Superlative Fruit Quality, If We Can Pick It
August 1, 2007 We’re getting more and more nervous in the Pacific Northwest. The 2006 apple and pear crops are moving from storage to consumers, with grower returns holding strong. Could it be? Two excellent years in a row? How can we possibly expect to go three for three?
This spring, California harvested a big cherry crop and marketed it smoothly. Our Washington and Oregon crop is moderate, with spotty losses to freeze damage and June rains, but fruit quality and size are absolutely spectacular. Returns are good enough to make even cherry growers appear happy.
While apple and pear crop size appears moderate, we still have to run the usual gauntlet of heat stress, hail, and our old friend codling moth. If we do make it to harvest, the 2007 crops are set up for another excellent year. New technologies and more intensive management from orchard to retail mean the consumer is receiving an increasingly higher-quality product — grown better, handled better, and delivered better. Per-capita consumption of our healthy, diverse, and affordable tree fruit products is increasing! Specialty crops have not been muscled out of the Farm Bill yet.
So, what’s the problem?
Labor.
A Tough Road Ahead
We have all followed the slow strangulation of comprehensive immigration reform as it expired in the Senate before it could even crawl toward certain death in the House. Despite the unprecedented level of cohesion the ag sector displayed in the political arena, despite the apparently widespread public support to do something, despite the very real need for a sufficient quantity of sufficiently qualified workers, we are back to wondering if we’ll be able to get all our cherries picked and packed.
It does not seem that the real crisis has hit, but we are nervous. Average wages are up, but returns should cover. This year’s moderate crop level and aggressive thinning have helped, but what will happen when thousands of acres of new Gala plantings are ready to pick? Will we be pushed into a once-over harvest, then fall further behind through November until the remaining Cripps Pink are left on the tree, not because they froze, but because we couldn’t get them into the bin?
If we do get our fruit harvested, could we see more raids like the one in June on the Del Monte plant near Portland, OR, in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested more than 160 employees? News of such events passes quickly throughout the ag labor community, further depressing an already depressed labor situation.
No political solution is apparent, and I do not believe we can resolve our labor issues at the national or local level without more fully embracing and implementing technologies that optimize production efficiencies and provide consumers a constantly improving product. Encouragingly, the national apple industry has already begun that transformation, most notably in key production and handling technologies.
Consider the current range of cultivars with inherently higher quality, managed in productive high-density systems utilizing IPM, harvested and stored to maintain superior fruit quality, delivered to customers in a seemingly endless array of packaging, and certified by an alphabet soup of third-party quality assurance outfits.
Of course, this transformation is not complete and the components of that transformation all cost more or are in limited supply: managed varieties, posts and trellis wire, softer pesticides, SmartFresh, packaging formats, regulatory costs, etc. Pears and cherries may not be as far along, but are on the same trajectory. Growers are producing fruit of higher quality and delivering it to the consumer.
Look For Other Solutions
All this is absolutely necessary to keep us in business, to continually grow per-capita consumption, and to attract repeat sales. While these transforming technologies are more labor efficient, we still need to prune, cultivate, spray, thin, irrigate, and pick our orchards. Then sort, store, process, and ship our fruit. Then do it again in 2008. All that still takes a consistent, predictable, and sufficient supply of skilled hand labor.
We are all probably tired of media accounts of the immigration reform debacle and irritated at people outside of ag who “don’t get it.” Yet, perhaps this has served a useful purpose now that the country’s citizens are more aware that the issue of immigrant labor is important and complex.
I hope that our labor-intensive specialty crop industries acknowledge that immigration reform, while a vital national goal, does not itself address our fundamental need to continue transforming our industries, focusing on creating more productive, safer, and more attractive workplaces while continuously improving the quality of our products. That will only come through a renewed focus on research and implementation of engineering solutions like automation, sensors, precision agriculture, and diagnostics.
Transforming production, combined with new genomics, genetics, and breeding inputs, will give us a chance to make every year a profitable year. Maybe even beyond three in a row.
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