Harvest demands a show of hands

Tag: Harvest Machine

Labor specialists and farm industry leaders have advice for dealing with scarce labor supplies this season: If you can't mechanize, brush up on your management skills to get you through, and as a last resort, try the H-2A guestworker program.

The consensus across the West is most farmers with labor-intensive orchard and vine crops will find fewer hands to hire.

Barry Bedwell, president of Fresno-based California Grape and Tree Fruit League, said his members are bracing for a tight labor market this year to harvest peaches, plums, nectarines and table grapes Harvest Machine.

"The trend is before us, and that hasn't changed," Bedwell said.

As in previous seasons, farmers are trying to make more efficient use of employees.

"Before, when we had labor, you might have concurrent operations going of harvesting over here during the summer and you're doing some summer pruning and cultural practices over here," said Bedwell. "Now, they're having to figure out 'I have less people. How do I do both of those, or do I cut some of this out?'"

Gregorio Billikopf, a University of California Cooperative Extension labor management farm advisor, has seen the demand for foreign workers rise all across the country. States like California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho are now competing with Eastern states for eligible workers.

"In the last six years the percentage of foreign-born workers in the dairy industry has risen from 3 percent to more than 40 percent," Billikopf said. "The need for labor and the realization of the value of labor from south of the border has just been enormous."

Mechanization has made inroads into various sectors of agriculture where hand labor once dominated.

Rows of new harvesting equipment were on display at the 2008 World Ag Expo in Tulare in February. Mike Yada, a sales representative for Grape Harvesters in Fresno, extolled the features of a towering green New Zealand-made harvester that picks winegrapes and, with some modification, can harvest olives for oil.

Replacing 50 workers

Yada, who has experience with running hand crews, said the machine has the potential to replace dozens of workers. "This will pick as much as 50 people," he said.

Another exhibitor, Tom Thompson of American Grape Harvester, had two machines on display at World Ag Expo, a winegrape harvester and a machine to harvest dried-on-the-vine raisins.

"Labor availability is the issue, but with a 6-foot-wide open-gable DOV, you can pick it by hand, but it is just easier to do it with a machine," Thompson said.

The raisin harvester utilizes a four-person crew, and Thompson claimed it could do the work that 20 people would normally do by hand.

Most winegrapes in California's Central Valley are now picked by machine, said Thompson. But he has seen more demand for mechanization by North Coast growers and vintners.

"We are selling some of these on the North Coast, where everything is hand-picked and that's what they prefer, but when you can't get the people, you use the machine," he said.

Brent Searle of the Oregon Department of Agriculture sees a similar trend in his state toward mechanization in Willamette Valley vineyards.

"I know that some of the equipment companies are pushing them pretty hard up here. These are the same machines they use in France," Searle said. "They work on hillsides. They are pretty high-tech. I think we are going to see more of it as time goes on and as labor issues increase."

Different spacing

Even though barriers remain to mechanize crops like cherries, apples, pears and berries, Searle said, growers are always searching for ways to be more efficient with available labor.

"Short of pure harvest kind of technology, you see a lot of stages in between that can be improved," he said. "I think some of these orchards are getting replanted to smaller trees, different types of spacing, so that they can move platform equipment through them and make it easier for pickers so they don't have to climb ladders and improve those kinds of efficiencies."

Some growers, anticipating worker shortages this season, are giving the temporary H-2A guestworker program a second look. The federal program allows farmers and ranchers to recruit workers from abroad, but it has rarely been used because it is expensive. It requires employers to offer free housing and transportation in addition to an adverse-effect wage rate that is frequently above market levels. In addition, the program requires subsequent approval by four governmental agencies: Department of Labor, Department of Homeland Security, State Department and the state employment agency.

Dan Fazio, director of labor relations for the Washington Farm Bureau Federation, expects a rise in H-2A applications this year to help fill the state's need for an estimated 50,000-60,000 seasonal workers. Last year, 20 employers filed H-2A applications for 1,635 workers, Fazio said.

"This year, there's more people using the H-2A program. We'll probably have applications for 2,500 to 3,000 H-2A workers," he said.

Seldom used

Fazio confirmed why the program is seldom used by agricultural employers. Of the 1,635 workers requested in 2007, the state's Employment Security Department was able to refer 68, and only two workers fulfilled their H-2A contract. Fazio called the program a "bureaucratic nightmare."

The program's costs can be prohibitive to many growers - as much as $2,500 per worker, said Fazio. For a typical farming operation using workers for four months, he calculated the program adds almost $4 per hour in added costs for each worker hired under the H-2A program.

Steve Merriam, an area manager for Growers Labor Services, a company that specializes in providing H-2A workers throughout the U.S., said the firm has applied for licensing to operate in Oregon and Washington this year. He conceded the program is not inexpensive, but it can help growers who are desperate.

"Anytime you have to provide a worker with housing and transportation and pay their transportation to and from the host countries - and workers' comp and all of the issues relating to the federal government - there's a lot of issues to be dealt with and money to do that," Merriam said.