Farmers becoming desperate for labor

STOCKTON, Calif. — Arnulfo Solorio’s desperate mission to recruit farmworkers for the Napa Valley took him far from the vineyards to a raggedy parking lot in Stockton, in the heart of the Central Valley.

Carrying a stack of business cards for his company, Silverado Farming, Solorio approached one prospect, a man with only his bottom set of teeth. He told Solorio that farm work in Stockton pays $11 to $12 an hour. Solorio countered: “Look, we are paying $14.50 now, but we are going up to $16.” The man nodded skeptically.

Solorio moved on to two men huddled nearby, and returned quickly.

“They were drug addicts,” he said. “And they didn’t have a car.”

Before the day was through, Solorio would make the same pitch to dozens of men and women, approaching a taco truck, a restaurant and a homeless encampment. He needed to find 100 workers to fill his ranks by April 1, when grapevines begin to grow and need constant attention.

Solorio is one of a growing number of agricultural businessmen who say they face an urgent shortage of workers. The flow of labor began drying up when President Barack Obama tightened the border. Now President Donald Trump is promising to deport more people, raid more companies and build a wall.

That has made California farms a proving ground for the Trump team’s theory that by cutting off the flow of immigrants they will free up more jobs for U.S.-born workers and push up their wages. So far, the results aren’t encouraging for farmers or domestic workers.

Farmers are being forced to make hard choices about whether to abandon some of the state’s hallmark fruits and vegetables, move operations abroad, import workers under a special visa or replace them with machines.

Growers who can afford it have already begun raising worker pay well beyond minimum wage. Wages for crop production in California rose 13 percent from 2010 to 2015, twice as fast as average pay in the state, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Today, farmworkers in the state earn about $30,000 a year if they work full time, about half the overall average pay in California. Most work fewer hours.

Some farmers are even giving laborers benefits normally reserved for white-