It takes Manuel and about seven relatives to nurture and harvest the farm's apple and peach trees, watermelons, pumpkin, jalapeños, green peppers and other produce. He jokes that he's never even tasted some of the produce he plants, such as eggplant and butternut squash.

Low wages, no benefits: For most of the year, Manuel works six days a week, from four to 12 hours a day. He saves throughout the year for his mandatory two-month vacation in November and December when there is no work.

Today, after a dozen years with the same farmer, he makes $7.75 an hour - occasionally he makes up to $18 when picking peaches by the basket. No health insurance. No vision or dental insurance. No retirement plan.

"For me, luxury is Golden Corral because it's a buffet and you get to eat what you want," he says, referring to the home-style restaurant. "But, it's expensive - it's $10 each."

Sarahi and Annahi, the younger farmworkers, say they're saving their money from picking peaches for a trip to Disneyland and college. They both want to be teachers.

get sick, there's usually only one place they say they feel comfortable going to: Centro de Buena Salud (Good Health Center) in Brigham City. A family of four must make less than $1,667 a month to qualify for care, with more than 50 percent of their income from farming. No one asks about a person's citizenship status.

Dexter Pearce, deputy director of Community Health Centers, oversees the 10-year-old migrant health center that serves farmworkers statewide. The clinic's operating funds come from federal grants that provide for two bilingual doctors and a dentist. In 2005, the center served some 2,400 clients for diabetes, annual exams, prenatal care and depression.

Maria, 45, says the clinic helps, but it's only good for minor medical problems. She says she was worried when she had to have gallstone surgery a few months ago and didn't have the money for it. She later got a hospital charity program to help pay for it.

Farmers strained: Only 2 percent of the state's nearly 15,000 farms have a full-coverage workers' compensation plan to pay for loss of wages and unlimited medical bills. By law, only those farms that have a payroll of more than $50,000 are required to have a full-coverage compensation plan for employees and report it to the Utah Labor Commission, says Joyce Sewell, the commission's industrial accidents director.

Farms with a payroll of $8,000 or less don't have to provide any coverage; and those with payrolls from $8,000 to $50,000 are required to have full coverage or $300,000 liability insurance and $5,000 for medical care, Sewell says.

But better pay, benefits and retirement packages are big expenses for struggling farmers, says A.J. Ferguson, director of farm safety for the Utah Farm Bureau Federation.

Many don't even have a retirement plan for their own families, Ferguson says. It also would be very difficult for farmers to pay better wages and provide benefits, Ferguson says.

No documentation: Trinidad Mondragon started picking watermelons when he moved from Mexico to Texas as an undocumented immigrant some 10 years ago. Mondragon, 30, is now a U.S. resident but says he can't forget about his fellow Mexican farmworkers who do not have proper U.S. documentation.

Mondragon and Jensen say they've heard complaints from farmworkers who are never paid or have been run them off by farmers threatening to call U.S. immigration agents.

According to state law, Utah Labor Commissioner Sherrie Hayashi says, there's nothing the commission can do when farmers don't pay their employees. Farmers and farmworkers are exempt from a state law that mandates employers to pay employees. The only option is for farmworkers to take the farmer to small claims court. But, if a farmer fires a farmworker, then the employer is required to pay the employee, she says.

No more farming: Manuel Gaytan says he knows he doesn't have money. Some people would call him poor. But, he says he has done farming all these years because it's what he knows best, and it's where the Lord called him.

He later started a Bible study at his home. About 18 months ago, he started Iglesia Rios de Agua Viva, or the Rivers of Living Water Church - a group of about 30 adults and children who meet Sunday afternoons in the basement of the American Legion in Ogden.

Manuel has spent most of his life in the fields, but he says he wants more for his children and grandchildren. He dreams that they will own their own houses and get jobs outside of the fields. Farming no longer has a future because farmers are slowly selling out to developers that are turning fields into cookie-cutter homes, he says.

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