ “

Even in California, a pro-labor state brimming with principled foodies, farmers are mostly adored and farmworkers ignored. Just 13 states — including six in the West — require employers to offer worker’s compensation, and less than half protect farmworkers’ right to form unions, guaranteed to most other laborers. Lopez hopes increased awareness will make a difference, but as recent attempts to reform labor laws show, fixing a system that relies on cheap labor to turn a profit is not easy.

On a typical day, California strawberry pickers, paid in part by the size of their harvest, perform a stoop-shouldered race down plastic-covered rows, picking and packing fruit. “Roberto,” one of the workers on the tour, left his farm in Jalisco 12 years ago to work in Watsonville because he couldn’t find a steady job in Mexico. He now earns about $16,000 a year.

Tour-goers began by picking strawberries. The fruit was organic, to prevent chemical exposure; true reality could be a little too dangerous. But 30 minutes of bending, stooping and twisting berries off the stem got the point across.

Next, the group squeezed into Roberto’s one-bedroom house, four at a time, through a vestibule serving as a kitchen-cum-laundry room. Stepping past a tiny living room, they peered into a bedroom stuffed with three beds and a handful of skinny children. Rent runs $850 a month, Roberto says.