Dirty Dozen Foods
April 19, 2018
Farmer Suicide
May 17, 2018
Food Chain Radio Show #1147
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Farm Worker
Guests: Lowell Hurst – Retired High School Ag Instructor, Mayor of Watsonville, CA; Guadalupe Sandoval –Executive Director California Ag Labor Contractor Association; Sophia Wilmore – Environmental Studies Major University of California
I had a conversion the other day with an 86-year old former California farmer. Now, this gentlemen was not just a former farmer, he was also a retired PhD college professor and a semi-retired local agriculture banker.
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Farm Labor – Who will work?
When our conversation turned to the subject of farm labor, as conversations with farmers do these days, I asked him what happened to the Bracero Guest Worker program, and without a nano-second of hesitation, he looked me in the eye and said, “Caesar Chavez! When he started listening to the AFL-CIO, it was all over.”
When I asked how the Bracero program worked for him, he replied, “We were required to have two local workers for every guest worker, which meant that if we had twenty guest workers, we needed to have 40 local workers. So we went downtown and hired whoever we could find just to have those 20 guest workers.”
“You have to understand that farm work is skilled labor. Those guest workers were not only skilled, they had a work ethic you would not believe. We would do anything to keep them, even to the extent of hiring local derelicts!”
The guest worker program is no more, the open border has been closed, and we are now left with a monumental change in the nation’s agriculture. What does that change look like?
More than 55 percent of 762 farmers and ranchers surveyed in a California Farm Bureau Federation report from October 2017 said half of their land continues to go unattended because of an ongoing labor shortage directly related to U.S. immigration policy.
Not a pretty picture, when half of our ability to grow food is out of business because there is no one to do the work! And so we ask…
Leave a comment below: Who is going to work on our farms?
Nationally syndicated Food Chain Radio airs live Saturday mornings 9-10AM Pacific.
