We had an encounter on this subject this
week. We visited a large tree nursery in North Central Texas - a well-run
and successful operation that requires a lot of hand labor. Shortly after
arriving I commented on photos of the owner with GW Bush. She acknowledged
that some explanation was required. Seems that Bush is a customer, for his
Crawford ranch, and this businesswoman had "shorted" a delivery in the hope of
getting an audience with the President about migrant labor. It
worked! Here's the story she told him: The nursery normally employs about
60 workers and advertises widely for those workers. This year only 6
applicants were US citizens. Of those, 4 failed to show for their drug
tests, and one walked out on the first day. From what we could
see, the work environment was safe and pleasant. The owner was able
to greet most of the workers by name and received a cheerful
response.
Why do US citizens not want to do this kind of
work? The work is tedious and the pay is low, but it's honest labor for a
good cause.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 10:29 PM
Subject: [Livingontheland] we'll have to
confront the farm-labor crisis
Let me get this straight - we can't even grow our own
food?
paul tradingpost@lobo.net ------------------------------------------
"In
farm fields larger than even a few acres, diversified vegetable farming is
extremely labor intensive -- and in the modern U.S., farm labor generally
means immigrant labor."
To create a truly sustainable food system,
we'll have to confront the farm-labor crisis By Tom Philpott 30 May
2008 http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2008/05/30/?source=food
When
I think about what a truly healthy, vibrant food system would look like, I
envision more farms: small farms serving specific communities, and
diversified, midsized farms geared to supplying their surrounding
regions.
Many hands make site work. Of course, there would still be
interstate and global trade -- you can't grow olives or coffee in Iowa, or
enough wheat in Florida to supply the state's bakers. But with more farms
across the nation, we could all generally eat much closer to home, consuming
fewer resources and throwing off less pollution in the process. Traveling
would be more interesting as well. Imagine finding region-specific, seasonal
specialties -- not standardized burgers -- at train stations across the land.
(Oh yeah, in my vision, there'd also be a high-functioning national rail
system.)
In some ways, this scenario -- the food part, anyway -- isn't
so far-fetched. I've watched people's zeal to "eat local" rise dramatically
over the past 10 years. And now, even the business media are taking it
seriously. Just last week, BusinessWeek joined the chorus heralding the "Rise
of the Locavore," noting that, "Consumers increasingly are seeking out the
flavors of fresh, vine-ripened foods grown on local farms rather than those
trucked to supermarkets from faraway lands." Nationwide, the number of
farmers' markets ballooned by 50 percent between 2001 and 2006, BusinessWeek
reports.
But consumer demand alone can only create so much change.
Though the locavore movement is heartening and necessary, it remains a tiny
organism compared to our great lumbering beast of an industrial food system.
By some estimates, local-oriented farms supply something like 2 percent of
U.S. food calories. To move beyond the farmers' market box, farms producing
for local and regional markets will have to multiply in number far more than
that impressive 50 percent figure.
I've already identified one major
obstacle between my reverie and reality: infrastructure. As I wrote in a
recent column on the need to revive the dismal fortunes of midsized farms, the
infrastructure needed for such farms to thrive -- locally owned grocery
stores, dairy-processing plants, slaughterhouses, canneries -- has withered
away as the food industry consolidated over the decades.
In the weeks
since that column, I've hit upon another roadblock: a growing labor shortage
that's falling particularly hard on midsized farms.
Belaboring the
Point
At first glance, New York would seem a particularly ripe state
for a midsized farm renaissance. It boasts a bustling metropolis -- the
nation's largest -- with a strong and growing locavore scene. Combined with
population centers like Albany and Rochester, the vast organism that is
greater New York City might be expected to provide a robust market for the
midsized farms that dot the state's landscape.
Yet those very farms are
struggling to harvest their produce because of an ongoing labor shortage. And
produce unharvested means produce unsold -- and farms in
trouble.
According to a recent New York Times piece, upstate farms are
suffering because very few U.S.-born citizens will accept agriculture jobs --
and the undocumented workers who have been staffing them for years are being
hounded out by anti-immigration zeal.
As a result, farmers are scaling
back production of labor-intensive fruit and vegetable crops and investing
heavily in labor-replacing machinery. Substituting human labor with machinery
not only boosts agriculture's fossil fuel use, it also makes farms more
vulnerable by strapping them with debt.
Not surprisingly, their lenders
are getting nervous. In testimony last fall before the U.S. House Agriculture
Committee, an official from Farm Credit of Western New York estimated that
more than 800 farms in the state, representing 750,000 acres in farmland, were
"highly vulnerable to going out of business or forced to [become] part-time
farms from a severe labor shortage."
These operations, whose average
size is less than 100 acres, essentially represent New York's base of midsized
farms. The Farm Credit official predicted that if those farms fail, much of
that land would likely remain in some form of agriculture, but that "hundreds
of thousands of acres would be vulnerable to being discontinued from crop
production and converted to non-farm uses."
In other words, what's left
of New York's most productive farmland may soon be sprouting second homes and
vacation condos where it once produced tomatoes and green beans.
U.S.
Farms Migrate to Mexico
The problem is by no means limited to the
Northeast. In California, the Associated Press reports, Mexican farmworkers
are having trouble heading north over an increasingly well-patrolled border --
but U.S. farm owners are crossing the other way freely. According to AP, "Many
[U.S. growers have] moved their fields to Mexico, where they can find
qualified people, often with U.S. experience, who can't be
deported."
When they jump the border to buy land -- presumably without
having to risk their lives in the desert or hire "coyotes" to ease the passage
-- U.S. farm owners find an oasis of cheap and compliant labor. AP reports
that U.S. farm employers can buy a whole day's worth of labor for a wage
($9.60) equal to an hour's worth of work at the going rate north of the border
-- while still doubling Mexico's minimum wage of $4.80 per day.
Now,
the AP article is talking mainly about large-scale agriculture here -- the
kind that keeps your local Wal-Mart stocked with little bags of baby spinach
and asparagus all year. In the logic of industrial farming -- where food is
grown in vast, centralized monocrops, and then distributed in thousand
mile-plus radii -- the shift from California to Mexico makes a certain sense.
"Mexico is closer to eastern U.S. markets than California," Associated Press
reports. "Shipping times to Atlanta are a day shorter from Mexico's central
Guanajuato state."
But the labor crunch is surely also squeezing
California's midsized operations -- the farms that will be needed to broaden
local-food access in one of the nation's most economically stratified states.
In farm fields larger than even a few acres, diversified vegetable farming is
extremely labor intensive -- and in the modern U.S., farm labor generally
means immigrant labor.
What, then, is the answer? In the short term,
the U.S. should end its ridiculous nativist immigration policies. As I've
written before, Mexican farmworkers don't sneak across one of the globe's most
militarized borders to freeload off of U.S. taxpayers, despite the fantasies
of certain cable-TV commentators. Rather, they're fleeing a near-complete
meltdown in small-scale Mexican agriculture -- one that directly implicates
the free-trade zeal of U.S. policymakers and corporations.
But even if
U.S. policymakers did open the border -- highly unlikely -- we can't build a
sustainable food system in the United States on the backs of former Mexican
farmers who have been driven off their land by NAFTA and other binational
U.S.-Mexico policies. The time has come for the U.S. sustainable-food movement
to develop a North American consciousness -- to foster a farmworker movement
of its own, and to seek coalitions with Mexican small-farm advocates to
rebuild local and regional food networks on both sides of the
border.
Farm for America
Simultaneously, it's time to
develop an idea floated by Anna Lappé on Grist a couple of months back: farm
work as a green-collar job. Heard of Teach for America, the federal program
that draws college graduates into critically important, but horribly paid,
public-school jobs? The time for Farm for America is ripe -- as ripe as the
fruit that will soon be rotting on vines across the country for lack of
pickers.
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