Labor cost, immigration rules push Osceola farmers to U-Pick business model
Mick Farms’ Aaron Mick doesn’t have the ability to hire any labor to pick crops, due to rising costs. Instead, he uses his eight children and his wife to work seven days a week at their 32-acre farm in St. Cloud, where they grow strawberries, pumpkins and other crops.
“It depends on the season but right now we’ll spend six to eight hours a day picking and packing stuff,” Mick said. “And then me and my oldest son get up early and we do a lot of the field work and stuff before the other kids get up and then we stay out late.”
Mick and his eldest son, 19, wake up around 4:30 a.m. picking crops, some days until 10 or 11 p.m., he said. His younger children are homeschooled in the morning and then pick crops in the afternoon.
Blueberry season runs from March to early May and in 2022 the Florida Farm Bureau expected 20 million pounds of berries to be produced. Each berry is grown, picked and packaged, a process that in Osceola County has become increasingly difficult for farmers of all crops due to housing for laborers and rising costs.
Farmers have had to find creative ways to stay in business including using machines to pick blueberries or selling directly to consumers who pick the fruits themselves.
Immigration, housing rules collide
Denton Chapman oversees everything blueberry-related at Double C Bar Ranch in Kenansville. Historically, he has contracted immigrant workers with seasonal visas, or H-2A visas, to pick his blueberries because domestic workers are hard to find. This year, he has none to pick his over 15,000 pounds of blueberries per acre.
Temporary agricultural workers are able to enter the country under the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration’s H-2A visa program for one-year increments until three consecutive years are reached. Then they are required to return to their home country for three months before becoming eligible to start the process again. The spouse and unmarried children under the age of 21 of an H-2A visa worker are allowed to seek admission through a different visa program but cannot work.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a new requirement that employers have to pay H-2A workers a minimum of $14.33 per hour in Florida at the time work is performed. The year prior, the requirement was around $12.40.
This new requirement bumped up pay by 16% for 2,000 workers in the middle of their season for labor contractor Julio Cruz, owner of AG Labor in Plant City. Depending on weather and the type of crop, Cruz said his crews can spend up to seven days a week picking crops for eight to nine hours a day.
The higher pay brings higher cost for Cruz but for the workers it makes picking crops in the U.S. better than working in Mexico.
“The workers are much happier,” Cruz said. “They save almost all of the money they make here and then it’s just to survive in Mexico.”
Cruz said he and his father have a crop-picking academy in Mexico where locals learn best practices for six months and then the best get brought to the U.S. through the H-2A program and work in Central Florida farms.
There’s added financial pressure because the employer is required to house the workers in either a motel, labor camp owned by the employer or other public accommodation that meets Occupational Safety and Health Act standards. Cruz houses his 2,000 workers in a labor camp his company built but farmers with resources can house their own workers.
OSHA standards require working kitchens, at least 100 square feet per person and a minimum 7-foot-high ceiling.
The H-2A program only allows workers to live within a reasonable commuting distance from the farm where they pick crops and employers are required to reimburse for travel time or provide transportation.
In Osceola County, affordable housing that’s within an hour from a farm does not exist, Chapman said.
Rising costs for housing and the new pay requirement make Cruz worried about the future of labor contractors in the U.S., he said. Cruz said he is concerned farmers in the U.S. won’t use his laborers anymore because they’re too expensive.
“The problem is in Mexico we have the same season so all the fruits from Mexico are getting a lot cheaper to buy with labor costs so low there,” Cruz said. “That’s my biggest concern.”
Chapman said smaller and more rural farms like his struggle to meet H-2A visa requirements simply because price of labor has increased and in Osceola County the big issue is housing.
Across Lake, Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Sumter counties there is a deficit of over 41,000 affordable units for those who can afford to pay the recommended 30% or less of their income on housing, according to the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies. The deficit in affordable housing gets larger for those who have to pay more of their income on housing, the data shows.
“A lot of farms, big farms, they just put in their own housing but they’re big enough they can justify the cost of building housing for their own,” Chapman said. “We’re not big enough to do that so we have to rely on a contractor to find the housing and they just give up, they can’t find it.” Statistics bear this out. Florida Health estimates that every year 150,000 to 200,000 seasonal migrant workers and their families work and travel to Florida.
The Shimberg Center for Housing Studies found that in 2021, Orlando and Kissimmee had 700 seasonal farm workers and 322 agricultural workers.
A 2022 Osceola County housing analysis found that, countywide, there are only 47 units for migrant workers. The analysis concluded that agricultural activities have declined in the county and migratory housing is not needed based on data from 1990, when only 2.6% of the county’s population was in rural or farm work.
To combat rising labor and housing costs, many farmers have started to grow a variety of plants that can be picked by a machine. For blueberries, it’s called Optimus, which was developed to allow only ripe fruit to drop.
Chapman plants a variety of blueberries that need to be handpicked but other farmers who have deeper pockets plant new varieties of blueberries that can be picked by a machine and solve the issue of needing to find labor.
Planting machine-pickable crops could kill the entire H-2A visa program and leave the annual 370,000 seasonal migrant workers without a job, he said.
“They’re shooting themselves in the long run by making it difficult,” Chapman said of the government’s visa program.
Machines replace workers
Another aspect making the transition to machines picking crops more likely is the rising costs of operations and the price of fruit declining. Chapman said the only way to make a profit is to increase volume and cut costs by running a machine that costs less than paying workers.
The only thing stopping Chapman from purchasing a blueberry-picking machine and planting new varieties is the $250,000 price tag of the machine.
“To justify that you need at least 50 acres of this plant ... but every year our cost of operation keep going up and our price of fruit that we sell keeps going down,” Chapman said. “It’s not as safe of an investment for me right now to plant more acres of this variety ... so we’re just maintaining now ... and then, at some point, we’ll probably be out of the blueberry business.”
For now, Chapman and many other farmers are relying on the U-Pick business model to help stay afloat.
Double C Bar Ranch charges $6 per pound of blueberries that tourists or locals pick themselves off the bush, minimizing the need for hiring labor to pick fruit before it goes bad and spreads diseases to other berries.
“We make a lot more money off U-pickers and that’s what is keeping the farm going,” Chapman said.
Chapman said a weekend of U-Pick brings in roughly 2,000 people who pick 15,000 pounds of blueberries. That’s still not enough to reap all he grows so he uses any labor he can get to pick the rest.
Mick and his wife began farming after the 2008 financial crisis left him without a construction job. Since then, they have had to downsize their farm. In the past, Mick said he had hired labor workers but, in the last five years, there’s been no way to make it work financially.
Mick runs four acres of crops as U-Pick and sells 18-20 acres worth of other crops to 15 local hotels and restaurants. The U-Pick keeps Mick Farms afloat but Mick and his wife have no money in retirement savings or any extra money to set aside, he said.
“If most of the kids decide to go their own ways then this will have to take a different direction,” Mick said. “That’s the biggest challenge with farming — is being able to keep the younger generations around because of the money.”
Mick said if it weren’t for the U-Pickers he and his eight children wouldn’t be able to have the farm.
“I would like to thank all the people that do come out and patronize us because without the customers we wouldn’t have anything,” Mick said.
Alise Edison, co-owner of Deer Park Peaches in St. Cloud, said U-Pick has turned out to be the best way to go for her farm.
“This year, because everything is going up, we have to raise our prices,” Edison said. “We just hate doing it but we’re going to have to do it.”
Edison said chemical and fertilizer costs have skyrocketed as well as labor. In the past, she has paid over $3,000 for just one day of work, and the contractor offered workers on Saturday as a favor. Now, she relies on U-Pickers, herself, her husband and help when she can find it from contractors who hire seasonal migrant
workers.
“Labor is really short,” Edison said. “I mean as far as finding someone who wants to come work in the heat.”
Edison said she often has to pump in her own funds to keep the farm.
Added to the rising costs and labor shortage is the real threat of crop disease.
“Just this past year we took out, disposed of, 12 acres of orange trees,” Edison said. “There’s nothing easy about farming.”