| The new grapes of wrath |
| San Diego Union Tribune: January 23, 2005 -- by Diane Lindquist |
PARLIER – For the past century, raisins in California's Central Valley have been harvested in exactly the same way: a monthlong frenzy of hand picking that required more workers than almost any other crop.
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| Last season, many raisin growers turned to machines to do the work. Although they had long held out, they are now joining growers nationwide in embracing mechanization to fend off global competition. |
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| But the switch to mechanical harvesting is taking a heavy toll on the Mexican migrants who fill most of the state's lowest-paying farm jobs. With machines picking more crops, the need for field hands is falling sharply. Where 50 men once were needed to harvest a field of raisins, five now suffice. |
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| "I've been going all over the valley looking for work, but there isn't any. If I'm lucky, I get one or two days a week," said Fidel Rosales Rodriguez, who last spring paid smugglers $1,200 to sneak him from Mexico into California. |
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| Even legal fieldworkers say they have never experienced such a tough year. There were more migrants, they complain, and jobs were all but impossible to find. |
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| Mechanization portends big problems for a region strained in the past two decades by the arrival of impoverished rural Mexicans. They are widely estimated to be coming to the United States at a rate of more than a half million a year, with a quarter to a third of them entering California. |
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| The challenge of absorbing so many newcomers is taxing the economic and social well-being of the valleys that produce fruits, nuts and vegetables for markets worldwide. |
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| "We're adding a lot of poor people into what's already a pretty poor area. It's a dangerous path," said Philip Martin, a migration specialist at the University of California Davis. |
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| California, the setting for John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and Cesar Chavez's historic farmworker union movement, is experiencing the emergence of a worrisome strain of rural poverty. It exists alongside the relative prosperity associated with the state's $25.7 billion agriculture business. If, for instance, the Central Valley were a state, it would rank first in the nation in agricultural production but 48th in per-capita income. |
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| "People used to think California was divided between the north and south, but it's really between the wealthy coastal areas and the impoverished interior valleys," said demographer Hans Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California. |
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| The sheer magnitude of the influx of Mexican migrants is prompting tension and resentment that mirror anti-immigrant feelings in other parts of the United States. California's agricultural valleys have become Balkanized as numerous ethnic groups have reshuffled into separate communities. |
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| "We risk falling into warring factions," said Assemblyman Juan Arambula, a former Fresno County supervisor. |
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| Parlier, a small farming town 20 miles southeast of Fresno that is in the heart of raisin country USA, typifies the dilemma that confronts many rural California cities. |
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| An unceasing arrival of migrants has transformed Parlier into one of the scores of communities known as "Mexican towns" that dot the Central Valley. Since 1990, Parlier's population has doubled to 12,000. Every year when field hands arrive for the harvest, the city has 4,000 more residents for a few months. |
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| The community also is one of California's poorest. Unemployment hovers year-round at 30 percent. Per-capita income averages $5,300; family incomes are slightly more than $24,000. |
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| Some families are struggling on less than $3,000 a year, the average wage in Mexico. |
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| "We're transferring rural poverty from Mexico to rural California," Martin of UC Davis said, "and we don't have a game plan to get out of it." |
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| The mechanization of the raisin harvest threatens to make the situation even worse. State officials believe two or three migrants are currently competing for each of California's 400,000 to 500,000 seasonal farm jobs. If machines pick the raisins, agricultural experts say, labor demand will drop to a tenth of the 40,000 to 50,000 workers typically hired today. |
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| "I'm reluctant to say we don't want any more (workers)," Arambula said. "But to the extent we have more people than work, we need to slow it down." |
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| The region is looking to U.S. immigration measures to control the flow. |
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| President Bush has put the issue back on his agenda, vowing that Congress this year will implement a guest worker program and some type of provision to legalize undocumented people living in the United States. |
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| Also expected is legislation that would increase border enforcement and impose enforceable sanctions on employers who hire undocumented workers. |
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| Any immigration reforms could greatly affect the state's farm picture as well as areas nationwide that have attracted large numbers of Mexican migrants and increasingly are coming to resemble rural California. |
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| Still, it's uncertain whether new measures would help. |
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| For example, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 spawned unintended consequences that contributed to the economic and social stress felt today. The legislation legalized 3 million undocumented immigrants, a third of them under a special agricultural provision. But it failed to halt illegal entries. Instead, it quickened the flow. |
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| Once legalized, Mexican men secretly brought their wives and children across the border to join them. Meanwhile, fresh job seekers arrived to replenish the ranks as the back-breaking work drove older workers from the fields but not necessarily from California. |
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| Such post-IRCA inflows have caused the population of farmworker communities to grow twice as fast as populations elsewhere in California. |
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| Estimates of undocumented people living in the United States generally vary from 9 million to 12 million, with Mexicans accounting for about 5.4 million of the total. |
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| "Every year, the numbers of undocumented immigrants flowing into the United States is higher than the year before," said Jeffrey Passel, a research specialist at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social policy research group in Washington, D.C. "The number in the last decade is more than any other decade, and the statistics might be low." |
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| Growers in Fresno County, home of the entire U.S. raisin crop, have long relied on workers from Mexico to collect the dried, wrinkly fruit they sell as a baking ingredient and snack. |
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| "We couldn't have gotten the crop picked without them," said grower John Pabojian. |
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| But Pabojian has stopped hiring from among the migrants who arrive each season. Instead of the 100 workers he once took on for the monthlong process, he now has six year-round workers and a machine that finishes the harvest in half the time. |
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| The transition many of the state's 5,500 raisin growers are making is considered the most significant innovation in the raisin harvest since the industry was established in 1873. It's also happening faster than anyone expected. Last fall, the amount of raisin acreage picked by machine increased by more than 30 percent. |
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| Harvests of most crops raised in California are already mechanized, from beans to nuts and some citrus. And experts predict that machines will soon pick more of the fruits and vegetables now routinely picked by hand. |
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| By eliminating so many jobs, the raisin industry's mechanization is dramatically changing the overall job market. |
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| "For a very traditional industry that always has been in the lead of fighting for hand laborers, it's revolutionary," said Martin of UC Davis. |
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| Raisin harvesting machines were developed in the 1950s, but growers resisted them until economics forced the issue. They had argued that only humans were capable of the painstaking work of cutting grape clusters from vines, laying them on the ground in paper trays to dry, turning them once, rolling them and, once they've become raisins, collecting them. |
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| Raisin growers, like those in the sugar and tomato industries, invested much political capital to convince lawmakers they needed a guest worker program to ensure an adequate supply of cheap labor. |
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| And now that President Bush is promising one will be enacted, they are not backing off. |
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| "We've got to have a guest worker program," said Manuel Cu×ha Jr., president of the Nisei Farmers League. The work force is rife with fraudulent documents, he said. With tightened homeland security laws and stricter enforcement, "it'll be all over" if the fields are raided. |
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| U.S. immigration agents, however, routinely have refrained from pursuing undocumented workers in California's agricultural valleys. Last summer, the Border Patrol closed its Fresno County office. |
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| Nevertheless, Cu×ha said, legalization would assure growers an adequate supply of stable, skilled laborers required for mechanization and, at the same time, offer workers the opportunity to move on to other, better-paying jobs. |
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| For workers, mechanization and the drop in labor demand last season hit without warning. |
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| "I've been coming here for 25 years. Back then it was the place to find work," said longtime field hand Simon Martnez of La Paz, in Baja California Sur. "This year has been the most difficult ever because there's been more people and a lot less jobs. |
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| "I have to come back next year. My family is counting on it. I have 10 children, and I also help support my parents," he said. |
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| It's too early to know how the permanent job cuts will affect the flow of migrants from Mexico. |
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| "The assumption is they'll go someplace else to where there are jobs," said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center. |
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| Labor issues are not driving the transition to mechanization. Globalization is. Producers in Chile and Turkey are sending cheaper raisins into an already saturated U.S. market. As a result, growers in Fresno County are being forced to cut costs. |
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| "The cause has been the basic economics of the industry," said Bert Mason, an agricultural economist at Fresno State University. "And because of that we've seen a rapid change in attitude toward mechanization." |
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| Competition has forced daunting decisions on California's raisin farmers, most of whom are Armenian or Japanese immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Many are in their 60s and 70s. |
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| While they once were able to make a decent living on less than 50 acres, foreign competition and four straight years of poor crops and low prices have made such operations big money losers. |
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| Some growers have put their grapes into table wine. Others are shutting down. In the past two years, the amount of acreage devoted to raisins shrunk to 200,000 acres from 250,000. The remaining farmers have little choice but to mechanize. |
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| "I'm going to switch over," Garvin Lane said. "You've got to convert or get out." |
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| Easing the transition has been the development of harvesting machines, new grape varieties and planting systems. Professional harvesters, with their own equipment and crews, have materialized. |
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| Although methods vary, all allow the fruit to dry on the vine, rather than on trays laid out on the ground. Machines fitted with big brushes then advance along the rows, gently knocking the raisins into bins. Because the fruit never touches the ground, the quality is higher. |
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| "It's a huge challenge to learn how to do it," Mason of Fresno State said. |
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| The shift is expensive. |
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| A machine typically costs about $150,000. Even if growers hire a professional harvester, the expense of preparing for mechanization – planting vines, trellising and installing subsurface drip irrigation – can run initial costs to about $4,500 per acre, or $2,500 more per acre than conventional planting. |
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| But yields more than double, boosting returns quickly enough to repay the investment. |
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| The biggest saving is in labor costs. Field hands are paid by the tray, averaging 15 to 17 cents each, with workers picking an average of 300 trays a day. Machines can cut that expenditure by 80 percent. |
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| "Everybody was looking for ways to survive and cut costs, and that's the way they found to cut costs," said grower Sohan Samran. "Even though we're mechanized, labor still is our biggest expense. |