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Cleanup leaves growers short of workers for harvest
Growers think workers are being siphoned away from the fields and groves by builders and landscapers B and even FEMA for cleanup elsewhere in Florida and in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

By LAURA LAYDEN, lllayden@naplesnews.com
November 20, 2005

Local growers say they're having a hard time finding enough workers to clean up the mess that Hurricane Wilma left behind.

The storm flooded vegetable fields. It blew over citrus trees and knocked fruit to the ground. It destroyed packing houses and ripped apart greenhouses, tearing up tender young vegetable plants that had yet to be planted.

Wilma arrived just as growers were about to start their winter harvest and as migrant workers were starting to return to Southwest Florida for season.

While the storm was deadly for growers, it didn't destroy everything. There are still crops to pick and there's a lot of cleanup to be done.

"Right now, at this moment, we are desperate for more help for cleanup and for the ongoing crop. There is still a crop out there. The crop was hurt and some of it was destroyed but it was not 100 percent destroyed for the year," said Jay Taylor, president of Taylor & Fulton Inc. in Palmetto, which has tomato acreage in northern, central and southern Florida, including Collier County.

His company could use another 100 workers a day just in Immokalee to help replant and to care for and harvest the tomato plants that survived.

Taylor said there's more work than usual this time of year in vegetable fields because of the hurricane.

"We will have an ongoing need," Taylor said. "We need more now than we will in the future. We have so much work to do to catch up."

Other growers feel his pain.

"There's not much help around right now," said John Alexander, chairman and chief executive of Alico Inc., a LaBelle-based grower whose crops include citrus and sugarcane. "We're a little early for the normal influx of migrant workers. They come in a little later."

The peak of season is still more than a month away. But that's just one of the reasons growers believe there's a shortage of workers. They say they're competing with other cleanup efforts in Southwest Florida. They think workers are being siphoned away from the fields and groves by local builders and landscapers â€â€