Costa Farms turned escalating risks into a comprehensive readiness plan built on communication, technology, and cross-functional teamwork.
When Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville, North Carolina, in late 2024, Costa Farms, one of North America's largest plant growers, faced a costly reality check. "We never would have expected the kind of damage that Hurricane Helene created," reflected Arianna Cabrera de Oña, SVP, Chief People Officer, and General Counsel. The company's Carolinas facilities and their surrounding areas — places they hadn't considered at high risk for hurricane damage — suffered damage while its Florida operations remained unscathed. The message was clear: operational and workforce risks are changing in ways that demand continuous adaptation.
Costa Farms has developed a comprehensive approach to protecting workers from escalating risks. Through innovative microclimate monitoring, structured communication systems, and close collaboration between safety and HR teams, Costa Farms shows how employers can turn climate challenges into opportunities to build stronger workforces.
Costa Farms grows approximately 100 million plants annually across seven production facilities spanning the southeastern United States. During peak season, roughly 3,500 of their 5,500 employees work in non-climate-controlled environments, making them particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, storms, and other weather events. But rather than viewing climate risks as an insurmountable challenge, the company has systematically built programs that protect its workforce while maintaining business productivity.
For Costa Farms, the reality of these impacts has always been present; extreme heat and storms are inherent to agricultural work.
Cesar Martinez, Senior Director for Environmental Health and Safety at Costa Farms, noted that agriculture is consistently among the top industries for injuries and lost time. "We work in an industry with heavy equipment, heat, storms, moving parts, exertion from work…You name it," he said.
But as conditions have intensified, so has the company's approach to managing these risks. Rather than trying to prevent or avoid heat — an impossible goal for an industry dependent on sunshine — Costa Farms decided to learn how to work safely within it.
"It went off like a light bulb in my head," Martinez recalled. "Heat isn't going anywhere. It's a key input to our product. We can either learn to work with it, or we can stick our head in the sand and hope it goes away, which is not going to happen. We decided to take the approach that we're going to figure out how to thrive within it instead of trying to hide from it."
This shift from trying to prevent the inevitable to focusing on adaptation and resilience is central to Costa Farms' strategy.
Costa Farms created daily communication touchpoints with every employee through five-minute huddles.
"Every single day, with every single person on our farms, we talk about safety, quality, and productivity — in that order," de Oña explained. "We have just under 300 of these five-minute huddles daily because we don't want huge groups. We want groups to be safe spaces where people will speak up."
These huddles serve multiple critical functions:
Information dissemination: Workers receive daily updates on weather conditions, heat risks, and protective measures. During storm season, teams discuss preparation protocols and what to expect.
Two-way dialogue: Workers can raise concerns about conditions they're experiencing, from water that wasn't cold enough to emerging hazards they've observed.
Rapid response system: Issues raised in morning huddles reach supervisors by early afternoon and senior leadership shortly thereafter, enabling quick corrective action. "By the afternoon, concerns that came up get to the VP level of that area," de Oña noted. "People are encouraged to report things they see and point things out."
The impact of this communication infrastructure became visible in their employee engagement surveys: 94% of respondents recognized they understood heat safety and had the tools they needed — a dramatic improvement from before Costa Farms intensified its multi-channel communication efforts.
Costa Farms employs an on-site nurse who rotates across facilities, participating directly in the five-minute huddles and providing ongoing education about heat illness recognition, hydration strategies, and nutrition choices that impact heat tolerance.
"She talks about things ranging from how to look at the color of your urine to understand if you're dehydrated, to what you should be eating on the weekends versus what you shouldn't be eating or drinking that might impact you during the work week," de Oña said. "She trains people on CPR and signs of heat illness and heat stroke."
Workers receive training on recognizing signs of distress in their colleagues, creating a culture of mutual care and vigilance. "With this many people out there, we have to empower people with knowledge and information so they can be the first responders, to be sure that people are healthy," she said.
Costa Farms also developed Costa Heat Shield — a system that leverages existing agricultural sensors to create location-specific heat alerts.
How it works: Rather than applying uniform heat policies across large geographic areas, Costa Heat Shield uses wet bulb globe temperature (which accounts for heat, humidity, wind, and surface radiation) to generate microclimate-specific alerts. When high temperature thresholds are reached, supervisors and leadership receive notifications triggering heat response protocols, including increased break frequency, additional hydration stations, enhanced monitoring, and modified work schedules.
The implementation: Costa Farms rolled out the system in South Florida in 2024, with plans to expand across their facilities in 2025 and 2026.
The low-cost advantage: One of the most compelling aspects of Costa Heat Shield is its affordability. Because Costa Farms already had thousands of sensors measuring moisture, humidity, and temperature for plant cultivation, they repurposed existing technology for this new system.
A critical element of Costa Farms' approach is intentional integration between the company's safety and human resources divisions.
Physical proximity: "Our teams actually sit together, so they share spaces," de Oña explained. This creates organic channels for information sharing and collaboration.
Shared training: The company regularly conducts joint training sessions, inviting safety team members to HR development programs and vice versa, ensuring both teams understand each other's priorities and constraints.
Cultural integration: The collaboration extends into workplace culture, from joint participation in company events to a genuine friendship between Martinez and de Oña that models the partnership they want their teams to embody.
"It's very important that we foster that relationship and foster that trust between the teams," de Oña said. When a hurricane approaches or a heat wave strikes, teams that already trust and understand each other can coordinate responses far more effectively.
Costa Farms' experience offers actionable lessons for employers addressing climate-driven workforce health risks:
The goal, Martinez explained, is to build a culture where employees trust one another and feel a shared sense of accountability for each other’s safety. "If you take a step back and just look out, like, is that my family member out there? What can I do to keep them safer?" Martinez explained. "Then it kind of drives the behaviors or your thought process as to what you want to do."
He acknowledged the business realities around profitability and efficiency, but insisted these can coexist with worker safety. "How do we be efficient and make money and provide value to our shareholders and all those things, but also, most importantly, keep our people safe?" he said. "If people take a step back and just think about it from an empathetic standpoint — as if this was a family member — that kind of drives the direction you need to go down."
Before investing in technology or equipment, establish systems to enable daily touchpoints with workers. Costa Farms' five-minute huddles create the foundation for everything else, providing a daily avenue to disseminate information, gather feedback, and enable quick responses.
De Oña emphasized that communication must be multi-channel and repetitive: "There is no one size fits all." Different workers access information differently — through posters, huddles, nurse visits, supervisor conversations, and written materials. "We had the right practices in place, but we needed to communicate them better and more often," she said. "Through repetition, people really started to understand the importance of it."
Climate risks don't fit neatly into one department. Physical proximity, shared training, and strong relationships between safety and HR enable the coordination required to build climate resilience. At Costa Farms, HR and safety both interact with employees and encounter information the other needs: "There are things that safety hears that need to come to us, and there are things that we hear as an HR team that need to go to safety," de Oña said.
Costa Farms's heat monitoring system works because it leverages sensors already deployed for agricultural purposes. Before investing in new infrastructure, consider whether existing resources can be extended or repurposed for climate resilience.
"Compliance for us is just a bare minimum," de Oña emphasized. "It's not just about following the rules. It's about doing the right thing. At a bare minimum, we have to follow the rules, but that's not where we stop."
Costa Farms regularly presents at industry events and collaborates with Miami-Dade County to share best practices with other employers, including smaller farms. The grower recognizes that sharing knowledge strengthens entire industries and helps protect vulnerable workers who might otherwise lack access to such resources.
Climate preparedness requires continuous learning, adaptation, and investment. Costa Farms' story shows what's possible when employers commit to protecting their people, breaking down organizational and communication silos, and building smart systems that enable rapid response to extreme weather.
The company's approach offers practical guidance for employers across industries grappling with more frequent and severe climate risks. Costa Farms proves that values-driven action can strengthen worker safety and organizational resilience.
"At the end of the day, we're trying to just do the right thing by our people," Martinez said.
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The National Commission on Climate and Workforce Health is a group of business, health, and climate leaders who share a mission to protect workers from the health risks posed by extreme weather. The Commission develops tools, resources, and recommendations to help employers build climate-resilient workforces.
The Commission was created by the Health Action Alliance in partnership with Mercer and with strategic input from the CDC Foundation. Additional support for the initiative is being provided by Elevance Health and The Hartford.
For more information and resources, visit climatehealthcommission.org or contact Climate@HealthAction.org.
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