Labor - A mechanical grape harvester could be the answer to a shortage of farmworkers in Oregon's vineyards Monday, July 16, 2007ANGIE CHUANG The Oregonian Staff
Surrounded by shiny new tractors, Carl Capps spends most days talking about horsepower, hydraulics and transmissions. He paid little attention to anti- and pro-immigrant-legalization activists who marched at the state Capitol.

Then the immigration debate came to him last fall, after he sold a quarter-million-dollar machine that harvests wine grapes -- the first in the Willamette Valley.

The New Holland Braud grape harvester can do the work of 40 handpickers in a fraction of the time.

Suddenly, vineyard owners were calling Capps to schedule demonstrations, saying they couldn't cope with worsening worker shortages -- or immigration raids. Their concerns were heightened after a U.S. Senate immigration bill that would have offered legal status for up to 900,000 undocumented agricultural workers failed, and immigration officers detained nearly 200 workers at a Portland produce processing plant.

Oregonians for Immigration Reform, a restrictionist group, touted the European machine as a beacon of a future without illegal labor.

"As soon as word about this got out, the immigration issue was the first thing that came up," Capps said. "The bloggers are all over it. They're saying, 'Finally, see? We told you that you could get by without all this immigration.' "

The harvester is a powerful and controversial symbol as Oregon and the nation struggle with the economic realities of immigration. As public pressure drives a border crackdown and increased enforcement, farmers nationwide face labor shortages as high as 30 percent to 50 percent during harvest. Further complicating matters, large numbers of former migrant laborers have switched to construction jobs for the higher pay and year-round stability.

The high-tech machine -- which uses "shaker rod" technology to coax grapes off the vine into molded silicon rubber collection baskets -- may herald a future of all-mechanized agriculture.

"Oregon doesn't have the scale or the research to make an immediate leap," said Brent Searle, special assistant to the director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture. "But in farming, it's always taken a crisis to make big changes.

"Necessity is the mother of invention."

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonia ... xml&coll=7

I have no doubt in my mind that we can produce machines that can do the work illegal aliens think they are entitled too, at least in agriculture.