Posted on 07/10/2006 7:40:22 AM PDT by SJackson
WOODLAND --- A third of Jerry Dobbins' 155-acre strawberry crop rotted on the vine this year. His blueberry bushes are so heavy with fruit that the branches are hanging near the ground.
There is no one to pick them.
Dobbins Farm in Woodland is one of many farms across the state facing a huge labor shortage this growing season, as tighter security along the U.S.-Mexico border has crimped the supply of Latino migrant farm workers.
The strawberry harvest, one of the hardest fruits to pick because of it's low proximity to the ground, has already come and gone at Dobbins' farm, the largest of its kind in Southwest Washington. Now Dobbins is worried that his other crops will suffer a similar fate.
"We won't pay any of the bills on our strawberry crop this year," Dobbins said.
The labor problem is not unique to this region, either.
Production at the Bell Buoy Crab Co. in Chinook is down 50 percent since Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids in April, according to the Washington State Farm Bureau. Growers across the state are feeling the void left by the worker shortage, said Dean Boyer, spokesman for the Farm Bureau.
"This is a rolling problem. As various harvests come, farmers are going to feel the effects," Boyer said.
Dobbins was short about 100 workers on his farm this year, or about one-third of his workforce.
Extreme temperatures in late June worsened the problem. Strawberries ripened faster than usual. An acre of strawberries usually requires around two workers per acre, but this season Dobbins needed three workers per acre.
However, numbers were closer to one worker per acre.
The workforce on the farm is almost entirely made up of Latino migrant workers, and Dobbins speculates that many of his usual workers simply did not show up this year because border crossing has become too dangerous and too expensive for those who have to hire "coyote" guides to help them.
Dobbins says added security is not the answer to the nation's immigration controversy.
"It seems to me like if they would have some kind of guest worker program in place before they put pressure on the borders. It would make a lot more sense to farmers. There's got to be a better solution than what they're doing," he said.
Down the road, fellow farmer George Thoeny faces the same labor shortage. Like Dobbins and most farmers across the state, he depends on the migrant workers to stay in business. The Hispanic population, he said, is a necessity because white people are unwilling to do agricultural work.
"I personally can tell you, where I need 300 workers a day, I haven't had one Caucasian person knock on my door and say, 'I want to work for you.' I couldn't do this without the Hispanic people," Thoeny said. "Fifteen years ago we would have a steady stream of young people coming to us to ask for a job. This year, we didn't have one Caucasian person come to us," added Dobbins.
Handpicking berries is necessary for the farmers to turn a profit, because foreign competition keeps prices low. Both Dobbins and Thoeny own machines that can pick raspberries and blueberries, but they're too expensive and inefficient, Dobbins said.
Machine picking costs him about 85 cents a pound, where handpickers make about 35 cents a pound.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see its going to be a disaster," he said.
Berry-picking machines also pull green, unripened berries off the bush, making more work for farmers who have to spend more time sorting and wasting thousands of berries that won't ripen. The machines also damage fragile raspberries and create a much lower-quality product.
"The price of machine-picked fruit is almost not worth picking," Dobbins said.
The farmers are quick to defend the Latino population they employ. They mention hearing radio and TV talk show hosts portray Latinos as drug dealers and criminals, or claim that immigrants are stealing jobs from the workforce. They turn the shows off in disgust.
"I think that most of these people who work in the fields are some of the hardest-working people I've ever seen in my life. They're no different than people who live here and go to Alaska to work in the summer," Thoeny said.
Bob Baker, a Mercer Island airline pilot, takes exception. He is the author of state Initiative 946, which would have denied medical benefits, including prenatal care, to illegal immigrants. It failed to get enough signatures by Friday's deadline to get on the November ballot.
"After doing I-946 for the last three months I've talked to enough people who have lost their jobs to illegals. We keep hearing this mantra of 'doing jobs Americans won't do.' It's not true," Baker said Friday.
"I've talked to a mother in Yakima who wanted her teenage sons to get agriculture jobs and they couldn't," he said, adding that he believes employers are hiring illegal immigrants to drive down prices and avoid having to pay taxes on workers.
Baker believes that stricter law enforcement would discourage illegal immigration.
"If they knew we were serious about enforcing our law, they'd go back," he said.
Baker, though, agrees with Dobbins, Thoeny and Boyer that a guest worker program is needed for migrant workers.
Such a program would grant migrant workers a permit, for a fee, to come into the U.S. for the harvest months, and then return to Mexico for the rest of the year.
"That way, the government will know who's here, employers will have to pay FICA (tax) and benefits on workers," Baker said.
One of Dobbins long-time Latino workers, however, gets angry when she hears comments like Baker's.
Minerva Alparacio, 28, started as a migrant worker on Dobbins' Farm six years ago and now lives there permanently, sending money home to her family in Mexico.
"The only reason I'm here is to help my family," she said.
Alparacio is one of the few bilingual pickers on the farm. She learned English during night classes at Lower Columbia College.
Immigrant workers don't take jobs away from American citizens, she said.
"It makes me sad because it's not true. I never see Americans out here picking strawberries. It's not true. Besides that, we're doing the jobs they don't want to do," she said.
Alparacio also supports a guest worker program for migrants.
"A work permit would work better, if they would just work and then come home. That's not reason not to let them in," Alparacio said.
Vincente De Jesus is one such migrant who works on Dobbins' farm for the harvest and goes home to Oaxaca, Mexico, for the other eight months out of the year.
De Jesus says that he comes to America to raise money for his four children in Mexico. The work is hard in Mexico, and they don't pay enough, he said.
Crossing the border was tougher this year, too, De Jesus said.
"I knew lots of people, about 20, that tried to make it across. Only two made it," he said.
The shortage of workers is also creating extra pressure on the workers who remain here, according to employees and volunteers at the Woodland Community Service Center.
The center gives out food to low-income families in the area, and serves several farm-worker families.
"We stay open until 7 now, because they can't get away from the farms for the 5 p.m. distribution," said Agnes Schmitz, an office worker at the Community Service Center.
For Dobbins and Thoeny, who struggle to come up with a working solution for this problem, a future for farming seems bleak.
"Usually farmers can improvise and come up with a plan B," Thoeny said. "The depressing part is, there is no plan B."
Or participate LEGALLY in the H2A program.
Yeah, I guess that would be ok. Equal protection says that if they get amnesty, we should all get amnesty. Not paying taxes 4 years out of 10 sounds like a fair bargain.
your turn
Plus....all those banned pesticides in the US.....get used on foreign foods....
See this for where the MECHANICAL PICKING MACHINES are being used......and other relevant info.....
http://www.goodfruit.com/issues.php?article=691&issue=24
Yeah, wouldn't want you to do anything beneath your dignity...
Myself, I'd rather be in the strawberry fields, or picking apples than a slave to "my CO" -
Been there, done that too.
An aside: No honest work is beneath one's dignity. As for myself, during the years I was raising my children as a single mom back when women's wages were slave wages, I worked 2-3 jobs simultaneously...One full and a couple part time...which meant I rushed from my hoity-toity corporate management job to what you might consider "peon" jobs, to put food on the table.
For the most part, I found the "peons" - as apposed to the CO-level - a nicer, 'realer' class of people...maybe because their noses weren't so high in the oxygen starved atmosphere?
There's more than one level of serfdom...
You don't have any idea of what a "CO" is, do you?
I don't believe for one minute his lack of being able to pick profitably blueberries by mechanical device. That is if he had the foresight to plant compatable varieties.
Mr Dobbins check here:
http://www.bei-inc.com/
Same here in Napa. I have noticed whole residential areas here where the "Homes for Sale" signs are entirely in Spanish. No English at all.
And if manual labor is his choice and Americans aren't available, I don't believe for one minute he couldn't get legal H2A workers. I do believe they'd be more expensive.
I've posted a couple articles like this. If there's a shortage of illegals developing, that's a good thing. That it caught employers by surprise is their problem.
In some N California areas the pom fruit quantities are way down due to the late rains and hail storms. So picking should be no problem. Early peach, cherries, plums or apricots harvest is way down this year. Late peach varieties seem okay. Pears and apples are going have a bumper crop.
I pick my own acre of blueberries. There is no way I could pay myself 35 cents a pound and expect to even make gas money.
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