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Washington growers bemoan labor shortage as apple harvest begins [url=javascript: void(0);]PDF [/url]| Print | [url=javascript: void(0);] E-mail [/url]
SHANNON DININNY - The Associated Press WAPATO, Wash. -- Fifteen sleepy farm workers ambled through rows of Fuji and Red Delicious apple trees Friday, taking in their new environment as they slowly recovered from the two-day bus ride that brought them from Mexico to rural Washington state to pick fruit.
First: a nap. Then they planned to be in orchards, on ladders and with pruning shears in hand, bright and early Saturday in central Washington's agricultural Yakima Valley.
"We have an agreement, like it should be. I pay their way, and they're here under contract to pick fruit," said orchard owner Rob Valicoff, who hired the workers through a recruiter under a federal guest-worker program. "There's $3,500 an acre sitting here on these trees, and to be tied up without workers is ludicrous."
It's a refrain farmers across the country are echoing this year, as crackdowns at the border slow the migration of Mexican workers -- legal and illegal alike -- to the United States.
In California, pear growers estimated losses in the millions of dollars earlier this summer due to a labor shortage.
An estimated 30 percent of the crop was left on trees in Lake County, northwest of Sacramento, too ripe to be picked after days of waiting for pickers to arrive. Still other districts piled pears that didn't pass grade in mounds on the ground.
Timing is everything to tree fruit growers, and in Washington state, concerns about a labor shortage are mounting. Washington is the nation's top apple-producing state, growing roughly half the U.S. crop.
On the east slopes of the Cascade Range, growers scattered "Pickers Wanted" signs along Highway 97 next to the Columbia River, a prime region for tree fruit in the northern part of the state.
Russ LeSage owns 250 acres of apple and cherry trees, but also manages 800 acres for Johns Farms in Brewster. The two enterprises share labor back and forth as needed; this week, he has about 100 workers picking apples.
"I could easily use 150, and 200 wouldn't break my heart," LeSage said. "We're three, four, five and six days late picking stuff, so it goes in a little lower quality than it should to the warehouse, and it doesn't bring us the kind of money it should bring us."
LeSage also said he's paying more for labor than ever before. Workers were earning about $18 per bin for Golden Delicious apples, which bruise easily and are more delicate to pick. The going rate last year was about $14 per bin, up from about $10 per bin five years ago.
The average picker can fill five bins in one day -- or $90 a day for Golden Delicious. A bin can weigh roughly 800 pounds, although that varies by apple variety.
"It's a laborer's market right now. My pickers all look at me and say, 'How much are you going to pay?' " he said. "They all have cell phones, and all they have to do is call up the road and see if anybody else is paying a little more."
Farmers in that situation are left to decide whether it's even worth picking the fruit, or just letting it rot, said Dan Fazio, director of employer services for the Washington state Farm Bureau.
"I can fill 10,000 jobs at $15 an hour right now," he said. "And we knew this was going to happen. We've been warning people for years."
Farmers across the West for years have complained about a labor shortage to harvest their fruits, vegetables and other crops. Critics have always discounted those claims, saying farmers who pay higher wages have plenty of help.
"At some point, it's like the boy who cried wolf," said David Groves, spokesman for the Washington State Labor Council. "It's just that, at different points in time, we've heard this, and we've seen evidence that there's not a labor shortage. There's just an unwillingness to pay decent wages."
That said, though, there are unique things happening with border security and immigration that could be impacting the labor supply, Groves said.
More than half of the nation's 1.8 million farm workers are here illegally, though growers in Washington estimate the figure here is as high as 80 percent.
The state Employment Security Department does not have definitive data proving a shortage exists in Washington. However, officials are hearing anecdotal evidence that farmers are having a harder time finding workers, said spokeswoman Sheryl Hutchison.
"Pretty much anybody who has a farm belt, they're having some problems. It's tighter," Hutchison said.
The agency has deploying staff in the field to recruit workers and run Spanish-language advertisements in newspapers, television, and radio. State officials also tried recruiting nontraditional workers, such as housewives and welfare recipients, with very limited success.
Fourteen of Valicoff's workers from Mexico are in the United States for the first time. Angel Rojas, 33, previously picked cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and tobacco in North Carolina and Tennessee.
"Many times, I've left my family. I'm used to it," he said, when asked if he misses the wife and two daughters, ages 6 and 9, that he left behind in Canatlan, Mexico, north of Durango. "My goal is to make money to dress up my girls and give them a better education."
Following a winter of heavy snowfall, Washington growers went into the season for the first time in years without fear of a drought, raising hopes for a healthy harvest. Labor woes could dampen those prospects.
Already, Valicoff had to abandon some Bing cherries earlier this year, to move his pickers to the more profitable Rainier cherry orchards.
"If you could take the man-hours and spread them out evenly across the board, we probably have enough people," Valicoff said. "But it doesn't work that way. When you've gotta pick 'em, you've gotta pick 'em."