Thread: Pick your theory, but valley is short of cherry harvesters

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pb ... /606290322

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

What is this article really saying?

The same amount of illegals are in this country that were here before anything changed at the border. So where are that people to pick the fruit?

What this is article is implying is we need MORE illegals because even though there are still 12 million illegals here the fruit is still not getting harvested. HHHHMMMMMM.......

This is a disturbing article for several reasons.

#1. Is someone putting him up to say this ? The anti-illegal immigration people play by the rules while the pro-illegal people like to carry around their bag of dirty tricks and propaganda tactics.

#2. Are they moving into other jobs "Americans won't do" ?

#3. Maybe he should pay a little more and ATTEMPT to find Americans to work for him with a liveable wage.

#4. Maybe it is time for automated picking machines and he needs to grin and bear it like the rest of us have to get used to things.

One things for sure illegal aliens haven't gone home. So maybe they are not working to make it look like we can't survive without them.

I agree dlm with you , dlm. Hmmmmm.

P.S. I'd like to see this man's assets before he cries poor man. I BET he's got far more than most people in America have.

They do have alternatives like the article I posted a few days ago. There is not a shortage of illegal immigrant workers in the country as evidence by the staggering numbers. We have more illegals now then we ever had.


http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=F ... ry+pickers

I said in another thread. I think this is the next tactic we are going to see. All of sudden there will be more and more stories of work not getting done because we are "cracking down on illegals"

Well since all the illegals are still here and illegals are still crossing the border and we really have not cracked down on much of anything other then the token raid by ICE here and there, there should not be a shortage of illegals to go around to all the businesses that need their cheap labor.

I am so tired of the rhetoric and the games and polictical jockeying. All I want is the laws of my country enforced and the borders secured and all illegals sent back to where they came from. Is that too much to ask?

If we can accomplish that it would put a huge dent in the elitists plans for a North American Union and the superhighway.

Why would they want to pick fruit? They have discovered that our welfare system is much easier to pick.

More stems are left on hand-picked fruit, adding to the presentation of maraschino cherries dropped in cocktails and plunked on ice cream sundaes.

And there is the reason we should endure the illegal alien invasion? Get a machine, pick the cherries, get over the lost stem, and never bother us again with this silly problem. Send illegals home.

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.

Just as I suspected, there are alternatives to using illegal alien labor. If Mr. Drazdoff wants to stay in business, he needs to modernize and quit being part of the illegal alien problem.

It's ok with me.....just give an American an idea, and they will create a machine to do the work.....we need our inventive minds back, not illegal cherry pickers!