Labor Costs Force California Growers To Face Tough Decisions

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Farmers nationwide are feeling the effects of a declining ag labor force, but farmers in California are especially feeling the pressure. Walt Duflock, vice president of innovation at Western Growers says producers are facing a challenging decision: embrace automation or risk moving operations to other states or countries.

Duflock… “You know, in California, yes, we pay $18ish for, for domestic ag, but we're paying $30 for H2A when you put housing, transportation, and food on there. So at a high level, California's paying 16.3 billion for 850 million hours a year, right? And when it's increasingly going to $30 an hour, because now 10 percent of our labor is H2A, and it's going to double, you end up with two choices, right? You automate and you robot your way out of it or the acreage can relocate on you. And so the automation piece was going along okay, but not where we need it, right? So harvest is two-thirds of those hours in a lot of crops, which is an average of two-thirds. Non-harvest the cultivation, so it's about one third of those hours. So you've got roughly 280 million hours that can be automated without fixing harvest, but you've got this 560 million hours that just needs to get solved called harvest, and we're struggling to get there. So we're not going to have the capital we need to get this stuff where it needs to go. So some of our bigger guys will go elsewhere, not just Arizona, but Mexico and South America.”

Again that’s Walt Duflock of Western Growers.