Farms struggle without workers

DRESDEN - Early Friday morning, farmer Bill Huston was already having a bad day - the tractor had a flat tire, his truck wouldn't start and people he was expecting to work in the fields picking vegetables hadn't arrived.

He needs seven pickers; on Friday he was expecting four.

"Right now, I've got two," Huston said.

He also had an order for 60 boxes of zucchini, and if no one else is there to pick them, Huston would have to do it, which means other work won't get done and the business will fall further and further behind on things like paperwork, spraying and weeding.

Huston's is one of several farmers having trouble hiring reliable pickers for vegetable fields. And the issue could only become more widespread, said Matt Bell, local farmer and Ohio Farm Bureau state trustee for District 16.

Bell's own operation is fortunate enough, he said, to be able to hire year-round workers and while it can be a challenge to find suitable people, his farm hasn't yet been negatively affected by a lack of workers. But he has heard from other area farmers who are struggling.

"To me, it could have a big impact," he said.

Not enough labor means not enough work gets done, which means not enough dollars are coming in, which means not enough dollars are being spent, which means the local economy suffers, Bell said.

"If a tomato is ripe, they can't just leave it there for two days and wait for help," he said.

According to a 2015 report by the Partnership for a New American Economy, from 2002 to 2014, the number of full-time farm workers in the U.S. dropped by more than 20 percent. The number of new farm workers immigrating to the U.S. dropped by 75 percent during that same time period.

Huston Farms has 100 acres of vegetables, including a variety of peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, green beans, melons and sweet corn, among others. Most of it will eventually get picked and sold, but more than once Huston has had to abandon produce in the fields. Once it gets too ripe, he can't sell it, so there's no point.

Rows of green beans were ripening on Friday morning, and the window of picking opportunity was closing; if the green beans weren't picked that day, they would be no good. Huston sells green beans at $25 a bushel, and there were probably 150 bushels in the field he was concerned about. If no beans could be picked, he would lose more than $3,000.

"These aren't too old yet," he said, adding that the beans might still be viable.

Melons have about an eight-hour window for picking. Zucchini can grow and be picked repeatedly, but only if it's picked before the plant blooms. If the zucchini is not picked before then, the plant won't produce any more and if the zucchini grows too large, it won't be sold.

"Those would have been sellable if they were picked earlier," Huston said about several zucchinis in one of his fields.

Huston pays pickers either hourly or by unit, and it is possible, he said, to make good money if someone is efficient and fast. But the migrant workers he used to hire have moved into construction, because the money's better. And grocery stores sometimes don't offer profitable deals to farmers for their goods, forcing them to cut costs and drop prices.

"Everyone wants cheap, local produce," Huston said. "If we're not making any money, I can't pay $12 an hour....If I can't compete with paying people, it's hard to keep up."

Betty Yeary, who owns Yeary Orchards in Adamsville with her husband, said they worry every year about getting enough help in their packing house - and they also only need seven workers to get them through a season.

The Yearys contract with a company in Georgia for seasonal migrant workers who work in the fields to pick the apples, which is a job that locals don't want to do and often lack the experience for, Yeary said. But they try to recruit local workers for their packing house. Jobs in the packing house include stacking boxes, filling bags with apples and monitoring the washing and waxing of the picked fruit, which is done by machines.

The work isn't very difficult, Yeary said. Yet they still can't always get enough reliable people for the whole season.

The process is functional with fewer than seven workers, but not much fewer. Yeary and her husband and both in their 70s and can still work when they have to, but they can't do hard labor 12 hours a day every day, she said.

It's tough to work around people's existing schedules, because there are times when an order will be placed for the next day, so workers have to stay until it's completed, she said.

"You can't start the line with part of a crew," Yeary said. "And if the order's not done, you can't stop."

Larger orchards in the state can get by, especially if they're located near a major city, but smaller operations are feeling the strain, she said.

Huston said he believes mid-size farms like his are going to be affected the most, and could eventually disappear, leaving only huge operations or small, local growers who only sell at farmers markets.

"The whole industry's changed," he said.

ksnyder2@zanesvilletimesrecorder.com

740-450-6752

Twitter: @KL_Snyder