Farmers scurry to recruit workers

Growers blame immigration-law impasse and tight border controls, but other factors may play role

By Jim Downing - Bee Staff Writer

All year, California farm groups have complained that congressional inaction on overhauling immigration laws, coupled with tightening border controls, would lead to a critical shortage of labor.

With harvest time having arrived, state agricultural leaders are preparing to join their counterparts from around the country this week for a major lobbying push in Washington, D.C. They have been gathering anecdotes describing what they say is a damaging labor crisis in the state:

Overripe pears are rotting in Sacramento and Lake counties, peaches went unpicked near Fresno, and according to one industry group, at least a few farmers are contemplating a move to Mexico, where cheap labor is plentiful and legal.

So far, however, state surveys show no discernible drop in total farm employment for May, June and July, though an uptick in farm wages suggests a tighter labor supply.

Weather also has influenced the demand for labor. Late spring rains combined with July's heat wave shifted harvest times for some crops, disrupting picking schedules. And finally, in anticipation of a tighter labor market, many of the state's farmers have been keeping more staff on the farm year-round and replacing hired hands with machines where they can.

Industry leaders, as a rule, concede these points. Still, overhauling immigration laws remains their top priority, and they will press Congress this week to take up stalled legislation that would expand the agricultural guest worker program and provide a path to legalization for immigrant workers. California's $32 billion agricultural economy, they say, is at stake.

"Either we're going to have a domestic food supply with foreign labor, or a foreign food supply with foreign labor," said Barry Bedwell, president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League.

Looking only at state agricultural employment data, though, there's little sign of farm jobs going unfilled. The market usually varies seasonally, with about 300,000 jobs in the winter, rising to roughly 430,000 jobs from May through September. This year -- at least through July, the latest figures available -- was little different.

Those numbers alone, though, don't tell the whole story, said Philip Martin, an agricultural economist and migrant labor expert at the University of California, Davis.

He noted that average farm wages began to rise last summer, and by March of this year, stood at $9.93 an hour, 6.5 percent higher than at the same point in 2005. That trend suggests farmers are having a more difficult time filling jobs and the pool of available labor is shrinking, he said.

The agricultural labor market in California differs from other industries in that the total number of laborers in any year is typically much larger than the number of jobs.

A state study based on 2001 data found that while the number of farm jobs averaged 388,000 through the year, about 1.1 million different people filled those jobs. That indicates that many workers are employed for only a small part of the year and that the market has flexibility to react to sudden demands for labor.

This year, though, agricultural employers say the labor market seems to have gotten tighter, a change that they attribute to tightened border controls.

Stockton-based labor contractor Joe Bautista said that this year, as usual, he hired 140 workers to pick cherries, apricots and pears.

The difference this year, he said, was that he had to look harder to find workers, since about 30 percent of his usual crew members didn't return from winter trips home to Mexico.

Bautista also said he found it very difficult to add workers on short notice -- something that turned out to be a problem when the Delta-region pear harvest ran several weeks late, a result of unusual weather earlier in the year.

Bautista was scheduled to take his crews to Lake County -- where a huge crop ripened just a few days later than usual -- but he said his crews and several other ones had to postpone the work.

Pears must be picked in a three-week window, and Lake County growers reported that they were unable to find replacement workers on short notice. With labor shortfalls of as much as 75 percent, growers reported crop losses of 30 percent and more.

Weather anomalies, of course, can cause problems for farmers in any year. In the long run, Martin said, the best way to judge the seriousness of any reduction in the farm labor supply is to watch how farmers adjust their operations.

"If you talk to (farmers) and they're saying that ... they are taking steps to respond to it -- that's the important message," he said.

At Manna Ranch in Acampo, as the wine-grape harvest proceeded last week, some signs of adjustment are already apparent.

Supervisor Matt Manna whose father, Mike, runs the operation, said that it has become harder to keep workers on hand, and so his company has for the last three years offered pickers a dollar-an-hour bonus to stay on through the harvest. A person who drives a grape-harvesting machine gets a $2 bonus, on top of a $14.50 an hour pay, he said.

"You've got to take care of them, or they're going to be gone," Manna said.

Hand-picking of grapes is declining statewide because of the widespread adoption of grape-harvesting machines. Even taking into account the capital cost of $250,000, a mechanized harvester can pick grapes for about $270 an acre, just over half the price of manual laborers, Manna said.

In the Lodi area, about 80 percent of wine grapes are now harvested by machine. Raisin growers in the San Joaquin Valley are following a similar trend. As a result, the number of grape-harvesting jobs in the state has been dropping steadily -- from 56,700 workers in 1995 to 41,700 last year, even as the harvest tonnage has remained relatively stable.

That trend, Manna said, contributes to a different kind of labor supply problem.

"It's easy to find a person to pick grapes -- it's hard to find a person that'll treat a piece of machinery like it's their own."

Mechanization is far from a cure-all. Most old grapevines must be harvested by hand because of the need for special pruning, for instance, and a cost-effective machine to pick delicate pears may never be invented. Even so, farm groups say there's significant scope for reducing the amount of labor required on farms, both through further mechanization and through management changes.

"I think we're seeing a lot of small steps that will allow us to get by with the expected shortages," said Jack King, manager of national affairs for the California Farm Bureau Federation. "But there's a lot of concern, a lot of worry out there as to where we're going."