September 22, 2006

Pickers Are Few, and Growers Blame Congress

New York Times

LAKEPORT, Calif. — The pear growers here in Lake County waited decades for a crop of shapely fruit like the one that adorned their orchards last month.

“I felt like I went to heaven,” said Nick Ivicevich, recalling the perfection of his most abundant crop in 45 years of tending trees.

Now harvest time has passed and tons of pears have ripened to mush on their branches, while the ground of Mr. Ivicevich’s orchard reeks with rotting fruit. He and other growers in Lake County, about 90 miles north of San Francisco, could not find enough pickers.

Stepped-up border enforcement kept many illegal Mexican migrant workers out of California this year, farmers and labor contractors said, putting new strains on the state’s shrinking seasonal farm labor force.

Labor shortages have also been reported by apple growers in Washington and upstate New York. Growers have gone from frustrated to furious with Congress, which has all but given up on passing legislation this year to create an agricultural guest-worker program.

Last week, 300 growers representing every major agricultural state rallied on the front lawn of the Capitol carrying baskets of fruit to express their ire.

This year’s shortages are compounding a flight from the fields by Mexican workers already in the United States. As it has become harder to get into this country, many illegal immigrants have been reluctant to return to Mexico in the off-season. Remaining here year-round, they have gravitated toward more stable jobs.

“When you’re having to pay housing costs, it’s very difficult to survive and wait for the next agricultural season to come around,” said Jack King, head of national affairs for the California Farm Bureau Federation.

California farms employ at least 450,000 people at the peak of the harvest, with farm workers progressing from one crop to the next, stringing together as much as seven months of work. Growers estimate the state fell short this harvest season by 70,000 workers. Joe Bautista, a labor contractor from Stockton who brings crews to Lake County, said about one-third of his regular workers stayed home in Mexico this year, while others were caught by the Border Patrol trying to enter the United States.

With fewer workers, Mr. Bautista fell behind in harvests near Sacramento and arrived weeks late in Lake County. “There was a lot of pressure on the contractors,” he said. “But there is only so much we can do. There wasn’t enough labor.”

For years, economists say, California farmers have been losing their pickers to less strenuous, more stable and sometimes higher-paying jobs in construction, landscaping and tourism.

“If you want another low-wage job, you can work in a hotel and not die in the heat,” said Marc Grossman, the spokesman for the United Farm Workers of America. The union calculates that up to 15 percent of California’s farm labor force leaves agriculture each year.

As they sum up this season’s losses, estimated to be at least $10 million for California pear farmers alone, growers in the state mainly blame Republican lawmakers in Washington for stalling immigration legislation that would have addressed the shortage by authorizing a guest-worker program for agriculture. Many growers, a dependably Republican group, said they felt betrayed.

“After a while, you get done being sad and start being really angry,” said Toni Scully, a lifelong Republican whose family owns a pear-packing operation in Lake County. “The Republicans have given us a lot of lip service, and our crops are hanging on the trees rotting.”

Tons more pears that were harvested were rejected by Mrs. Scully’s packing plant because they were picked too late. The rejects were dumped in a farm lot, mounds of pungent fruit swarming with bees, left to be eaten by deer. “The anthem about the fruited plain,” Mrs. Scully said sadly, “I don’t think this is what they had in mind.”

Some economists and advocates for farm workers say the labor shortages would ease if farmers would pay more. Lake County growers said that pickers’ pay was not low — up to $150 a day — and that they had been ready to pay even more to save their crops. “I would have raised my wages,” said Steve Winant, a pear grower whose 14-acre orchard is still laden with overripe fruit. “But there weren’t any people to pay.”

The tightening of the border with Mexico, begun more than a decade ago but reinforced since May with the deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops, has forced California growers to acknowledge that most of their workers are illegal Mexican migrants. The U.F.W. estimates that more than 90 percent of the state’s farm workers are illegal.

Most California growers gave up years ago on recruiting workers through the seasonal guest-worker program currently in place. Known as H-2A, the program requires employers to prove they tried to find American workers and to apply well in advance for relatively small contingents of foreign workers for fixed time periods.

“Our experience with the current H-2A program has been a nightmare,” said Luawanna Hallstrom, general manager of Harry Singh & Sons, a vine-ripe tomato grower based in Oceanside, near San Diego.

Ms. Hallstrom said her company tried to use the program in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, when security checks forced it to fire illegal migrant employees who were working in tomato fields on a military base. Her company lost $2.5 million on that 2001 crop, she said.

Over the years, occasional programs to draw American workers to the harvests have failed. “Americans do not raise their children to be farm workers,” Ms. Hallstrom said.

The failure of Congress to approve a new guest-worker program surprised California growers because a proposal that the Senate passed stemmed from a rare agreement between growers’ organizations, the U.F.W. and other advocates for farm workers, and legislators ranging from conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats.

Known as AgJobs, the proposal would create a new temporary-resident status for seasonal farm workers and give them the chance to become permanent residents if they work intensively in agriculture for at least three years. It was included in a bill that passed the Senate in May. The House has passed several bills focused on border security, and has avoided negotiations with the Senate on a broader immigration overhaul. [Three of the House bills were passed Thursday.]

Mr. Ivicevich, a 69-year-old family farmer, is not given to displays of emotion. But he paused for a moment, overwhelmed, as he stood among trees sagging with pears that oozed when he squeezed them. His nighttime sleep, in his cottage among his 122 acres of orchards, is disrupted by the thud of dropping fruit and the cracking of branches.

For decades, Mr. Ivicevich said, migrant pickers would knock on his door asking for work climbing his picking ladders. Then about five years ago they stopped knocking, and he turned to a labor contractor to muster harvest crews. This year, elated, he called the contractor in early August. Pears must be picked green and quickly packed and chilled, or they go soft in shipping.

“Then I called and I called and I called,” Mr. Ivicevich said.

The picking crew, which he needed on Aug. 12, arrived two weeks late and 15 workers short. He lost about 1.8 million pounds of pears.

His neighbor, Mr. Winant, standing in his drooping orchard with his hands sunk in his jeans pockets, said he would rather bulldoze the pear trees than start preparing them for a new season.

“It’s like a death, like a son died,” said Mr. Winant, 45, who cares for the small orchard himself during the winter. “You work all year and then see your work go to ground. I want to pull them out because of the agony. It’s just too hard to take.”