Pedro Alvarado Jr. prefers his job picking citrus fruits to the oil-field work he once had, even though he must lug 50-pound sacks of ruby-red grapefruit over to large plastic bins in the South Texas heat.

"The hours are better," said the 36-year-old Alvarado, his arms wrapped for protection against branches jutting at all angles as he swooped down and under thickly planted trees.

The problem for growers of citrus, onions, melons and other produce in the lower Rio Grande Valley, a key growing area, is that there are ever-fewer Pedro Alvarados around.

"It's a hard job," said Martin Diaz, 40, a third-generation labor contractor who hired him. "No one wants to be out in the sun anymore. They want to work at Wal-Mart, where it's air-conditioned."

Area growers speak of keen competition for workers from the construction and service industries in burgeoning McAllen, Mission and Edinburg, which have seen no housing downturn thanks to a continuing influx of winter Texans from the Midwest, wealthy Mexicans buying second homes, and business executives managing maquiladora factories across the nearby border, in Reynosa. And the situation is aggravated by a ripple of fear among undocumented workers whenever immigration authorities raid a packing plant.

While politicians in Washington debate immigration reform and ways to bring in guest workers to harvest the nation's crops, many big grower-shippers in the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission swath of the Valley have stepped up farming activity south of the border, tapping Mexican labor at home.

"Eight years ago, I had to tippy-toe between those involved with imports and those dealing with only domestic production," John McClung, president of the Mission-based Texas Produce Association, said in an interview. "That's no longer the case. Now every member of my board is working both sides of the frontier."

In testimony before a House subcommittee last month, McClung warned lawmakers that "unless Congress is able to quickly resolve the immigration-reform issue, more and more of the growers-shippers in Texas will accelerate the trend of moving to Mexico and elsewhere offshore. If we cannot secure labor in the United States, we will move operations where we can find labor. Then we will have succeeded in outsourcing yet another U.S. industry."

Stretching the season

Jimmy Bassetti is one of those growers-shippers working with Mexico.

But like many things in agriculture, the picture is complicated.

When asked why his $100 million-a-year, Edinburg-based J&D Produce is growing pickle cucumbers and seedless watermelons in Mexico, Bassett doesn't mention labor costs.

The main reason is "lengthening the window," or stretching the season, during which J&D can ship a particular item to the Midwest and Northeast, filling gaps when market prices are good, he said.

And it wasn't a sudden move in response to a labor shortage or higher costs here. Bassetti bought a 200-acre farm about a decade ago in the western Mexican state of Colima from another Valley grower, Othal Brand, the former mayor of McAllen.

"Today, we're all over Mexico -- Saltillo area, Tampico, Irapuato, Leon, Jalisco, Nayarit, Puebla, Chiapas -- chasing the climate and growing melons, greens, peppers, onions."

Back in Texas, Bassetti said, "Our labor situation is what it's always been -- difficult."

Aside from 50 full-time employees, J&D employs 250 part-time field and packinghouse workers in the Lower Valley. The pickers receive $7.25 an hour, which Bassetti says is higher than the industry average but ensures quality workmanship when growing niche crops like Swiss chard, Italian peppers, bok choy, fresh dill and high beta-carotene maroon carrots.

"We're dealing with labor-intensive crops but still do them," he said. "As the labor problem increases, we'll either phase them out or move."

That's not to say offshoring would solve all of the problems.

Mexico, where J&D employs 25 full-time and more than 200 part-time workers, "is not an easy environment in terms of getting things done in a timely fashion," Bassetti said. "You need to be in control of the growing, packing and shipping, especially from a food-safety perspective. By hiring our own people, we can ensure good farm practices."

Rounding up crews
Darrel Duda is one of the few Valley growers who found conditions south of the border just not worth the hassle.

"We tried a celery crop, and we actually had labor issues in Mexico," said Duda, who runs the McAllen operation of Florida-based, family-owned Duda Farm Fresh Foods. "We thought Mexico would be perfect. They told us, 'Labor? No problem.'

"We introduced U.S. piece rate [paid by amount picked], but they left the fields after making their personal target on the second day. And there's a narrow harvest window. Celery can't wait.

"We ended up taking 20 people -- from Texas -- with celery-harvest experience to finish."

Sticking to the Lower Valley is taking longer to round up crews for his onion harvests.

"They tell me, 'Why work agriculture when I can get a construction job?'" Duda said. "It's now taking us 10 days to get full staffing for the packinghouses when it used to take us one day. And we don't plan to expand any crop other than celery and sod."

Worker shortages
Duda says pickers hired for his onion harvests are paid minimum wage, which is currently $5.85. Unlike most manual workers, agricultural laborers are not guaranteed time-and-a-half pay after 40 hours.

The exception, strongly supported by farm groups, has not made physically demanding field work any more attractive.

A 1979 strike by onion pickers for better pay and conditions in Raymondville, 45 miles northeast of McAllen, was broken when then-Mayor Brand bought the crop and hired other workers to harvest.

Growers interviewed for this article want a system allowing Mexicans to cross the border to harvest crops, but none, directly or indirectly, use documented foreign farmworkers under the current H-2A visa program. Although a top farming state, Texas is not among the top 10 employing such authorized foreign labor.

Of the roughly 60,000 H-2A laborers in the country, Texas employed fewer than 1,500 last year, according to Department of Labor statistics. Economics might be a reason. These foreigners must be paid a minimum of $8.66 an hour, higher than the prevailing agricultural wage in the lower Valley. And if a farm operation already employs U.S. citizens, the Americans must receive at least the same wage, according to the Texas Work Force Commission.

There is no disputing the difficulty of recruiting farmworkers, despite a 6 percent unemployment rate in the McAllen metropolitan area.

"It's not that we can't find people," said Mike Martin of Rio Queen, which grows and ships citrus fruits, onions, tomatoes and honeydew melons. "We have to pay more."

But only 1 of 4 growers interviewed said he lost part of a harvest because there was no one to pick it.

"Two years ago," said Jim Steele, president of family-owned Frontera Produce in Edinburg. "Mother Nature said the cantaloupes would be ready in six days, not 14. In years past, you might have lost a day. We lost the equivalent of 100,000 40-pound boxes in the field."

Critics of proposals that would ease restrictions on guest workers say farmers should simply mechanize.

"It's not as easy as people think," Steele said. "There is yet to be a machine that can pick a cantaloupe off the ground or determine if it's ripe."

Machines can harvest some onions but not the softer, sweet onions like the 1012 grown in the Valley, Duda said.

"As labor gets more difficult to find, they'll come with one," he said. "The need hasn't been there."

Worker programs cited

Stories of fruits and vegetables going unharvested occur in spots around the country but are not yet widespread.

"There has been an overstatement of how desperate times are right now," said Howard Rosenberg, an agriculture labor expert at the University of California at Berkeley. "No crops are rotting on the vine, and the labor supply so far this year seems sufficient.

"It could get desperate in the future," Rosenberg said in a telephone interview. "If someone pressed a button, and you had a day without a Mexican, without an alien, there would be a major shock. I don't believe even our government wants that."

Dependence on foreign workers, even undocumented ones, is clear. A U.S. Labor Department study estimates that 53 percent of farm laborers are in the country illegally. Others, including Rosenberg, say the number could be 70 percent to 80 percent. Foreign farm laborers with work visas number fewer than 65,000.

"We're not asking for cheap labor," Frontera's Steele said. "We need some sort of day program that is not intimidating.

"If I had more labor, I would plant 50 percent more cantaloupes," said Steele, who said that cantaloupe production in the area has dropped, with Central America picking up the market. "Not because of the cost of labor, but because of availability."


Source: star-telegram.com

Publication date: 11/8/2007