Labor Lull: Valley not immune to farm worker shortage

It used to be as simple as posting a sign on the roadway.

But now, South Texas farmers are forced to recruit field labor through employment agencies and repeated phone calls to harangued work crew leaders.

"We have about 250 workers right now, and we need around 350 to do it the right way," said John Bannworth, owner of B&J Onion and Melon Co. near Zapata.

"It's slowed us way down in our harvesting and our packing plant. We lose a lot of crops because we get behind."

Directly across the Rio Grande from Mexico, farmers here used to be able count on their proximity to that country for a steady stream of legal and illegal workers - even as the immigration crackdown crippled other regions of the United States, where farmers often ended up watching their crops rot in the field.

While the situation here has not reached those proportions, South Texas farmers are finally feeling the pinch.

A study released last month by the Texas AgriLife Extension Service, a division of Texas A&M University, reported that 66 percent of surveyed farmers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and Winter Garden regions said they experienced some degree of labor shortage over the last two years.

"In the past 10 years, I haven't seen anything like it," said Parr Rosson, a professor at A&M. "The labor market has been increasingly tight in agriculture. Shortages exceed 20 percent in some areas (of South Texas)."

Competition

Rosson believes the shortage stems from two principal factors: illegal immigrants scared off by U.S. Customs and Border Protection's crackdown and the demand and higher pay for workers in the construction and oil industries.

"For the average person, oil is going to be the top paying, and then construction, and then farming," Rosson said.

Industry officials estimate that illegal immigrants make up about 70 percent of the agriculture work force.

As there is no means of tracking illegal immigrants, the impact of the federal crackdown is impossible to quantify. But Ray Prewett, president of the Texas Citrus Mutual, which represents the state's orange and grapefruit industries, said it was certainly significant.
"This enforcement has dried up a big part of the labor supply for agriculture," he said.

Prewett added that some South Texas farmers have begun looking at options once considered unthinkable along the border, such as enrolling in government programs providing temporary foreign labor.

"Sometimes, the government can be difficult to deal with in terms of some of their requirements, so there's a reluctance to get into some of those programs," Prewett said. "People are looking at that more and more because they're not finding labor through the other channels."

The effects on farm labor supply has become a contentious issue on the national political scene, as farming associations heavily lobby for immigration reform and a guest worker program that would provide a more reliable supply of workers.

But for many South Texas farmers, the labor problems began long before CBP started hiring more U.S. Border Patrol agents.

‘Moving up the ladder'

Fred Schuster, whose family has run Schuster Farms south of San Juan for about 80 years, believes the labor problem has more to do with the region's changing economy.

While employment options in the Valley may have once been limited, forcing many to pick produce in the fields, job opportunities in the retail, construction and medical industries have really grown.

"Unemployment is way down," Schuster said. "It used to be 18, even 25 percent. A lot of these people are moving up the ladder."
Up the road from Schuster Farms, Isaac Garcia watched over a crew of farm workers picking honeydew melons on Monday.
A former field laborer himself, Garcia, 43, grew up in the Valley and worked his way up.

Each fall he goes around to local Laundromats and convenience stores to post signs looking for men to work the citrus harvest. But increasingly, Valley residents are not the ones calling about the job, which is compensated anywhere from $60 to $150 a day, based on how much produce a worker picks.

"Some people, they have high school diplomas and they do this because they like it," Garcia said. "But most of the people from here don't want to work out here ... it's hard work."

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James Osborne covers McAllen and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4428.