The management of California's strawberry industry offers a case study of both the dependence on an imported peasantry that characterizes much of American agriculture and the destructive consequences of a deliberate low-wage economy.
By Eric Schlosser
November 1995
[...]
Twenty years ago there were about 800 acres of strawberries in the Santa Maria Valley; today there are about seven times that number. The strawberry is one of the most labor-intensive row crops. It is risky and expensive to grow, but it can yield more revenue per acre than virtually any other crop except marijuana. On the same land outside Guadalupe where family farms raised dairy cows not long ago, strawberry farms now employ thousands of migrant workers. Most of these migrants are illegal immigrants from Mexico, a fact that helps explain not only California's recent strawberry boom but also the quiet, unrelenting transformation of the state's rural landscape and communities.
Agriculture is still California's largest industry. For more than half a century California has led the nation in agricultural output; it now produces more than half the fruits, nuts, and vegetables consumed in the United States. Hundreds of commodities, from the mundane to the exotic, are grown in California, primarily in the
Central Valley, an area that contains perhaps the best farmland in the world. In some respects, however, California agriculture is in decline. The value of its annual output, adjusted for inflation, has fallen 14 percent over the past two decades. During the 1980s roughly 20,000 acres of Central Valley farmland were lost each year to urbanization. Wide-open fields are giving way to subdivisions and strip malls. Water long used for irrigation is being diverted to cities and towns. Improved cooling and transportation systems have opened the American market to overseas competitors. Air pollution has begun to diminish crop yields.
Meanwhile, the fastest-growing and most profitable segment of California's farm economy—the cultivation of high-value specialty crops—has also become the one most dependent on the availability of cheap labor. Nearly every fruit and vegetable found in the diets of health-conscious, often high-minded eaters is still picked by hand: every head of lettuce, every bunch of grapes, every avocado, peach, and plum. As the demand for these foods has risen, so has the number of workers necessary to harvest them. Of the migrants in California today, anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent, depending upon the crop, are illegal immigrants. Their willingness to work long hours for low wages has helped California to sustain its agricultural production—despite the loss since 1964 of more than seven million acres of farmland. Fruit and vegetable growers in the state now rely on a thriving black market in labor—and without it more farms would disappear. Illegal immigrants, widely reviled and depicted as welfare cheats, are in effect subsidizing the most important sector of the California economy.
The rise in the number of migrant workers in California, along with the growth in the proportion who are illegal immigrants, reflects a national trend that has passed largely unnoticed. During the 1960s it was commonly believed that within a decade there would be no more migrant farm workers in the United States. Experts predicted that technology would soon render migrants obsolete: if a crop could not be harvested mechanically by 1975, it would not be grown in the United States. Census figures lent support to this scenario. Philip L. Martin is a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California at Davis and one of the nation's foremost authorities on farm-labor demographics. According to his estimates, during the 1920s there were some two million migrant farm workers in the United States. During the 1940s there were about one million. And during the early 1970s, when Cesar Chavez's labor-organizing drive among migrant workers was at its height, there were only about 200,000. Then the number began to climb. Today it is impossible to gauge the size of the migrant work force with any precision, among other reasons because so much of it is composed of illegal immigrants. Martin believes that 800,000 to 900,000 migrant farm workers are now employed in the United States. And not only are there far more migrants today but they are being paid far less. The hourly wages of some California farm workers, adjusted for inflation, have fallen 53 percent since 1985. Migrants are among the poorest workers in the United States. The average migrant worker is a twenty-eight-year-old male, born in Mexico, who earns about $5,000 a year for twenty-five weeks of farm work. His life expectancy is forty-nine years.
The rise of the strawberry industry is in many ways emblematic of changes that swept California agriculture during the 1980s. The strawberry has become the focus of a California industry whose annual sales exceed half a billion dollars. American farmers now receive more money for fresh strawberries each year than for any other fresh fruit grown in the United States except apples. And strawberry pickers are not only the poorest migrants but also the ones most likely to be illegal immigrants. During the recent strawberry harvest I spent weeks traveling through three regions in California where the fruit is commercially grown, meeting workers, farmers, academics, and farm-labor activists. My trip took me through the Santa Maria Valley, where rural poverty has recently become entrenched and where cruel sharecropping arrangements have trapped farm workers under mountains of debt; through the area around Watsonville and Salinas, where about half the state's strawberries are grown and where this year's heavy rains made many hard lives even harder; and through northern San Diego County, where the needs of farmers and real-estate developers increasingly conflict, and where a migrant work force lives in Third World shantytowns within throwing distance of expensive suburban homes. In the strawberry fields of California, I believe, one may find answers to many of the pressing questions raised by illegal immigration, along with some ethical questions that are much more difficult to resolve.
The Industry: A Short Course
A strawberry field is not a beautiful sight. It lacks the charm and character of a citrus grove, an apple orchard, or even a field of corn. Strawberries now begin and end in plastic. Before planting, an entire field is sealed with plastic sheeting and injected with methyl bromide, a chemical brew that kills harmful microbes and nematodes. Then the sheeting is removed and workers install drip-irrigation hoses in the beds, cover the beds with new, clear plastic, and insert the plants through the plastic by hand. This plastic helps retain heat, keeps the soil moist, and prevents erosion. At the end of the harvest, workers rip the plants from the ground and throw them away, along with the plastic and the drip-irrigation hoses. Second-year plants tend to produce smaller berries.
California did not always dominate American strawberry production. In the early 1950s the state was responsible for only a third of the nation's strawberry crop. Then California strawberry production began to surge, impelled by new growing techniques, new plant varieties, and an abundance of inexpensive labor. From 1974 to 1994 California's strawberry output more than tripled; prices fell, and Americans doubled their consumption of fresh strawberries. Last year California shipped 76 million boxes of fresh strawberries (a box, also called a flat or a tray, holds a dozen pints and weighs roughly eleven and a half pounds), an all-time record. The state now accounts for 80 percent of the strawberries grown in the United States and about a quarter of the world's commercial strawberries.
In a good year strawberries can be one of the most profitable row crops in California. But they are also one of the riskiest. The fruit attracts a wide variety of pests, including aphids, eelworms, and red spider mites. Even more threatening is the weather. No matter how carefully a grower prepares the field, no matter how well-bred the plants, the size of the harvest will be determined in large part by the weather. Ideal growing conditions for strawberries include cool nights and warm, sunny days, with no wind above five miles an hour and no rain once the berries have appeared. Weather that falls short of the ideal may quickly and irreversibly damage the crop. Frost can burn the blooms. A strong wind will rub leaves against the berries, marring their skin with brown streaks. A heat wave will stunt and soften the fruit. Worst of all is heavy rain. Strawberries are so fragile that prolonged rain opens small tears in their skin, and the tears are quickly infected with botrytis, a gray mold. A few days of rain can destroy an entire harvest of strawberries.
The market for strawberries can prove just as unpredictable and disastrous as the weather. The perishability of fresh produce exposes growers to considerable risk. Ten days after a strawberry is picked, it begins to spoil. "I can't stuff my berries into a silo like a wheat farmer does," one grower told me, "and then run computer programs to decide when it's the best time to sell." Wholesale prices for fresh strawberries fluctuate widely, from $4.00 to $22.00 a box, depending on the quality of the fruit, the supply, the time of year, and all sorts of imponderables. Growers who produce specialty crops do not benefit directly from any government price supports. Although the strawberry plants now grown in California often produce fruit continuously for nine months, a fourth to a third of the berries reach maturity at the peak of the harvest—a period that lasts only a few weeks. A grower has little choice but to accept the prevailing market price for those berries. Strawberries for processing, which eventually can be stored, sell for about twenty-five cents a pound.
The most successful growers cultivate a high-quality strawberry, have enough capital to ride out the bad years, and sell their berries through a prominent marketing consortium. Such growers may earn annual profits of $10,000 to $20,000 an acre. But others often find themselves at the mercy of the weather and of a volatile free market. As in most fruit and vegetable production, the steady profits are usually earned by the middlemen—processors, cooling houses, distributors—and not by the growers. In the strawberry industry a grower's annual losses can be huge. The cost of strawberry production is anywhere from $12,000 to $30,000 an acre. A fifty-acre strawberry farm producing high-quality berries requires an annual investment of at least $1 million. There is very little a grower can do to limit the fixed costs: the payments on the mortgage or lease, for the plants, the pesticides, and the drip-irrigation system. The only cost over which a grower can exert any real control is the cost of labor.
Many strawberry growers play by the rules and treat their workers well. Indeed, strawberry pickers all aspire to jobs at farms affiliated with Driscoll Associates, where the fields are immaculate and the wages are the highest in the industry. Other organizations—such as Naturipe, Sweet Darling, Calberi, Figueroa, Gold Coast, and Boskovich Farms—are also highly regarded. It would be wrong to imply that all strawberry growers routinely mistreat their workers; but some do. Since labor costs constitute 50 to 70 percent of the total costs in strawberry production, cutting labor costs can mean the difference between a profit and a loss, or between a bad year and a disastrous one. The temptation to break the law can be great. The punishments for doing so are rarely applied. And in recent years some growers have shown little self-restraint.
One of the easiest ways to reduce labor costs is to keep workers off the books. Growers are often obligated to pay unemployment taxes and workers'-compensation premiums for each of their employees, in addition to Social Security and Medicare taxes. Paying an "invisible worker" in cash lowers the cost of that worker by at least 20 percent. Ignoring California's rules about overtime—which in agriculture do not apply until the workday reaches ten hours—effectively cuts those wages by 50 percent. And paying less than minimum wage brings the greatest savings of all. The vast number of illegal immigrants in the migrant work force is an invitation to break the law. They are unlikely to approach authorities about a violation of the labor code.
Sharecropping is the most insidious means by which growers avoid responsibility for their workers. The sharecropper is a straw man, an intermediary, usually a middle-aged farm worker, to whom the grower shifts many of the legal and financial risks. Sharecropping has a long history in the strawberry industry. It is a practice that in the past few years has often resembled not so much a type of agricultural production as an elaborate, well-organized fraud.
[...]
Locked Into Dependence
The immigration history of Guadalupe, California, can be read in the names and faces adorning headstones in its small cemetery. The Swiss and Italian and Portuguese surnames belong to families that settled in the Santa Maria Valley around the turn of the century, growing beans and sugar beets, running cattle, and raising dairy herds. The Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino names belong to the first wave of farm workers, some of whom managed to acquire land of their own. Spanish surnames greatly outnumber the rest, marking the recent graves along with plastic flowers and images of saints. There is a sepulchral custom in Guadalupe, practiced for generations: most of the headstones bear sepia-tinted photographs of the deceased. Walking through the graveyard, one sees at a glance the slightly different ethnic traits and the subtle variations in skin color—long the basis of economic status and rivalry. Now all these faces stare in the same direction from the same place, arranged like crops in long, straight rows.
For most of this century the Santa Maria Valley had a diverse farm economy. Although migrants were a large seasonal presence, the area lacked the huge industrial farms that dominated the landscape elsewhere in California. The acreage around Guadalupe was devoted primarily to field crops and irrigated pasture. The cattle ranches and dairy farms were owned and managed by local families. Fruits and vegetables, though an important source of revenue, occupied a small portion of the agricultural land.
Then, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, the Santa Maria Valley was transformed. As field crops and dairy products became less profitable, farmers either switched to high-value specialty crops or quit farming. Much of the land in the valley was bought by outside corporations, such as Mobil and the Bank of America. Irrigated pastures became strawberry fields (dotted with oil wells) on leased land. The number of migrant workers soared. In 1960 Guadalupe's population was 18 percent Latino; today it is more than 83 percent Latino. The middle classes fled to the nearby city of Santa Maria, leaving behind a rural underclass. Half the families in Guadalupe now live below the poverty line.
Juan-Vicente Palerm has spent the past twelve years studying the social and economic changes in the Santa Maria Valley. The director of the University of California's Institute for Mexico and the United States, Palerm is an anthropologist by training; his early fieldwork traced the lives of Spanish guest workers in northern Europe—migrants imported by treaty to labor in factories and fields. He is an imposing figure, with the graying beard of a patriarch, and has a remarkable grasp not only of labor-market dynamics but also of how every crop in the valley is planted, tended, marketed, and sold. I spent a day with Palerm and one of his graduate students, Manolo Gonzalez (who picked strawberries for a year as part of his research), driving the side streets of Guadalupe, touring the fields, and discussing how the growers of California and the peasants of rural Mexico created an agricultural system that has locked them into mutual dependence.
By relying on poor migrants from Mexico, California growers established a wage structure that discouraged American citizens from seeking farm work. The wages offered at harvest were too low to sustain a family in the United States, but they were up to ten times as high as any wages Mexican peasants could earn in their native villages. A system evolved in which the cheap labor of Mexican migrants subsidized California agriculture, while remittances from that farm work preserved rural communities in Mexico that might otherwise have collapsed. For decades the men of Mexican villages have traveled north to the fields of California, leaving behind women, children, and the elderly to look after their small farms. Migrant work in California has long absorbed Mexican surplus labor, while Mexico has in effect paid for the education, health care, and retirement of California's farm workers.
Whenever migrants decided to settle in California, however, they disrupted the smooth workings of this system, by imposing higher costs on the state—especially if they married and raised children. That is why the Immigration and Naturalization Service has traditionally rounded up and deported illegal immigrants in California immediately after the harvest. Nevertheless, millions of Mexican farm workers have settled in the United States over the years, many of them becoming American citizens. Although agricultural employment has long been a means of entering U.S. society, low wages and poor working conditions have made it an occupation that most immigrants and their children hope to escape. Farm labor is more physically demanding and less financially rewarding than almost any other kind of work. A migrant who finds a job in a factory increases his or her income fourfold. As a result, the whole system now depends on a steady supply of illegal immigrants to keep farm wages low and to replace migrants who have either retired to Mexico or found better jobs in California.
Juan-Vicente Palerm believes that today there are not only more migrants shuttling back and forth from Mexico but also more Mexican farm workers settling permanently in California. Throughout the state towns like Guadalupe, Calexico, Cutler, and McFarland are becoming enclaves of rural poverty. In the Santa Maria Valley the increased production of fruits and vegetables, higher yields per acre, and an extended growing season have created thousands of full- and part-time jobs for farm workers. Broccoli fields now occupy more than 20,000 acres, requiring a large supply of resident workers for a staggered harvest that lasts most of the year. Celery and cauliflower production have also increased the number of reliable jobs. Perhaps 40 percent of the farm labor in the valley is currently performed by workers who live there. Many farm workers now own houses. A privileged few may earn as much as $50,000 a year. But the strawberry fields have drawn thousands of poor migrants to the area. Only 12 percent of the work force at a strawberry farm can claim year-round employment. And cultivating the fruit is so labor-intensive—twenty-five times as labor-intensive as cultivating broccoli—that strawberry production now employs more farm workers than the production of all the vegetables grown in the valley combined. Most strawberry pickers hope to find jobs in the nearby vegetable fields, where the wages are better and the work is less arduous. Turnover rates are extremely high in the strawberry work force. But there is no impending shortage of potential migrants. The rural population of Mexico has tripled since the 1940s, and now stands at roughly 30 million. "In terms of absolute numbers," Palerm says, "there are far more Mexican peasants today than ever before."
A growing proportion of the strawberry pickers in the Santa Maria Valley are Mixtec Indians—some of the poorest and most exploited people in this hemisphere. Soil erosion and declining crop yields in the mountains of western Oaxaca have forced the Mixtecs to become migrant workers. According to Michael Kearney, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Riverside, their choice is simple: "Migrate or starve." Mixtec Indians increasingly dominate the lowest-paid jobs in California agriculture. In Tijuana you often see the wives and children of Mixtec farm workers, small and dark and beautiful, dressed in the bright colors of their native villages, selling Chiclets to tourists on the street.
Until the late 1970s almost all the Mexican farm workers in California were mestizos with strong cultural links to communities already in the state. The new migrants present social workers with unusual challenges. In addition to the ninety-two dialects of Mixtec, there are at least half a dozen other pre-Columbian languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca. Perhaps a fifth of the Mixtec farm workers in California speak no English or Spanish. Throughout their migratory route Mixtecs are the victims of robbery and discrimination. In central Mexico they must run a gantlet of officials demanding bribes. In Tijuana they are preyed upon by smugglers, rapists, and thieves. In San Diego County they have been the targets of "beaner raids"—random beatings administered by white teenagers from the suburbs and by Marines from Camp Pendleton.
In Guadelupe many of the settled farm workers resent the new arrivals from Oaxaca. Illegal immigrants often crossed picket lines during the 1980s, helping to drive the UFW from the valley. Hourly wages have declined by 40 percent over the past decade, and there is widespread underemployment. Labor contractors now actively recruit illegals, who work for less money and raise fewer objections than legal residents. At harvest time Guadalupe's population of 5,500 swells by as much as half, placing great demands on local services. Palerm's researchers once discovered twenty-two people living in a two-bedroom apartment. The city government is bankrupt. Last year much of Guadalupe's housing for migrants was razed or condemned. Local officials hope to turn Guadalupe into a tourist attraction, an authentic "Mexican" town. The bars and cantinas along Highway 1 have been repainted, and destitute migrants, who might scare away the tourists, have been strongly encouraged to go elsewhere.
Despite the hardships of their long journey, Mixtecs hoping to sustain their native villages have a strong incentive to find work in California. Wages in Oaxaca are about two or three dollars a day. Wages in the strawberry fields of Baja California are about five dollars a day. A Mixtec farm worker in the Santa Maria Valley, making ten dollars an hour at the peak of the strawberry harvest, can earn more in one day than he or she could earn back home in a month.
[...]
Bowing Down to the Market
One morning in San Diego County, I met a strawberry grower named Doug. We sat and talked in a trailer on the edge of his field. Doug's father and grandfather were both sent to an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Upon their release the grandfather bought a used truck. At first he worked for other farmers; then he leased some land. Doug's grandfather spoke no English, and so Doug's father, still a teenager, assumed an important role in the business. The two grew vegetables with success and eventually shifted to strawberries, shipping and processing the fruit as well. On the land where their original farm once stood, there are now condominiums, a park, and a school. Doug grows strawberries a few miles inland. His fields are surrounded by chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. An enormous real-estate development, with hundreds of Spanish-style condo units, is creeping up the hills toward his farm. Many of the farmers nearby have already sold their land. Doug has spent most of his life in strawberry fields, learning every aspect of the business firsthand, but now he isn't sure he wants his children to do the same.
"Farming's not a glamorous business," Doug said. "Farmers don't have a high status in this community. In fact, we're resented by most people." With all the hassles today from the state and from his neighbors, he sometimes asks himself, "Hey, why do this?" He worries about water costs, about theft, about the strawberries from New Zealand he saw in the market the other day. This year's rain wiped out a quarter of his early-season berries, just when the market price was at its peak. Doug cannot understand the hostility toward growers in California. After all, agriculture preserves open land. He thinks Americans don't appreciate how lucky they are to have cheap food. He doesn't understand why anyone would impede strawberry production by limiting his access to migrants. "My workers are helping themselves," he said. "I respect these people. They work damn hard. And my jobs are open to anyone who wants to apply." Every so often, he said, college kids visit the farm, convinced that picking strawberries would be a nice way to earn some extra money. Doug laughed. "They don't last an hour out here."
We stepped from the trailer into bright sunshine. Workers moved down the furrows under close supervision. Doug takes great pride in being a third-generation grower. He is smart, well-educated, and meticulous, and it showed in his field. But I wondered if Doug and his workers would still be there in a few years.
Doug picked a berry and handed it to me, a large Chandler that was brilliantly red. I took a bite. The strawberry was warm and sweet and fragrant, with a slightly bitter aftertaste from the soil.
That evening I inadvertently met some of Doug's workers. Ricardo Soto, a young lawyer at CRLA, had brought me to the edge of an avocado orchard to visit a hidden encampment of migrant workers. Perhaps half the migrants in San Diego County—at least 14,000 people—are now living outdoors. The shortage of low-income housing became acute in the early 1980s, and large shantytowns began to appear, some containing hundreds of crude shacks. As suburbs encroached on agricultural land in northern San Diego County, wealthy commuters and strawberry pickers became neighbors. At one large shantytown I visited, women were doing their laundry in a stream not far from a walled compound with tennis courts, a pool, and a sign promising COUNTRY CLUB LIVING.
The suburbanites do not like living beside Mexican farm workers. Instead of providing low-income housing, local authorities have declared states of emergency, passed laws to forbid curbside hiring, and bulldozed many of the large encampments. San Diego growers appalled by the living conditions of their migrants have tried to build farm-worker housing near the fields—only to encounter fierce resistance from neighboring homeowners. Although the shantytowns lower nearby property values, permanent farm-worker housing might reduce property values by an even greater amount. "When people find out you want to build housing for your migrants," one grower told me, "they just go ballistic."
The new encampments are smaller and built to avoid detection. At the end of a driveway, near a chain-link fence, I met a young Mixtec who lived in such an encampment. His name was Francisco, and he was eighteen years old. He looked deeply exhausted. He had just picked strawberries for twelve hours at Doug's farm. I asked what he thought of Doug as a boss. "Not bad, "he said politely.
The previous year Francisco had picked strawberries from April until July. He had saved $800 during that period and had wired all of it to his mother and father, in the village of San Sebastiàn Tecomaxtlahuaca. This was Francisco's second season in the fields, but he had not seen much of San Diego County. He was too afraid of getting caught. His days were spent at the farm, his nights at the encampment. He picked strawberries six days a week, sometimes seven, for ten or twelve hours a day. "When there's work," Francisco said, "you have to work." Each morning he woke up around four-thirty and walked for half an hour to reach Doug's field.
At dusk thirteen tired men in dirty clothes approached us. They were all from Francisco's village. They worked together at Doug's farm and stayed at the same encampment. They knew one another's families back home and looked after one another here. The oldest was forty-three and the youngest looked about fifteen. All the men were illegals. All were sick with coughs, but none dared see a doctor. As the sun dropped behind the hills, clouds of mosquitos descended, and yet the migrants seemed too tired to notice. They lay on their backs, on their sides, resting on the hard ground as though it were a sofa.
Francisco offered to show me their encampment. We squeezed through a hole in the chain-link fence and through gaps in rusting barbed wire, and climbed a winding path enclosed by tall bushes. It felt like a medieval maze. As we neared the camp, I noticed beer cans and food wrappers littering the ground. We came upon the first shack—short and low, more like a tent, just silver trash bags draped over a wooden frame. A little farther up the path stood three more shacks in a small clearing. They were built of plywood and camouflaged. Branches and leaves had been piled on their roofs. The landowner did not know the migrants lived here, and the encampment would be difficult to find. These migrants were hiding out, like criminals or Viet Cong. Garbage was everywhere. Francisco pointed to his shack, which was about five feet high, five feet wide, and seven feet long. He shared it with two other men. He had a good blanket. But when it rained at night, the roof leaked, and the men would go to work soaking wet the next day and dry off in the sun. Francisco had never lived this way before coming to San Diego. At home he always slept in a bed.
Beyond the sheds bushes crowded the path again, and then it reached another clearing, where two battered lawn chairs had been placed at the edge of the hill. There was a wonderful view of strawberry fields, new houses, and the lights of the freeway in the distance.
Driving back to my motel that night, I thought about the people of Orange County, one of the richest counties in the nation—big on family values, now bankrupt from financial speculation, unwilling to raise taxes to pay for their own children's education, unwilling to pay off their debts, whining about the injustice of it, and blaming all their problems on illegal immigrants. And I thought about Francisco, their bogeyman, their scapegoat, working ten hours a day at one of the hardest jobs imaginable, honest work, and sleeping on the ground every night for months so that he could save money and send it home to his parents.
We have been told for more than a decade to bow down before "the market." We have placed our faith in the laws of supply and demand. What has been forgotten, or ignored, is that the market rewards only efficiency. Every other human value gets in its way. The market will drive wages down like water, until they reach the lowest possible level. Today that level is being set not in Washington or New York or Sacramento but in the fields of Baja California and the mountain villages of Oaxaca. That level is about five dollars a day. No deity that men have ever worshiped is more ruthless and more hollow than the free market unchecked; there is no reason why shantytowns should not appear on the outskirts of every American city. All those who now consider themselves devotees of the market should take a good look at what is happening in California. Left to its own devices, the free market always seeks a work force that is hungry, desperate, and cheap—a work force that is anything but free.
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