Help Wanted In The Fight For Labor

Orchard Worker

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If your grow a crop that’s labor-intensive, and you want to know what a crackdown on illegal immigration like the E-Verify program might cost, you could ask Gary Paulk. Last year the state of Georgia’s new law cost him $250,000 in revenue on his blackberry crop.

“I can say that unequivocally,” says Paulk, who grows blackberries and muscadine grapes in the southern part of the state in Irwin County. “We had a 25-acre block that we didn’t pick. The mature fruit just fell on the ground,” he says. “If we tried to do it all, the overall quality would have gone down. So we just cordoned off that block and said those are being abandoned, and we will do a good job on the crop that can be picked.”

Blackberries require a lot of pickers, because every acre must be picked every day for 45 days, Paulk explains. For his 150 acres, he needs 500 workers. But last year, because many former pickers were scared off by Georgia’s new law, House Bill 87, the Illegal Immigration Reform Act, he could only get 350. That’s why he made the decision to abandon the one block and focus on getting good quality berries out of the rest of his acreage.

It wasn’t like Paulk just threw up his hands. He tried working with the state Department of Labor, just like state legislators suggested, because Georgia has a 10% unemployment rate. “I asked for 25 workers for starters, and I got one,” he says. “We have a family operation, and we all own a piece, so we all put applications in for workers, but we never got any more applicants.”

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Nothing Else Matters

Paulk says that when the law actually starts applying to him — last year the rumors alone were enough to drive workers away — he’s not sure how he can even enforce it. That’s because, as the name implies, E-Verify requires checking out a person’s citizenship status via the Internet. But Paulk says that in rural Georgia he often feels fortunate to get service for his cell phone, much less a reliable Internet connection.

Paulk is also angry about the lack of justice in the anti-immigration law. “If you get pulled over and have an illegal in your car you can be prosecuted for transporting illegal aliens — that even applies to church vans,” he says. “People didn’t think: When you fish with a large net, you catch a lot of fish you don’t want.”

Furthermore, Paulk believes the law has racist undertones that will haunt the state. “A lot of campaign promises were made, saying these people are taking jobs from Georgia residents, and myths like they don’t pay taxes, and that’s just not true,” he says. “One day we will look back and say this is almost as bad as the Jim Crow laws.”

Now that 25-acre block of blackberries, which was only four years old and was in its prime, is plowed under. Paulk is considering cutting back further on his fruit acreage, and planting crops that can be mechanically harvested. It’s not what he wants. “I hate to put my acreage in cotton and peanuts,” he says. “But like they say, if you can’t harvest the crop, nothing else matters.”

Indeed, for fruit growers, nothing else matters. American/Western Fruit Grower checked in on growers, Extension personnel, and grower association executives around the country to see how they fared regarding labor this past year, and their prospects for 2012. Click here to read about Pennsylvania apple grower Brad Hollabaugh and his feelings regarding immigrration. For more thoughts from across the country, keep reading.

New Jersey

Sourcing labor is not the problem for Kurt Alstede, it’s getting through all the red tape involved in making sure his employees are legal. Alstede Farms is in Chester, NJ, a very populated area of New Jersey that’s about an hour from New York City. Alstede operates a 500-acre vegetable, fruit, and flower farm along with a farm market, a pick-your-own operation, and an agritainment business.

About 100 people are employed during the prime season, which is July through November. Alstede uses some H-2A workers and he also employs students from a work-travel exchange program. The farm has been hiring students using J-1 Exchange Visitor Visas, he says. They are college students from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Bulgaria. In fact, he called American/Western Fruit Grower from the Czech Republic, and even from several thousand miles away, Alstede’s frustration with the H-2A program was palpable.

He feels like he’s being punished by the federal government for trying to do the right thing. “H-2A is the most legitimate way to get farmworkers, but we face more roadblocks than anyone else,” he says. “Latino farmworkers’ documents are often questionable, so you’d think the government would be happy we do H-2A.”

But H-2A has become something of a nightmare, especially since 2008, when President Obama took office. Under Obama, Alstede said the Department of Labor has made it far more difficult to get H-2A visas approved each year. Under former President Bush, the H-2A program wasn’t exactly simple to navigate, but it was far more sensible than under Obama. “Bush had put reforms in place to make the process a little bit easier,” he says.

“The first day Obama came in, all those reforms were canceled. “Today, there’s a concerted effort to scrutinize H-2A employers, he says. Alstede went through an H-2A audit in 2010, a process he describes as “horrible.” Sometimes, he wonders why he bothers. “The Department of Labor doesn’t even care that we’re trying to do this legally,” he says. “If we just hired these people with questionable paperwork, we’d have it much easier.”

California

The president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, Barry Bedwell, says his grower-members felt a strain in the labor market, but they were still able to harvest on time this past year. A lot of that’s due to the continuity of their workforce, he said, which they have promoted by adding additional crops. For example, stone fruit and table grape growers, who harvest in the warmer months, have added citrus to be able to provide year-round employment.

Like most people in the fruit industry, Bedwell says he expects to see a further tightening of the labor market this coming year. The overall availability of labor will decrease, especially when taking into account the economy improving and losing potential employees to hospitality, restaurants, and hotels. Even though a federal E-Verify program has almost no chance to be approved in an election year, there is a trend to more I-9 audits. The lack of activity isn’t necessarily welcome. “We’re going to see more challenges in 2012,” he says. “Without a guest worker program, how is the situation going to improve?”

The Georgia experience is troubling to Bedwell. He notes that California’s total farm gate value — much of it specialty crops that aren’t mechanically farmed — is about $37 billion and is rapidly approaching $40 billion. A study conducted by the University of Georgia noted that total losses to the state economy from the first year of its law against illegal immigration were estimated at $391 million. If California were to lose a similar percentage, based on farm gate receipts, it would be about six times as much.

If a federal E-Verify system is instituted, Bedwell says the Georgia experience is instructive. “We see a situation that would go from bad to worse very quickly; there could be major disruptions,” says Bedwell.

“Georgia is a great example. The workers of a transitory nature, they simply won’t come. I’m inclined to think we would see very real shortages and very real economic damage as seen in Georgia last year.”

Bedwell remains hopeful, however, noting that California Congressman Dan Lungren has been pushing for a guest worker program that would accompany any form of E-Verify. “You have to try and be optimistic, that E-Verify might pave the way for a guest worker program,” he says. “The more people we can convince that some form of E-Verify legislation and a guest worker program go hand in hand is critical. That will be our best opportunity.”

Washington

Some growers in Washington did not fare so well this past year, says Karen Lewis, a Washington State University tree fruit regional Extension specialist in the Columbia Basin. Others had few problems, mainly because they make worker recruitment a point of emphasis. “Every day you need to build an organization that’s attractive to employees, no matter what the labor supply is,” she says. “Year in and year out you win if you get the most skilled, most motivated workers.”

In 2011, the big challenge in Washington was the timing of the apple harvest. They were two weeks late, which disrupted the normal cycle. Transient workers expect to arrive and leave at certain times of the year.

If you used the federal H-2A system it was even worse, because you have to set your dates way in advance, says Lewis. So growers who used H-2A — and more of the state’s growers are using it than ever before — found themselves having to pay those workers when they really had no work for them to do, and then the workers were supposed to leave before harvest was over.

“Pinpointing a biological activity six months ahead of time is difficult to do; it was even more critical than the labor shortage,” says Lewis. “Still, a majority of orchards got pruned, thinned on time, and picked on time, and the crop put into the shed. But the farther north you went, the later in the season the crop was harvested, the worse it was.”

As for this coming year, Lewis says one bright spot is that every year Washington growers depend more on former migrants who have settled down, not immigrants. Still, she estimates that migrants pick anywhere from 20% to 40% of the state’s tree fruit. “So we’re certainly dependent on the western migrant stream (from down near the Mexican border),” she says, noting there are also streams up through the Midwest and the Northeast.

“These migrant streams we have in the U.S. are very important, and if a roadblock develops it’s a bad deal. It would be nice, says Lewis, if the crop ripened when expected in 2012, because any advancement or delay costs the industry. But more important than that, growers have to find a way to communicate to the general public that fruit growing is a people management business, and they have to have people to manage. “A lot of growers know how to grow good fruit; the tough part of the business is the people management,” she says.

“Oh, and another thing: There are no unskilled jobs in this industry.”

Mechanization Is One Solution

There were unfamiliar sounds coming from the orchards of Washington this past fall, where growers produce about 70% of the nation’s apple crop. And Karen Lewis, a Washington State University (WSU) tree fruit regional Extension specialist in the central part of the state, is excited. “We had seven harvest assist machines running through most of harvest,” she says. “That doesn’t sound like many, but that’s a big deal, it’s never occurred before.”

Lewis, who specializes in the areas of harvesting, mechanical thinning, and pruning and platform assistance, briefly described the three types of units.

• At Auvil Fruit Company, they ran four units built by Van Doren Sales Inc. It’s a platform conveyor system, says Lewis, with on-board human sorting.

• Two units from OXBO/Picker Technologies were tested in the orchards of several growers. These use a vacuum tube-based system, she says, with on-board sensor-based defect sorting.

• Finally, with money from the Specialty Crop Research Initiative and the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission, WSU now owns a unit from DBR Conveyor Concepts Co., based in Michigan. It is also a vacuum-tube based platform system that will have sorting, she says.

Growers and researchers were generally happy with these units, but the days when they can replace a lot of laborers are still a way’s off. In the near future, Lewis expects them to be used mainly for two reasons, enabling workers to quickly pick the top third of larger existing trees that require ladders, and night-time picking.

“If I have 20 acres of Honeycrisp, I only have three to four days to get across that block,” she says. “That means I need multiple machines, unless I just use them to pick the top of the tree and let people pick the fruit closer to the ground. Machines are expensive, so this would get the best return on investment.”

The advantage of this system is the machines can be used with conventional orchard systems. “You don’t need a two-dimensional orchard to use these systems, but having said that, I want to focus on the top third of the tree because of ladders. We need to get ladders out of the system.”

The real benefits of these machines, which will naturally be further refined, will be realized in the coming years when growers design and grow two-dimensional orchard systems, aka fruiting walls. They will need to precisely because the labor situation is getting increasingly precarious.

“My experience and that of my colleagues around the world leads us to believe the people that will be in the best position to employ automated orchards are those that are planting orchards in the 2-D system — two-dimensional fruiting walls,” she says. “But it’s not a quick fix.”

Moving your farm operation to a system that can be done mechanically simply puts you ahead of the game, says Lewis. The more fruit and the more leaves you can see, the better quality fruit you will produce. Also, it helps save input costs, because every drop goes to the crop. It will take some time for growers to adjust, says Lewis, but it is on the horizon.

“We’ve pretty much got the horticulture down,” she says, “we just need to get the engineering down.”

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