Thread: Plentiful harvest awaits, but few hands to pick it

http://www.thetimesherald.com/apps/pbcs ... 70304/1002

Plentiful harvest awaits, but few hands to pick it
Without a large migrant work force, local company must buy crops elsewhere

By HILLARY WHITCOMB JESSE
Times Herald

For years, hundreds of migrant farm workers tended the fields of Sanilac and St. Clair counties. Today, only a few dozen migrants labor on local farms. In a three-day series, Times Heraldreporter Hillary Whitcomb Jesse looks at what has led to the change, how the change has affected agriculture and social services, and how former migrant workers have settled into the area.

Craig Gielow's family has been making pickles for four generations.

Just about everything has changed in the industry since Gielow's great-grandfather started Aunt Jane Foods pickle company in Croswell.

"Back then, since it was so seasonal, you used to have to have a large work force for such a short period of time," said Gielow, executive vice president of Gielow Pickles Inc. in Lexington.

He said Aunt Jane's, which since has closed, used to drive busloads of workers to the area and house them in camps in the outskirts of Croswell in the 1950s. In 1970, after Aunt Jane's was sold to Borden Foods (now owned by Dean Foods), Craig's father started his own company.

Since then, the company has moved from making mostly brine-cured pickles to refrigerated pickles, including some pickled pepper products. Today, not one migrant worker is employed by Gielow Pickles Inc.

Gielow Pickles sells to wholesalers for food-service work, Gielow said. Cucumbers are trucked in from Mexico, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, elsewhere in Michigan and Ontario, depending on the season, to make sure there's a constant supply.

Still, Gielow said, finding the raw cucumbers can get difficult.

"There's no migrant work force left out there to pick the pickles," Gielow said. "We've got all these unemployed people in America, but there's no one who wants to work in agriculture."

The cucumbers he buys from Ontario all are picked with what he called "harvest aids," a generic term that, for cucumbers, includes small, roofed carts for pickers to sit on as they pick instead of walking down each row.

One Georgia grower who used to sell vegetables to Gielow would bring 200 migrant farm workers to his fields under a national program for temporary foreign agricultural workers but stopped, Gielow said, because of the program's stipulations.

He said he knows of at least one Sanilac County farmer who didn't plant cucumbers this year because he couldn't count on a labor force to pick them.

Payments manager Nancy Albert at the Sanilac County Department of Human Services office recalled one recent year when the economy was so bad, farmers tried to hire local teenagers for farm work, to provide them some income. They told their usual migrant workers not to come.

"The local kids wouldn't do the work. It was too hard to work in the hot sun," Albert said.

Charles Ruthruff of Grant Township, who owns McCallum's Orchard & Cider Mill, said the same thing - he has jobs for fruit pickers, doughnut makers and tractor drivers, yet few teenagers come and apply.

Today, Gielow Pickles employs 63 year-round employees in production and management.

"A lot are housewives looking for a second income. High school, college kids through the summer months, though they don't come in as much anymore," Gielow said.

He said it's not really a case of the work phasing out the need for migrants.

"They're very much needed. They're just not here," he said.



http://www.thetimesherald.com/apps/pbcs ... 70302/1002


Need for migrant services declines as numbers dwindle


By HILLARY WHITCOMB JESSE
Times Herald

WATERTOWN TWP.- Chris Collins' presence this summer is making people relieved and happy.

Collins, a teacher at Reese schools in Tuscola County during the school year, is the migrant program specialist for the Sanilac County Department of Human Services. But it isn't a crowd of migrant farm workers who are thrilled to see him - it's his coworkers.

The drop in the migrant farm-worker population in Sanilac County, from the heyday of hundreds down to a few families today, means Collins has picked up work for other caseworkers in the office.

As far as migrant casework goes, "As of this point, I have two families," he said earlier this month. "This time last year, I probably had half a dozen. We provide help with food benefits, medical benefits, and we also provide help with child day care."

He's expecting a small rush of new clients around the start of July, after kids finish school down South and their families come North.

Collins' supervisor, payments manager Nancy Albert, said there seems to be less need for migrant workers than in the past.

She has worked in the human-services office since 1971 and remembers the mid-1980s to the early 1990s as a busier time for migrant farm workers in Sanilac County.

Back then, it took two migrant specialists plus the other office workers pitching in to handle the workload, she said.

Albert found a report from 1995 that showed 54 migrant farm worker families, including 183 individuals, received help that year. She said the need probably topped out around 100 families during the busiest years, but reports weren't available.

During that same time, a nonprofit agency called the Migrant Ministry, Health Inc. served migrant workers in Lapeer, St. Clair and Sanilac counties.

Founded by Isabelle Sanchez in the late 1960s, the agency used donations from churches and other sources to provide medical, housing, educational or employment help to migrant workers.

After Sanchez died in 1991, the ministry's leadership changed hands a few times and was renamed Thumb Outreach Minority Services in the late 1990s.

John Espinoza, today a Democratic state representative from Croswell, was one of its leaders before the agency's funding dried up. He said the Human Development Commission in Caro took over the agency's function, though funding for such needs has dropped significantly.

"The need has decreased also. There just isn't the population," he said.



http://www.thetimesherald.com/apps/pbcs ... 70303/1002

School programs no longer needed


By HILLARY WHITCOMB JESSE
Times Herald

For most school districts in Sanilac and St. Clair counties, programs for migrant workers' children are long gone.

The Sanilac Intermediate School District hasn't had one in recent memory, nor have Marlette or Capac schools. Deckerville never had one, said Superintendent Alan Broughton, who grew up in the Deckerville area and recalled a Marlette program as well as one Croswell-Lexington schools ran.

As the number of migrant workers in St. Clair and Sanilac counties has dropped during the years, the need and funding for programs giving an academic boost to migrant workers' children has run out, too.

Tillie Ramos, 54, of Croswell has worked for the Croswell-Lexington school district for 21 years. She used to recruit kids to attend the district's summer migrant program.

"I would cover mostly all of Sanilac County," Ramos said.

The district would send a bus around the county to bring kids to class, she said.

Until the 1990s, the six-week summer program provided breakfast, lunch and a snack for the kids, took them on field trips, brought in a dental hygienist and brushed up on academics.

"It was an excellent, excellent program that we provided. We could help them catch up with their reading and math skills, which was the main reason we provided it," Ramos said.

She started a tutoring program to reach children whose families came north in late April or early May but didn't enroll in school for that final month.

After the summer program ended, Ramos continued tutoring until school started in the fall.

She said some families enrolled kids in school for the fall months because Croswell-area canneries and apple orchards needed workers into October.

The schools also had a bilingual program, Ramos said, in which she and another bilingual aide helped a bilingual teacher.

"We would work with our migrant students because generally they were behind, because of migrating," she said.

"We no longer have a program because we don't have the families coming into the area," she said.

The complaint that the "teenagers" couldn't or wouldn't do the hard work in the hot sun? What in the heck is that?

You take kids who've been confined in air-conditioned schools in air-conditioned houses and haul them out to a farm in Georgia probably when it was the hottest day of the year and tell them, "pick" and he's surprised that didn't work out well?

You can't do that to teen-age workers. They probably had on typical "kid wear" consisting of a big old heavy baggy pair of jeans and some heavy polyester blend baggy navy or black t-shirt hanging down over their butt with unventilated ball caps with the visor turned to the back....and they probably all nearly collapsed from heat exposure!!

GOOD GOD MAN!! You have to properly attire, properly outfit, and properly cool down the workers!!

First, they need 100% cotton t-shirts preferably white loose-fitting so they breathe but not hanging down over the jeans.

Second, they need straw hats not unventilated polyester ball caps.

Third, they need a proper pair of pants...thin denim or cotton baggy pants or bermuda type shorts....no belts.

Fourth, they need a chance to acclimate.

Fifth, they need a mister and a shade even if only a tree or an umbrella set up for them.

Sixth, they need cool rags to drape around their necks.

Seventh, they need their hair short or put up off their necks.

Eighth, they need a water cooler....no soda.

Ninth, they need sun protection.

Tenth, you have to stay on top of them and if they don't show up, go get 'em.

These are teen-agers that have to be taught how to work and do it right in a way that is as comfortable and as reasonable as possible. They also need time and instruction to get work-ready and become fit for the job.

I'm sure, too, that when they got home dehydrated, heat exposed, drenched in sweat, with horrific sunburns....their Mamas horrified by the sheer unusual sight squealed "oh you poor baby, you're not going back to that field...over my dead body...that man can pick his own pickles".

So instead of helping them to succeed, they were doomed by the adults from the outset.

Gee...why don't they just mechanize? Too cheap to spend the $$$???

RR