Over the past year, I’ve reported at length about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America.

I haven’t stopped thinking about how they suffered. Their wages were stolen, guns were pointed in their faces, and one woman I met was held captive, raped and nearly killed.

As I wrote those stories, there was something else I couldn’t stop thinking about — something I keep thinking about: Whenever I go to the grocery store, I have no easy way of knowing if the fruits and vegetables I put in my cart are part of the problem I’ve documented.

I eat a lot of blueberries, which happen to be the fruit grown most in the state where I live, Georgia, and the state where I tracked these abuses. During the long drives back and forth between my home in Atlanta and my reporting trips in the rural South, I had a lot of time to consider how little we know about the farms that feed us.

I struggled with the disconnect between the problems on America’s farms and the limited awareness of those problems in most American households. I felt that disconnect in my own kitchen, every time I reached for the berries in my fridge.

I wanted to know: With enough digging, would it be possible to determine if the blueberries I’m buying come from farms with a record of mistreating workers?

Federal regulators don’t require blueberry brands to disclose on their packaging any information about the individual farms they buy from. So I had to spend time — a lot of time — trying to figure........

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