A blight in the fields
As farms hurt for labor, households could feel the pain
“There’s nothing better than a hand-picked crop. But there’s the minimum wage, the cost. The bottom line is, we have to compete.” Jeff Percy
Castroville, Calif.-based grower Ocean Mist A machine mounted on a tractor thins lettuce seedlings, a job usually done by hand, at an Ocean Mist farm near Thermal, Calif. JAY CALDERON/USA TODAY NETWORK
COACHELLA, Calif. – On a recent sunny morning, Isidro Fuentes spent several hours thinning out 2-week-old rows of romaine lettuce.
In years past, that job would have been done by 30 people. But today Fuentes, 56, sits alone atop a tractor with a special mechanical attachment that handles the entire operation. “This is the future,” he says. The future, in fact, has many farmers nervous. The company Fuentes works for provides labor to Ocean Mist Farms, which has begun turning to automation because farmworkers are in short supply and increasingly costly.
“There’s nothing better than a hand-picked crop,” says Jeff Percy, vice president of southern production for Castroville-based Ocean Mist, the country’s largest grower of fresh artichokes.
“But there’s the minimum wage, the
cost,” he says. “The bottom line is, we have to compete.”
California farmers, anchors of a $50billion-a-year industry that represents 13 percent of the nation’s agricultural value and is a crucial source of its produce and milk, face an unprecedented squeeze on their livelihoods that could have repercussions in households from coast to coast.
Beyond a decade-in-the-making labor shortage, spurred in part by a lack of replacements for an aging workforce, California’s newly enacted overtime pay law and the Trump administration’s tense rhetoric over illegal immigration have ratcheted up concern among farmers and those they rely on to work the land.
Farmworkers, who once crossed the Mexican border routinely for seasonal work in el Norte, are afraid of making the trip, effectively cutting off the supply of labor south of the border.
Farmers, increasingly faced with more than a 20 percent shortfall in field staffing, often are forced to leave lucrative crops to die on the vine or sell highpriced goods such as strawberries to jam manufacturers at a reduced rate.
Searching for answers
Some farms, such as Ocean Mist, hope to turn the financial tide by relying on robots and mechanization. Others have elected to grapple with cumbersome H-2A visa program paperwork to temporarily import an international labor force.
The most blunt of agriculture veterans simply say their futures may involve shifting to less labor-intensive crops, perhaps operating solely out of Mexicobased operations or possibly shuttering their businesses altogether.
“Because we have little control over market pricing, we’ll be forced to look at other options,” says Steve Maddox, managing partner of Maddox Farms in Riverside County just east of Los Angeles, which has 3,000 dairy cows. It also grows almonds and grapes.
Experts warn that any of those avenues could lead to higher prices in grocery stores nationally.
“If you want your food grown in the
U.S., we need to find a way to have a legal and stable labor supply for farmers,” says Bryan Little, director of employment policy for the California Farm Bureau Federation.
The bureau’s most recent survey of state farmers, conducted in 2017, showed that 55 percent of respondents said they had experienced labor shortages, and a third delayed harvesting, eliminated crops and neglected critical tasks such as pruning as a result.
President Donald Trump recently suggested help was on the way, leaning on his administration’s commitment to streamline the visa process.
“You need these people,” Trump told a gathering of the American Farm Bureau Federation in New Orleans on Jan. 15. “We’re going to make it easier.”
But the H-2A visa program remains unchanged.
Democratic lawmakers instead focus on creating a path to citizenship for farmworkers who have made a commitment to the industry.
A recent Pew Research Center study estimated that in 2016, there were 10.7 million undocumented workers in the USA, and a quarter of them worked on farms. Of those, roughly half were undocumented.
On Jan. 17, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., introduced the Agricultural Worker Program Act, which would grant “blue card” status to immigrants who have worked in agriculture for at least 100 days over
the past two years. That card could lead to a residency permit within a few years.
Although cautiously optimistic that new legislation could provide a respite for farmers looking to keep longtime workers from returning home permanently, Lofgren says the possibility of citizenship causes “some right-wing talk show hosts to scream amnesty.”
“Looking at it that way doesn’t help our country,” she says. “There’s no line of people begging to pick crops. The pay is not bad, but people don’t want to do it. It’s very tough work.”
California’s farmers aren’t counting on an immigration overhaul to safeguard their operations, many of which have been in their families for generations.
They are finding other ways to deal with a reality that could threaten their businesses.
“You’ll see different models for how farmers will pencil this out,” says Carolyn O’Donnell of the California Strawberry Commission, which represents 315 growers.
“With each development, it puts farmers into problem-solving mode,” she says. “And yes, if they can convince (produce) wholesalers to accept a higher price for their goods, the price will be passed along to consumers.”
‘The way the world goes around’
Between young people not wanting to do farm work and issues with immigration, farmers struggle for answers, says Jerry Pearson, a farm-side labor attorney with Young and Wooldridge in Bakersfield.
“So maybe first you’ll see a lesser grade of avocado or orange in the store, or you’ll go to Whole Foods and start paying even more. But if farmers are paying more for labor, then stores will pay more for produce and on down the line. It’s the way the world goes around,” Pearson says.
Farmworkers, the people who do the back-breaking cultivation work that no one else seems to want to do, are caught in the middle, crushed between market forces and heated immigration rhetoric, and there is no easy solution in sight.
The next time you stop to pick up a basket of blueberries or a head of lettuce, don’t take it – or its price – for granted, says Farm Bureau labor expert Little.
“The farm labor shortage is not just our problem,” he says. “If you want safe and wholesome and affordable food at home, we need to find a way to fix this.”