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Pick your theory, but valley is short of cherry harvesters

Farmers cite immigration uproar, weather, automation

MICHAEL ROSE
Statesman Journal

June 29, 2006

Terry Drazdoff's cherry crop has never looked better, but it has been a bitter harvest for the Polk County farmer. Few migrant farmworkers are showing up to pick the ripe fruit.

The worker shortage has left Drazdoff exasperated -- and time isn't on his side. He also is railing at the government's decision to put National Guard troops on the Mexican border to prevent illegal immigration.

"Why did President Bush do this before harvest?" Drazdoff said.

Farmworkers should be harvesting 25 tons of fruit per day from Drazdoff's orchard, he said. Instead, the farmer can hire enough workers to pick only about 6 tons of fruit daily.

Drazdoff and some other growers are quick to blame the crackdown at the border for restricting the labor supply. But experts in migrant labor say recent changes in immigration policies are only part of the reason -- and perhaps not the main one -- why some growers can't hire all the pickers they need.

Daniel Quinones, a farmworker representative for the Oregon Employment Department, said the numbers of migrant workers passing through the Willamette Valley has been declining for years. One reason: there simply is less work for them as more farmers switch to machine-harvested crops, such as grass seed.

This season, a late strawberry harvest overlapped with the start of the sweet cherry harvest, Quinones said. Meanwhile, picking has started at some raspberry and blueberry farms. The coinciding harvests stretched an already-tight supply of pickers.

As a result, some growers have had difficulty finding people willing to pick crops, he said.

Some farmers disagree with Quinones' reasoning. They assert that cherry pickers tend to specialize in harvesting that crop, and fewer and fewer of them seem to be available in Oregon.

Quinones said that the uproar about illegal immigration might be discouraging some Hispanic workers from following the crop harvests on the West Coast.

"There is a lot of fear out there because of what's happening around the nation with the immigration situation," he said.

The cherry pickers Don Nusom hires all have documents showing their legal status, he said, although the farmer said he wouldn't be surprised if some of them entered the country illegally.

"Our entire labor supply is pretty much immigration, whether they're legal or illegal," he said.

The number of pickers seeking work is well below normal, said Nusom, who grows cherries near Gervais.

Experienced cherry pickers, who are paid by the bucket, often earn $11 or $12 per hour, he said. People new to cherry picking and less skilled, such as a couple of workers Nusom recently hired, make minimum wage.

Craig Bell, whose Marion County farm produces sweet cherries and pears, agrees that it has been a tough year to find pickers.

"People are getting by, but there's not an abundance of pickers. People are scrambling to find them," Bell said.

He also operates Eola Speciality Co., a food processor that packs maraschino cherries and pickled vegetables.

The "border problem" is adding to a picker shortage, he said.

Another theory is that last year's abysmal cherry harvest in the Willamette Valley is having an after-effect on the labor market.

An unusual weather pattern in 2005 resulted in one of the worst years ever for cherry growers. As a result, cherry pickers might be skipping the Willamette Valley this year and going directly to The Dalles and the Hood River area, where a good crop is viewed as a sure thing.

Reliable estimates about the size of a work force that might spend only a few days or weeks in Oregon are not available, although there is little doubt that it has declined throughout the years, state employment officials said.

Ramon Ramirez, the president of Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United, better known by its Spanish acronym, PCUN, said he expects cherry farmers to have better luck finding pickers when the strawberry harvest ends.

The pay rate for strawberry pickers started at about 18 cents per pound early in the season, then spiked to 25 cents per pound at a few strawberry farms, he said.

There is another option for cherry farmers. Growers can use machines to harvest their crop, but the hand-picked fruit is more desirable to cherry processors. More stems are left on hand-picked fruit, adding to the presentation of maraschino cherries dropped in cocktails and plunked on ice cream sundaes.

Back at Drazdoff's farm, the farmer might soon have to decide between shifting to mechanical harvest and letting his crop rot. The migrant workers, who have brought in the harvest at his farm for decades, might be permanently replaced by picking machines.

"Once I go to machines, I won't go back," Drazdoff said.

mrose@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6657