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Article published Nov 19, 2005

Migrant workers series: A field out of favor

GIBSONVILLE -- For six generations, the Lewis family has farmed tobacco and grain in Guilford County.

Since 1978, Mexican agricultural workers have helped them with the harvest. For the past five years, they have been part of a federal guest-worker program that brings in legal migrant workers for several months.

But for Robert Lewis, 51, and his son Brian, 29, labor may be the least of their future worries.

Production costs are going up, but tobacco prices are coming down. And even in Northeast Guilford County, the pressure of global competition from places such as Brazil is felt.

"We made enough to keep in business this year," said Brian, who sat hunched in a chair in his parents' kitchen on a Thursday evening in early November. "But we didn't make nowhere near what we did in other years."

Without government subsidies for the first time, North Carolina's tobacco farmers have no income guarantees. Once the state's prized crop and economic engine, the tobacco leaf is out of favor. Less tobacco is being planted every year; farmers are retiring; fields are getting sold to subdivision developers.

The Lewises, like other farming families with extended lineage in the fields, vow to continue on short term. But whether a seventh generation Lewis plows the fields is an open question.

"You take the best of the bitter -- who knows what is going to happen now?" said Robert, who wears blue work jumpsuits regardless of season and carries a pack of chewing tobacco with him everywhere. "We're just taking it one year at a time."

Partners in the fields
Robert and Brian Lewis can't do this job alone, not with dozens of acres to sow, tend, harvest and dry.

For more than 25 years, farmhands up from Mexico have helped.

"I had one guy who worked for me -- I picked him up in the early 80s walking down a back road," said Robert. He had papers allowing him to work, but his cousins, who also worked for the Lewises, did not.

But using undocumented workers eventually prompted state officials to start asking questions about his workers.

So to prevent legal problems, in 2001 the Lewises opted to participate in a federal program that brings in legal migrant workers.

This summer, the Lewises hired 11 guest workers up from Mexico. They were led by Mario Elias Gervacio, who has spent the last five springs and summers on the Lewis acreage that stretches across Guilford, Rockingham, Caswell and Alamance counties.

They have been satisfied with the program. "The (guest worker) program -- it's straight. Now I don't look over my shoulder," said Robert. He and Brian rely on Gervacio to take care of everything with the other 10 workers, from time sheets to work instructions.

The cost of help
The workers, once a fairly inexpensive labor source, are getting to be yet another cost to worry about.

Their wages this year were $8.24 an hour, up from $7.75 two years ago.

But more importantly, as participants in the guest-worker program, the Lewises had to provide the men free housing.

A state inspector's warning meant improved housing standards for the men this past summer.

The Lewises in the offseason spent $40,000 on building a new home for the men. It has satellite television, washing machines, two stoves, and room outside to play soccer, an improvement on trailers that used to house the men, the men who worked for the Lewises said.

"The free housing, I don't think that's fair -- well I think the kind of money they're making they need to be paying some part of it," Robert Lewis said.

The men do not pay state or federal taxes.

Stan Eury, the president of the N.C. Growers Association, which organizes the migrant worker program, said the higher housing and labor costs are exacting a toll. Fewer farmers are participating in the program year over year.

About 6,500 participated this year, down from a peak of about 10,000 legal immigrants in 2001.

At the same time, the total number of migrants entering the state, including residents of other states and legal and illegal workers, keeps rising, according to the N.C. Department of Labor.

In 2000, there were 14,312 agricultural migrant workers; in 2004, the latest available statistics, the figure rose to 18,247.

Regina Luginbuhl, the bureau chief of the Agriculture Safety & Health division of the N.C. Department of Labor, says the rise "probably" shows that farmers are reverting to using more illegal workers. But the department does not check.

"As the (guest worker) program gets more expensive, folks revert to the former system -- crew leaders. But workers could be green card, could be Puerto Ricans, U.S. citizens from Florida or up north," she wrote in an e-mail.

Not so far apart
At least in the next year the Lewises do not plan to make any changes to their operation.

Unlike many other farmers in the state they are not reducing their tobacco acreage. Statewide, 14 percent fewer acres of tobacco were planted in 2005 than in 2004, according to the N.C. Department of Agriculture.

If anything, the Lewises have invested more heavily in the operation in recent years, buying tobacco dryers and other equipment.

Buying the equipment was a "cloudy day in Daddy's thinking," Robert said, but he does not envision abandoning farming in the next year or two. Selling the land to developers, who have turned more than a few former tobacco fields in the area into new subdivisions is not an option at this point.

But beyond that? There is already one telling fact about the Lewis family's future in farming: Brian is the only one of Denise and Robert Lewis' five children that wants to make a career of it.

"It breaks my heart," said Robert.

Many of the men from Mexico who worked for Lewis this summer say they too cannot imagine doing anything else for a living.

Most work in the fields when they return home to Mexico and do not know another life.

"I've never thought about other work," said Juan Hernandez Hidalgo, 42, when asked what his dream job would be.

"I would grow tobacco. I don't know how to do anything else."

Farmer and farm hand are not so far apart. Brian Lewis has said he would consider being a truck driver if he could no longer farm profitably, but he couldn't imagine not working the land.

"We're going to keep trying to do what we do for as long as possible."