Worker lack leads to swan song
Andrew Silva, Staff Writer
Article Launched:12/09/2006 12:00:00 AM PST




http://www.sbsun.com/ci_4809430
ONTARIO - Under a warm fall sun, about a dozen farm workers pulled long plastic sheets from the ground and shoveled green and red Roma tomatoes into the furrows.
The last crop to be overseen by 65-year-old Richard Miller was to be plowed under because of low prices.

"Farming is fun. It's fun when you're making money. It's fun when you're not making money," said Miller, a gregarious, stocky fellow with a well-groomed shock of white hair and a white beard.

The market is paying $4 for a 25-pound box of his tomatoes. His cost to produce them: $6 a box.

After 3 & 1/2 decades working for a company founded by a Japanese-American family after their release from a World War II internment camp, Miller is calling it quits.

Farmers have always wrestled with the vagaries of weather and fickle markets.

But there's a new problem facing American farmers that's forcing them to leave big parts of crops rotting on the ground.

Not enough farm workers.

Miller's strawberry crop on 130 leased acres in south Ontario earlier this year should have been a strong moneymaker. Instead, his company, Murai Farms, lost money.

"I was always behind," he said. "You try to pick strawberries
three times a week. If you get down to two times a week or one time a week, it's ripe. And if the weather hits you, you have to throw it away."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., cited Miller in a speech in the Senate this week as she pushed a bill that would allow guest workers in the country.

"Over and over again, I have heard that growers need an immediate fix. They do not know what to plant in the upcoming spring season because they do not know whether they will have the workers necessary to harvest the crops," a transcript of Feinstein's speech stated.

Farming in the Inland Empire is an increasingly rare enterprise as development relentlessly gobbles up open land.

Most of the men and women working for Miller have been with him for years, but getting enough people to harvest a crop has been difficult.

"Berries are a very expensive crop to grow," he said, adding that the cost is $12,000 an acre. "It can make you a lot of money. Without labor, you can lose a lot of money in a big hurry."

While the contentious debate over illegal immigration may play a role in the labor shortage, a bigger factor appears to be plain old capitalism.

Construction work can easily pay double or triple the minimum wage earned by farm workers. Even service jobs that also pay minimum wage can be more desirable because they don't have the backbreaking demands of picking crops and don't require moving around.

"Obviously, workers are motivated by the desire to make money," said Armando Navarro, ethnic-studies professor at UC Riverside. "There's a demand for labor in other sectors."

Farmers agree, but there's little room to raise wages when prices are determined by the buyers, not the farmers.

Some pear growers faced a serious shortage of workers and did raise wages in Lake County earlier this year, said Jack King of the California Farm Bureau Federation in Sacramento.

The higher wages still didn't draw enough workers, he said.

"When the market is soft and you're not making a profit, you're limited to how much you can raise wages," he said.

Some farmers are switching to crops that allow more mechanized harvesting, he said, which could mean a permanent shift of some crops to other countries.

The public and politicians have to realize that an entire industry depends on the foreign workers who are the very focus of the immigration battle, both Navarro and King said.

For the upbeat Miller, the worsening labor problem on top of everything else was enough to get him to heed his wife's pleas that he retire to his home in Yorba Linda.

He recalled the all-nighters to keep crops from freezing, the hot weather in the fields, the cold weather, and the Santa Ana winds that could beat up a strawberry crop and make it worthless.

"It's a good life to have, and I wouldn't change anything I've done," he said. "It just gets a whole lot harder now."

Contact writer Andrew Silva at (909) 386-3889 or via e-mail at andrew.silva@sbsun.com.