10-25 IAT Migrant Shortage

It has been a tough year for many fruit and vegetable growers. The stalemate in Congress has left a lot of uncertainty about the future of immigration reform. At the same time, farmers worry if they will have enough workers to harvest their crops. Growers like Fred Leitz have already had to deal with a worker shortage. "We normally have about 250 people seasonally and we only have 195 or so right now. We have harvested our blueberries twice and we have two good pickings left out there. Then with cucumbers, we have harvested five or six times where normally we will harvest 10 times so we have left about a third of our production out in the cucumber fields just because we haven't had the labor to keep up with everything." Asparagus grower Ryan Walsworth had to leave vegetables unharvested as well. "We had a freeze early on and that pushed our season late and then once we got going, we got quite warm in a hurry. Typically with asparagus, your best production is early in the season so a lot of farmers got caught just because we didn't have enough labor to get everything off. Some guys think between 1 million and 1,000,000 1/2 pounds have been lost due to either weather extreme or not having the labor there to pick it." Earlier in the season, I did a story on a local asparagus grower and I called asparagus green gold because of its value. What a loss.