Getting a Labor Work Force

Getting a Labor Work Force. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

US Apple Chairman Dale Foreman recently submitted testimony to the House Judiciary Committee strongly urging Congress to find a solution to the agricultural labor problems.

FOREMAN: There are 7,500 apple growing families around the country. There are many states that produce apples and the US Apple Association is the spokesperson for the apple industry and so we are working hard in Washington DC to try and get a comprehensive ag labor reform bill passed. And the centerpiece to that would be a program to allow people to come into the country legally. They’d have to pay some kind of a license or a fee to the government to make sure that they were honest, hard working people. That they weren’t drug dealers or crooks. And they would come into the country legally and they would stay here no more than 10 months in a year, go back to Mexico or where they came from.

There was an experiment this past year using prisoners to pick fruit. There were some pros and cons. (no pun intended)

FOREMAN: The pros were they were able to get some apples picked. The bad part of it was it cost them about $22 an hour for these people to pick and they only picked half as much as a normal picker. So that really means you’re paying $44 an hour for people to pick fruit and of course because they were prisoners and not professional apple pickers they bruised the fruit, tore buds off the tree, broke some branches and so it’s certainly not a solution to the problem.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.