Posted on 12/02/2005 4:53:42 AM PST by Crackingham
Imperial Valley lettuce farmer Jack Vessey says it's the worst in his lifetime. Farther north in California's Central Valley, orange grower Manuel Cunha calls it the most constrained since before World War II. Coastal tomato grower Luwanna Holmstrom constantly worries about a repeat of two years ago, when she had to plow under $2.5 million in tomatoes left unpicked.
California and Arizona farmers - producers of half the nation's citrus and 90 percent of its vegetables and nuts - are struggling with an acute labor shortage. The situation, worsened by crackdowns on illegal immigration since 9/11, also extends to other states and is no longer just a matter of possible price increases on lettuce, oranges, or almonds, farmers say. Rather, it is a turning point in the nation's ability to produce its own food - and possibly the loss of major parts of its agriculture industry.
"We are trying to sound the alarm without being alarmist, but the situation has become extremely serious," says Tim Chelling of the Western Growers Association, whose members grow, pack, and ship half America's produce. "We are now talking of losing the production of key commodities to foreign competition. America's produce industry is facing a crisis."
Although the shortage was worsening before 9/11, it's now extreme, Mr. Chelling and the three California farmers say. Without an emergency guest-worker program, they will be dramatically short of the minimum number of workers needed to harvest the current crop. Without long-term immigration reform that acknowledges America's reliance on foreign workers, farmers will not be able to make ends meet, they say.
Mr. Cunha, for example, says Central Valley raisin growers need 50,500 pickers and have only 15,000. In the last harvest, $150 million to $300 million in grapes were ruined because they could not be picked and laid out to dry before the period of necessary seasonal sunlight passed. This year predictions are worse.
Mr. Vessey began harvesting romaine, iceberg, and red-leaf lettuce Tuesday. He was 200 workers short. "I lost $250,000 because of this problem last year," he says. "This year I am concerned I could go under completely. If I miss making my contracts with some of the big stores, they could look to China, Canada, Mexico, and elsewhere, and even if I recover my labor later, it may be too late."
Even before 9/11, other industries from construction to hotels, restaurants, and domestic services were luring workers away from the difficult and temporary work of harvesting. Increased border enforcement, which began a decade ago but has been ratcheted up since 2001, has further reduced the labor pool. In fact, by tripling the border patrol in recent years, the back-and-forth traffic of illegals has become so problematic that instead of returning to Mexico, many have moved farther into America's interior in search of full-time work - leaving seasonal agriculture work behind. This year, construction booms in the West and Midwest, hurricane reconstruction in Florida, and post- Katrina cleanup in the Gulf have siphoned off even more undocumented workers.
Higher wages would help, critics point out. "The problem is that the agricultural industry has come to expect that they will have exactly the workers they need when they need them and at the price they want them, but that is not the way the economy works," says Ira Mehlman of the Federation of American Immigration Reform.
Furthermore, America is not getting the cheap labor it expects from undocumented workers because of the unseen cost of $10.5 billion spent a year for health, education, and incarceration of such workers, he says. "If you started factoring in all the costs associated with these low-wage workers, you would realize the cost of a head of lettuce is prohibitive in this situation."
"You always hear the argument that if we just paid decent wages and made these jobs open to legal Americans that the jobs would be filled," says Cunha, president of the Nisei Farmers League. "We have found that to be completely not so."
Vessey says he offered $8.50 an hour but that some workers choosing to harvest "per carton" can average up to $12 per hour. But when he went recently to Imperial County's welfare and economic development department seeking 300 workers for the next day, only one showed up to his fields and left after half a day.
Squalor is as squalor does. Hutterites don't let their kids form vicious street gangs that clog the court dockets. And they don't rely on welfare. The complaints I've heard about Hutterites are:
1) Sometimes their kids come into stores and shoplift felt-tip markers from stationary stores.
2) They don't smell too good.
3) They produce crops and livestock so efficiently that it makes it hard on the other farmers.
"Hutterites don't let their kids form vicious street gangs that clog the court dockets."
They practice the 11th Commandment from my time in the Army.
Or maybe take another look at the welfare system. There are far too many able-bodied people waiting for government checks each month who could be doing this work.
Prices, prices, prices. I've seen a grocery chain "dump" a supplier because another supplier furnished the same product for $00.01 less. Mother Nature is a tough nut to work with when it comes to agriculture plowing, fertilizing, debugging, demolding, picking and getting it to market while the product is still in prime condition. Grocery stores are good sources to sell the product, but make sure there is a season contract, cause next year, with the price of fertilizer, insecticide, cost of water all goes up. Transportation is a factor a lot of people do not think of. With the price of petroleum fluxuating up and down, so do the price of plastic and lettering fluzuate, all part of the equation of the food you purchase. The price of sand and transportation to make glass to hold your food. I can go on and on about the cost of agriculture and all that goes into the food chain that eventually ends up in our homes.
They won't, and EPA rules that are set for each and every chemical err on the side of caution, sooooo, what that means is that as long as the strict controls on the defoliant are there, the defoliants probably won't be used or won't work well in the amounts that are used, and the tomatoes will have to be harvested by hand.
I don't, and many other do not as well.
Wait a minute. What about these herbicide resistant crops that are supposed to make it easy to spray for weeds? You can't tell me that Monsanto spent all that money to develop these strains when they knew it the EPA wouldn't a herbicide to be used.
Huh?
I don't think that herbicide resistant tomatoes or any produce item are out there yet. Just cotton and soybeans so far, I think.
Besides all that, a herbicide is not the same as a defoliant.
"I don't, and many other do not as well."
1. Define "many."
2. Many people oppose or support something in the abstract, because it's not personally inconvenient at that point. When real action is required, and that action is too personally inconvenient, they'll flip like pancakes.
They wouldn't have to be. They would already be grown when they are sprayed. After the foliage falls off, they would be picked by machine.
Besides, most of the tomatoes we eat are picked by machine already without defoliants:
"The harvest of process tomatoes is completely mechanized, requiring minimal human labor to operate the machinery. Even global positioning systems (GPS) are being used by some growers to perfect field operations.
"Just in California alone, an average 10.8 million tons of process tomatoes -- 95 percent of the country s supply -- are grown each year. Add in the rest of the process crop from about a half dozen Midwestern and Northeastern states, and you have a harvest with an average annual worth of $500 million."
http://www.paradisetomato.com/NewsEventDetail.asp?id=11&type=0
People have put up with long inconvenient lines at the airport for the sake of security. I would think they will pay a little more for produce for the sake of national security.
"People have put up with long inconvenient lines at the airport for the sake of security."
Only if they absolutely have to--witness the present financial woes of the airline industry.
People fly relatively little compared to how often they eat.
But there are choices in what you can eat. We can buy things that aren't labor intensive. You don't need tomatoes in every salad.
You might see some people carping about some high prices, but it isn't going to provoke a riot in the streets. Give us some credit. We suffered from gas prices almost double for years during the 70's.
What are you saying, that the nation is going to fly apart if produce prices rise? C'mon.
"You might see some people carping about some high prices, but it isn't going to provoke a riot in the streets."
It's not just going to be the price of tomatoes. It's going to be the price of all foodstuffs.
It is the more attractive alternatives which lead to the lack of workers.
Picked green. If you can't taste the difference between these and vine ripened, you have never had a tomato.
NO! I despise hucksters and libelists though.
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