Harvesting activity moves to the coastal plains in the second quarter of April June, as lemons and oranges are harvested in southern California and vegetable crops are thinned and then harvested in the Salinas Valley of northern California. June marks the second highest month of employment on the state’s farms, as workers harvest strawberries and vegetables as well as early tree fruits, including cherries and apricots; melons and table grapes are harvested in the desert areas. Other workers thin peaches, plums, and nectarines, remove leaves in some vineyards, and thin large acreage crops such as cotton. Farm employment peaks in September, during the third quarter, reflecting the harvests of crops from Valencia oranges to tomatoes to tree fruits in the Central Valley of the state. However, the single largest labor-intensive harvest involves raisin grapes—some 40,000 to 50,000 workers have been hired to cut bunches of 20 to 25 pounds of green grapes and lay them on paper trays to dry into raisins. The workers typically receive $0.20 a tray, and the contractor who assembles them into crews of 30 to 40, and acts as their employer, receives another $0.05 a tray. During September, there is something of an early morning traffic jam, as vans ferry workers to fields and orchards,stackable flower pots and employers wanting to wait as long as possible to harvest to raise the sugar content of their grapes worry that not enough workers will show up.
During the fourth quarter, harvesting activities slow, and after the last grapes, as well as olives and kiwi fruit are harvested in October, most seasonal farm and food processing workers are laid off. Most workers remain in the areas in which they have worked—most workers are not migrants who follow the ripening crops—but many were born in Mexico, and some return to Mexico with their families for the months of December and January. If workers were willing to follow the ripening crops, and to switch between citrus and grapes, they could harvest work for 6 to 8 months a year.But few workers migrate from one area to another, and few switch crops within an area. In the mid-1960s, when migrancy was at its peak, a careful survey of farm workers found that only 30 percent migrated from one of California’s six major farming regions to another . A 1981 survey of Tulare county farm workers found only 20 percent had to establish a temporary residence away from their usual home because a farm job took them beyond commuting distance , and surveys of California farm workers in the 1990s found that fewer than 12 percent followed the crops . A 2000-01 survey of 300 farm workers found 19 percent who moved in the previous two years to find farm work; fewer than 25 percent planned to move in the current year to find a farm job . There are many reasons why most farm workers stay in one area of California: the harvesting of many fruits and vegetables has been stretched out for marketing and processing reasons; the availability of unemployment insurance makes migration less necessary; and some farm workers with children who are not likely to follow them into the fields realize that migrancy makes it very difficult for children to obtain the education needed to succeed in the U.S.
An easy test of the degree of follow-the-crop migrancy is to check turnover in a farm labor center.If follow-the-crop migrants filled the center, workers and families would be constantly arriving and departing, as they moved on to another job in a distant area. In fact, most migrant centers fill as soon as they open, and keep the same tenants for the season: workers know that they can obtain services for themselves and their children, especially in the state-run centers, and it is very hard to find alternative housing if the family packed up and sought another job in the manner of John Steinbeck’s Joad family.Until the 1940s, it was common for the wives of field workers to be employed in the packing houses that canned, froze or dried fruits and vegetables. However, after unions pushed packing-house wages to twice field worker levels in the 1950s and 1960s, packing-house jobs became preferred to field worker jobs, often representing a first rung up the American job ladder for field workers. About 40,000 workers are employed in the preserved fruits and vegetables subsection of the state’s manufacturing industry, down from 50,000 in the early 1990s.In the case of some vegetables and melons, non-farm packing and processing jobs have been turned into farm worker jobs by field packing, having workers in the field put broccoli or cantaloupes directly intocartons rather than having the crop picked by field workers and packed by non-farm workers in packing houses.4 In other cases, farm jobs have become non-farm jobs, as when the cutting and packing of lettuce in the field is replaced by fewer workers simply cutting lettuce, and when there are more non-farm jobs in packing plants as lettuce is cut and bagged: bagged lettuce uses almost 40 percent of U.S. lettuce.Employment on California farms was expected to drop sharply in the 1960s, as the end of the Bracero program, which brought Mexicans to work in U.S. fields between 1942 and 1964, was followed by sharply rising wages and unionization—the United Farm Workers union won a 40 percent wage increase in its first table grape contract in 1966. Processing tomatoes provides an example of the sharp drop in farm worker employment as a result of labor-saving mechanization.In 1960, a peak 45,000 workers, 80 percent Braceros, hand picked 2.2 million tons from 130,000 acres of the processing tomatoes used to make ketchup. In 2000, about 5,000 workers were employed to sort 11 million tons of tomatoes from 350,000 acres that were picked by machines.
The keys to tomato harvest mechanization included cooperation between scientists and between farmers, government, and processors. Plant scientists developed smaller tomatoes more uniform in size that ripened at the same time, and were firm enough so that the stalk could be cut, and the tomatoes shaken off, without damage. Engineers developed a machine to cut the plant, shake off the tomatoes, and use electronic eyes to distinguish red and green tomatoes and discard the green ones . Processors agreed to accept tomatoes in 12.5 ton truck mounted tubs rather than 60- pound lugs, and the government established grading stations at which random samples were taken to determine the quality and price. The cost of mechanizing the tomato harvest was relatively small—less than $1 million—and the estimated rate of return was hundreds of percent.5 The rapid diffusion of tomato harvesting machines in California—none were harvested by machine in 1960, and all were harvested by machine by 1970—was expected to usher in an era of machines replacing men on farms,flower pots for sale economists and engineers boldly predicted that, by 2000, there would be practically no jobs left for unskilled seasonal farm workers by 2000 .6 However, the cooperation between researchers, farmers, processors, and the government that transformed the processing tomato industry in the 1960s proved to be the exception, not the rule. Farmers remained very interested in and supportive of mechanization research during the 1970s, when there were hundreds of public and private efforts to develop uniformly ripening crops and machines to harvest them, but interest waned in the late 1970s due to rising illegal immigration and a lawsuit. Mexico devalued the peso in 1976, and in 1977, for the first time, apprehensions of unauthorized Mexicans in the U.S. first topped 1 million. Apprehensions remained at about 1 million a year until after 1982, when another peso devaluation caused them to jump by 25 percent, and the rising number of unauthorized Mexicans, many of whom were from rural Mexico and sought jobs on U.S. farms, guaranteeing an ample supply of hand workers. Meanwhile, the UFW and California Rural Legal Assistance in 1979 filed a lawsuit against the University of California , charging that efforts to develop labor-saving machines were an unlawful expenditure of public funds because they displaced small farmers and farm workers . The suit asked that UC mechanization research be halted and a fund was created to assist small farmers and farm workers equal in size to what UC earned from royalties and patents on agricultural innovations .The suit was eventually settled by establishing a committee to review research priorities, but public and private support for mechanization research decreased, and scientists and engineers moved on to other issues. Most labor-saving research today is conducted by the private sector, and most of it is far less visible than machines replacing 90 percent of the hand harvesters, as in tomato processing. Precision planting and improved herbicides have dramatically reduced the need for thinning and hoeing labor. Many farmers have planted dwarf trees to increase yields, which can also reduce harvest labor needs. Much of today’s mechanization is motivated as much for non-labor reasons as to save on labor costs. For example, drip irrigation systems reduce the need for water as well as irrigator labor, and a machine harvesting wine grapes at night results in higher-quality grapes and uses less labor.
In the 19th century, U.S. agriculture in general and California agriculture in particular were considered land-abundant and labor short, which led to labor shortages that were compounded in California by the dominance of large and specialized farms. California began producing fruits in the 1870s, when the completion of the transcontinental railroad and falling interest rates encouraged a shift from grazing cattle and growing grain without irrigation to labor-intensive, irrigated fruit and vegetable farming. The expectation was that large farms, many derived from Spanish and Mexican land grants, would be broken up into family-sized units and sold to farmers arriving on the railroad, because only with a family-farm system would there be enough workers for labor-intensive agriculture . However, large farms were not broken up into family-sized units because new workers were available to be seasonal farm workers. Some 12,000 Chinese workers had been imported to help build the railroad through the Sierra Nevada mountains and, when they were laid off in 1870, they were kept out of urban jobs by anti-Chinese movements . Chinese workers were paid low wages only when they were needed which helped to raise land prices, and made it hard for family farmers to buy land and get started in farming, and gave landowners an incentive to keep the door open to immigrants. However, anti-Chinese sentiment eventually led to a halt to Chinese immigration in 1883, but a new source of immigrant workers was found, in Japan. Japanese immigration was stopped in 1907, and workers were imported from present-day India and Pakistan until World War I. There was little immigration during World War I, when Mexico was experiencing a civil war. The U.S. government was trying to restrict immigration from Europe, imposing head taxes and literacy tests on new arrivals in 1917, but western farmers won an exemption for Mexican farm workers coming to the United States for up to one year, beginning the U.S.-government-approved recruitment of Mexican farm workers. There were many problems with this first Bracero program, and government approved recruitment was halted in 1921, but Mexicans continued to arrive and travel around California seeking farm work. Many Mexicans were sent back to Mexico during the Great Depression, and the source of farm workers in the mid-1930s shifted to the Midwest, where many of the Okies and Arkies who lost their farms during the so-called Dust Bowl moved to California, expecting to become small family farmers. The gaps between farmers and farm workers in California led to some of the most enduring American literature, including John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Okies and Arkies continued to be the mainstays of the seasonal harvest work force in the 1940s, when “fruit tramps” migrated from farm to farm, but their children often went in to the military during World War II, or found jobs in wartime factories, and California farmers asked the federal government to once again approve the recruitment of Mexican Bracero workers. The federal government agreed, and the first of a series of Bracero agreements was signed in 1942; almost 5 million Mexican workers were admitted over the next 22 years—many individuals returned year after year, so that only 1 to 2 million Mexicans gained experience working on U.S. farms.