Could good, affordable housing help solve farmworker shortage?

SPRECKELS — Like many farms facing labor shortages in the West, the Tanimura & Antle vegetable farm in California’s Salinas Valley was in a bind for the 2015 harvest season. It was more than 225 workers shy of the number needed to gather crops, and it had to plow under about $500,000 worth of produce.

“We were really in a panic,” said Carmen Ponce, a vice president of Tanimura & Antle. “We had gone through our waiting lists. We have been in business 33 years, and we had always had people wanting to work for us.”

Western Growers, a group representing more than 800 fruit and vegetable growers, packers and shippers, has called labor shortages the biggest problem facing its members in California, Arizona and Colorado. The number of young, recent arrivals from Mexico who could be counted on to provide farm labor is down dramatically. And although the employment of Mexican-born farmworkers in the U.S. has been steady, around 400,000 a year, those workers are aging and less inclined to move around the country from growing season to growing season.

Thinking the shortfall was caused by crackdowns on illegal immigration, the company tried what it thought was an obvious solution: make it legal. Tanimura & Antle turned to a visa program called H-2A, which allows temporary agricultural workers to cross the U.S.-Mexican border and work during harvest season. The visas require employers to provide housing, so the company started the process in 2015 by spending $17 million to build 100 apartments for workers near its headquarters here in Spreckels, near Salinas.

Then came a surprise. The farm’s worker shortage was as much about the high cost of housing as it was about crackdowns along the border.

In Salinas, Tanimura & Antle offered last year to rent some of the units to U.S.-based migrant workers who normally travel from winter jobs in Arizona to spring and summer jobs in California. Those who had declined to come before were happy to get the work when it was coupled with affordable housing. The workers were charged as little as $125 a month for a dormstyle bed in the new complex, a fraction of the cost of renting a room in the area.

Soon the roster for the 2016 harvest was full and there were plenty of hands to bring in the 2016 crop. “We thought we had to go to H-2A, but it turned out housing was really the impediment,” said Rick Antle, Tanimura & Antle’s CEO. Good, affordable housing also was a happy surprise for farmworker Apolonio Garcia, 27, who came here to work in April for the first time.

“I had heard that you have to pay like $800 for a room, plus you pay your own furniture and utilities,” Garcia said.

Tanimura & Antle’s worker apartments are comfortable and feel safe, Garcia said. “When I walked in, I said, ‘Whoa, this is nice — nicer than home,’” he said. “And it’s all your co-workers. There’s no random people walking around like in the city, so you feel safe.”

Like many U.S.-based migrant workers, Garcia’s family has a year-round home near Yuma, Ariz., which borders California’s Imperial Valley farm region, and he has worked in other California agricultural regions. Workers call it “the circuit” or “el sistema,” a few months of work in each spot.

Thousands of workers are needed in the Salinas area for growing and harvesting from April to October, as they have been for decades — harkening to the days depicted by Salinas native John Steinbeck in his novel “The Grapes of Wrath.” But they also need housing, and at a price that makes the trip worth their while.

Apartments in Salinas can cost $1,800 for two bedrooms, and they can quickly become overcrowded as a dozen people or more move into each apartment during the growing season. Farmworkers also find themselves competing for housing with service workers needed in the nearby resort area of Monterey.

“Thousands of people come, and there’s very little empty space for them to live. That combination is very bad for people,” said Lauro Barajas, regional director for the United Farm Workers union in Salinas.

It’s a huge issue for farmworkers, who often subsist on cabbage and tortillas while making barely more than enough to pay rent, said Ann Lopez, director of the Center for Farmworker Families in nearby Felton, Calif. Before they built housing, Tanimura & Angle supervisors said they found that when they would take employees home, such as after an accident or illness on the job, workers were living in closets or tool sheds.