Opinion: Growers Can Educate Consumers About Labor
June 1, 2010 One of the most enjoyable conversations I’ve had with a grower this year was with a walnut and almond grower, Paul Wenger, who appeared on the cover of our April issue. I interviewed Wenger in part because he was the incoming president of the California Farm Bureau Federation. He said one of his overriding goals was to educate the vast majority of people not involved in agriculture about what it means to be a farmer. Thus the headline on the piece: “The Education President.”
One point Wenger hammered home was that growers are good at what they do, but they’re not good at telling people what they do. Wenger then offered some advice to his fellow growers that I thought was spot-on. “When you’re on a plane, when you’re in line at the movie theater, tell people who you are,” he said. “The best thing you can do is reach out, shake hands, and tell people, ‘I’m a farmer, and this is what I do.’”
I was reminded of that conversation recently in reading all the rhetoric over Arizona’s controversial new immigration law. I’m not going to get into all the facets of that issue here — there’s hardly room to do it justice — except to point out one common misconception among people unfamiliar with agriculture. I’ve seen it time and again, and the gist of the argument is that illegal immigrants take Americans’ jobs. That simply doesn’t apply to agriculture.
Even writers of letters to the local paper here in California’s San Joaquin Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world, insinuate that if illegal immigrants weren’t working in the fields, those jobs would be snapped up by the many unfortunate legal residents who’ve recently become unemployed. That’s hogwash.
Hardly Unskilled
I’ll give you just one example of how ridiculous that is. I know a vegetable grower down in Southern California who a couple years ago had a field of cabbage he needed harvested, but didn’t have the manpower. Just for the heck of it, he posted a notice with the local office of the Employment Development Department. He got one reply, and that guy quit shortly after showing up. (And realizing, no doubt, how much work he would have to do.) The field was disked.
It’s not just the notion that legal residents would eagerly apply for these jobs that bothers me either. Even if they wanted to do the work, they couldn’t handle a lot of it. I was reading a piece in “The Crush,” the newsletter of the California Association of Winegrape Growers (CAWG), that had a great quote from a CAWG lobbyist in Washington, DC, Fowler West.
“Many people think that farmworkers are an unskilled labor force, but in reality this isn’t the case at all,” he said. “When you look at the equipment that we are running through the vineyards, whether it is just general equipment or some of the larger, more powerful equipment, you need to have someone trained in its operation. We would prefer to have skilled labor that we can depend on to come back year after year or even be able to keep these people employed year-round.”
Amen to that, and the next time you hear someone say that those people are taking our jobs, please, give them an education.
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