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A snapshot of the farm labor force

By VANESSA GREGORY, Californian staff writer
e-mail: vgregory@bakersfield.com | Saturday, May 17 2008 12:00 PM

Last Updated: Friday, May 16 2008 9:51 PM

Migrant workers are less common than they once were, but California’s farm labor supply still swells and shrinks with the seasons.

Statewide the agricultural workforce balloons from 200,000 to 225,000 in the winter to 400,000 or 450,000 in summer’s peak harvesting months, according to the California Farm Bureau Federation trade association. Kern’s massive farm industry produced commodities valued at $3.5 billion in 2006, according to the county’s crop report.

Although Kern’s 9.7 percent April unemployment rate might suggest Kern has plenty of available labor, at least one Kern grower was willing to speculate on why a company might import workers from another state.

“It’s because they’re cherry pickers,” said Steve Murray, who has 280 acres of cherry trees planted on his Murray Family Farms.

“These days of labor shortages, you can get a crew that comes in that doesn’t have experience.”

And the delicate cherry demands the right touch, Murray said. He hires up to 700 temporary workers who pick his cherries stem-by-stem, taking care not to bruise the fruit or damage the tree’s fruit-producing spur, which would erase next year’s crop.

Increasing crew size at precisely the right time can be a struggle, he said. Ripe fruit needs to get picked early in the season, before cherries ripen elsewhere and supply drives prices down.

Some workers who left farming in recent years to work construction or service jobs are now returning to the fields, according to the California Farm Bureau. But getting crops picked is an ongoing concern, said Kern County Farm Bureau Executive Director Matthew Park.

Agricultural work is hard, and some of it — such as grape pruning — takes a certain skill level, Park said.

“It’s not like a typical employer, who can go out and advertise in the paper,” Park said.

Stemilt Growers recently applied to bring more than 50 foreign workers into Washington under the H-2A federal guest worker program, according to the UFW in Washington.

The UFW objected to the application in a Monday letter to the U.S. Department of Labor, pointing to a program provision requiring growers to demonstrate a domestic worker shortage.

“If there’s a shortage, why did they send 100 workers down to California?” asked Erik Nicholson, a Washington-based UFW staffer.