EDD regularly obtains data on farmworkers and wages paid when employers pay unemployment insurance taxes. Employers who pay more than $100 in quarterly wages are required to register with the EDD and pay taxes of up to 6% on the first $7,000 of each worker’s earnings to cover the cost of unemployment insurance benefits for laid-off workers. We extracted all Social Security numbers reported by California agricultural employers in 2015 and tabulated all of the farm and non-farm jobs and earnings of these farmworkers. This allowed us to assign workers who had more than one job to their primary commodity, the North American Industry Classification System code of the employer, and the county where they had their maximum earnings. Figure 1 shows average employment in California crop agriculture since 2007. Average employment rose over 10%, but there was an important change in crop agriculture after 2007, when non-farm crop support employers — those who bring workers to crop farms, such as farm labor contractors — began to bring more workers to farms than were hired directly by crop farmers. There are several reasons why farmers may turn to FLCs for workers, package of blueberries including the ability of FLCs to assemble crews of workers at lower cost than farmers who hire workers directly.
According to EDD data, over the past decade crop farmers have hired a few more workers directly, animal agriculture has had stable average employment, and there has been a sharp increase in crop support employment , most of it with FLCs. The average employment of crop support establishments has been rising by 10,000 a year, so that in 2016 non-farm crop support firms brought an average 215,000 full-time equivalent workers to crop farms, more than the average 173,000 FTE workers that these farms hired directly . Average FTE employment in animal agriculture has been stable at about 29,000, while animal support employment fell slightly. The total number of farmworkers employed sometime during the year is larger than average employment because of seasonality and turnover. In 2015, employment peaked at 475,000 in July and reached a low of 350,000 in December, guaranteeing at least 475,000 unique farmworkers. The actual number of workers is higher because of turnover: some workers do only a few days or weeks of farm work and quit, and workers employed in the Coachella and Imperial Valleys during the winter and spring rarely migrate to the San Joaquin Valley for the summer harvest, so different workers are required in different areas. After making adjustments for what appeared to be false or shared SSNs, in 2015 there were 848,000 unique SSNs reported by agricultural establishments, twice the average FTE employment of 421,000 .
This suggests two workers per FTE job, a ratio that has been stable over the past decade. Average FTE employment and the number of unique farmworkers each rose 10% between 2007 and 2015. The average annual pay of FTE agricultural workers varies by commodity. In 2015, the average annual pay of a directly hired FTE crop worker was $32,500, that of an FTE animal worker was $35,900, and that of an FTE crop support worker was $27,500. Table 1 presents data on the number of establishments, average employment and average annual pay for California commodities where average employment was at least 10,000 employees. The four crop categories in the table accounted for almost all establishments and average employment in the NAICS code for crops ; dairies accounted for half of NAICS 112 animal employer establishments and two-thirds of animal employment and total wages. The four crop support services listed under NAICS 1151 in the table accounted for almost all of the establishments, average employment, and total wages in the crop support category. Farm employment is concentrated in a few commodities. Fruits and nuts accounted for 57% of average direct-hire crop employment in 2015, dairy for 64% of direct-hire animal employment, and FLCs for two-thirds of average crop support employment.
For a FTE worker, the implied average hourly earnings ranged from a low of $10.80 for FLC employees to $18.34 for other post-harvest activities such as cooling and cleaning crops after they are harvested. California’s minimum wage was $9 per hour in 2015. Since we have data on all workers who were employed in a commodity, we can calculate the difference between the earnings of an FTE worker and the earnings of an average worker. We assigned farmworkers to the commodity or NAICS code in which they had their highest earnings, and found that 705,000 workers had their maximum earnings from a farm employer; we call these workers primary farmworkers. Table 2 shows that these primary farmworkers averaged $17,434, or 58%, of what an FTE worker employed in agriculture would have earned. We assigned the 705,000 primary farmworkers to the NAICS code or commodity in which they had their maximum earnings in order to determine what share of FTE earnings in that commodity a typical worker received; for over 100,000 farmworkers, this was a non-farm NAICS or employer. Primary crop workers were those whose maximum earnings were from employers with NAICS 111, and they averaged $21,467, two-thirds of what an FTE crop worker would have earned . Those whose maximum earnings were in greenhouses and nurseries earned 84% of FTE earnings in this commodity, while those whose maximum earnings were in more seasonal fruits and nuts earned 57% as much. Primary workers in animal agriculture earned 86% of what an FTE animal worker would have earned, and dairy workers, who were almost two-thirds of primary animal agriculture employment, earned 87% of what an FTE dairy worker would have earned , likely reflecting more hours of work during the year. Support service workers outside of crops earned almost as much as an FTE worker, but not crop support workers, who earned only half of what an FTE crop support worker would receive. The seasonality and turnover in crop support means that primary workers employed by FLCs, the largest group of workers, earned only 44% as much as an FTE worker employed by FLCs . Since the implied hourly wage for an FTE worker employed by FLCs was only slightly above the state’s minimum wage, the low average earnings of primary FLC employees must arise from fewer hours of work. A worker employed 1,000 hours at $9.86 an hour would have earned the average amount of a primary FLC employee in 2015, $9,878. Most primary agricultural workers, 70%, had only one job in 2015; this was a farm job, since having a farm job was necessary to be selected. Over 85% of animal workers employed in sheep, hogs and poultry had just one job in 2015, but less than 60% of workers who were employed in strawberries and vegetables had only one job. About 70% of primary FLC employees had one job in 2015. A quarter of farmworkers, some 223,000, had two or more jobs, and 18% had three or more jobs. Half of the 51,500 primary FLC workers who had two or more jobs in 2015 had one farm and one non-farm job, nft hydroponic while two-thirds of the 11,300 post-harvest crop support workers had one farm and one non-farm job. Half of the primary FLC workers with two or more jobs got at least 75% of their annual pay from FLCs, just as half of the dairy workers with two or more jobs got at least 75% of their annual pay from dairies. This same pattern held for most commodities, viz, half or more of two-job workers with primary earnings from strawberries or vegetables got at least 75% of their annual pay from this same commodity.
A quarter of the 51,500 primary FLC workers with two or more jobs in 2015 had at least two farm jobs and one non-farm job. However, these 14,000 workers were only 5% of the 293,000 workers whose primary earnings were with FLCs and less than 2% of all farmworkers, suggesting that combining farm and non-farm jobs is relatively rare.The 848,000 workers with at least one farm employer in 2015 can be assigned to the county where they had their highest-earning job, which could be a farm or a non-farm job. Kern , Fresno and Monterey had 36% of the state’s farmworkers, and the eight counties that each had at least 30,000 farmworkers had over 60% of the total, including Tulare , Ventura , San Joaquin and Santa Barbara and Los Angeles . Workers are assigned to the county of their employer, so that an employee of an agribusiness operatingin several counties could be assigned to the headquarters county. The largest employer in most counties was an FLC : they employed 65% of primary workers in Kern County, 47% in Fresno County and 41% in Monterey County . In Kern County, the next largest employers were tree nuts and grape vineyards , each with 7% of primary workers. In Fresno, the next largest were employers engaged in post harvest activities with 13% of workers and grape vineyards with 8%. In Monterey, postharvest activities employed 15% of primary workers, vegetable farming 12% and strawberry farming 11%. In Tulare County, FLCs accounted for 54% of farmworkers, followed by 9% for post harvest activities and 7% for dairy . In Ventura County, 32% of farm workers were in strawberry farming, followed by 19% with FLCs and 16% with other berries . Los Angeles was the most unusual county. All workers had to have one farm employer to be included in the analysis, but the largest employers of farmworkers who had their highest earnings in Los Angeles County were employment services , with 12% of farmworkers; restaurants , 8%; nurseries , 4%; and strawberries, 3%. In Napa County, 34% of the 8,000 farmworkers were employed by grape vineyards, followed by 32% employed by farm management services ; 7% each were employed by FLCs and beverage manufacturers .In an effort to improve wine quality, many smaller high-end wineries employ laborers to hand sort individual berries after destemming to remove unwanted material such as raisins, diseased berries, unripe berries, and materials other than grapes such as leaves and stems. This can be costly, labor intensive, and it can slow down the process line. To reduce costs and increase throughput, many wineries have adopted optical sorting technology. Using this technology, MOG can be removed more efficiently, and parameters such as color, shape, and size can be used to sort individual berries. Depending on the type of sorter, processing speeds can range between 2 and 15 tons per hour. Furthermore, fewer workers are needed to operate an optical sorter than to hand sort the respective amount of fruit. In addition to saving time and money, optical sorters have the potential to decrease the impact of inconsistent ripening in grapes. One study successfully sorted Carlos Muscadine grapes into four different ripeness levels using light at two different wavelengths in the visible spectrum. The researchers found that with successive sorting levels, there was an increase in Brix and pH, along with a decrease in titratable acidity in grape samples. In the wines, an increase in tannin and pH and a decrease in titratable acidity was found with increasing sorting. In sensory analysis, the first and fourth sorting levels were found to be inferior compared to the middle two treatments. Even though this study used outdated equipment compared to today’s standards, it shows that white grapes can be sorted into different ripeness levels and this can affect the quality of the wine produced. A recent study used visible near-infrared spectroscopy to classify table grapes into different groups based on soluble solid and phenolic content. The researchers were able to differentiate berries of different classes with accuracy ranging from 77% to 94%. Another study found that wine made from optically sorted Chardonnay grapes had higher residual sugar, pH, and total phenols than the unsorted control. The wines were analyzed sensorially with descriptive analysis and the judges scored the sorted wines significantly higher in tropical fruit and sweetness. However, with only two significant attributes out of twenty, the wines were determined to be similar in character. Another study investigating the effect of mechanical harvesting and optical berry sorting on Pinot noir grapes found that, in general, wines made from optically sorted fruit were significantly lower in total phenol and tannin, potentially due to the removal of MOG during sorting.