Posted on 12/20/2002 5:35:52 PM PST by sixmil
Most California raisin-grape growers use migrant armies of illegal aliens to harvest their crops. Not Lee Simpson.
Simpson found a way to mechanize 95% of his harvest. That doubled his production and revenue. It also almost ended his need for seasonal help.
"Normally at harvest time, I'd hire about 80 people," he said. "Now we do it with six or seven people. Five of those seven people are working for me year-round."
But old ways die hard. In more industries than agriculture, employers would rather import cheap labor than take a chance on something new.
Such dependence on imported labor has often served as a substitute for innovation.
Cutting the flow of immigrants has often spurred progress and boosted productivity.
Farming is just the best example.
"One shorthand measure of development is how few people are employed in agriculture," said Philip Martin, professor of agriculture economics at the University of California, Davis. "All countries start out with most of their people in agriculture, but over time you don't get more food with more people out there, you get more food by substituting capital for labor."
Cutting The Flow
In the U.S., farmers have long predicted doom when their supply of cheap immigrants is threatened.
"The crop of the present year, although deemed a short one, taxed the labor capacity of the state to the utmost . . . . If such was the situation this year, what will it be when the numerous young orchards now just coming into bearing will be producing full crops? The labor is not now in the country to handle such an increase in production."
That was written in 1883 against the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Fruit farmers in California claimed crops would rot in the fields if more Asians were not brought in for the harvest. The rotting didn't happen.
Then there was the great tomato scare of the early 1960s.
The head of the California Agriculture Department told Congress to expect a 50% drop in tomato production if the Bracero guest-worker program got the ax. That drop didn't happen.
Instead, tomato farmers were forced to mechanize. Output rose and prices fell, from $30 a ton in 1960 to $22 a ton in 1970.
In 1960, California farmers paid 45,000 workers to pick 2.2 million tons of tomatoes. In 1996, just 5,500 workers picked 12 million tons.
Tomato acreage grew from 130,000 acres in 1960 to 360,00 acres in 1996. Tomato consumption rose from 44 pounds per person in 1960 to 75 pounds in 1994.
In Florida, the problem crop was sugar cane. Growers used to import West Indians from the Caribbean to do the backbreaking work of bringing in the cane.
The workers were covered by the H-2A guest-worker program, which levied legal rules regarding pay, housing and transportation.
"Those requirements were almost universally violated," said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies.
When labor lawyers rushed to the defense of the West Indians, cane growers decided machines were less trouble.
"Now virtually all sugar cane in South Florida is harvested by machine," Krikorian said. "Instead of sweaty, shirtless men hacking sugar with machetes, you have a more civilized work environment where people drive farm machinery and go home to their families at night."
Krikorian says dependence on immigrant labor gives an advantage to competition abroad, where labor is even cheaper.
"In the short term, these businessmen are trying to keep their labor costs down, but they are undermining the long-term prospects of the industry," he said. "If the industry is to remain viable, it's got to find ways of using our strength, which is capital and innovation, rather than the strength of our competitors, which is low labor costs."
There's a risk. Innovations are made by necessity and sometimes can't be foreseen. The market's invisible hand moves in mysterious ways, while businesses naturally prefer to play it safe and keep things as they are.
"The people closest to the situation are typically the least able to see what's coming, in part because many of them have a lot invested in the status quo," Martin said.
Lee Simpson didn't have that handicap. He wasn't raised to raise raisin grapes. He got his civil engineering degree and worked a bit in yacht repair in the San Francisco area. Then he decided he'd rather his sons grow up on a farm in Madera, Calif.
Simpson's early years raising grapes were a struggle, which forced him to innovate.
Harvesting raisin grapes the old way takes a lot of help. The grapes are cut from the vine and laid out in paper trays for drying, during which they must be turned and rolled and dried some more.
Why Not Innovate?
Simpson figured there had to be a better way. He perfected an overhead trellis system that lets the grapes dry on the vine before being picked by machine.
The dried-on-the-vine system was used first in Australia to cut labor needs. Simpson's system also boosted production 2 1/2 times.
"It's the old out-of-the-box thing," he said. "There was a certain amount of willingness to take a risk. Nobody had ever done it before. In business, that kind of pays off sometimes."
California has about 300,000 acres growing raisin grapes. Simpson says only about 5,000 acres use the dried-on-the-vine system, but that's changing.
"There's a tremendous push now to mechanize because the price of raisins is low," he said. "Farmers are finally waking up to trying something new."
Sort of like the Commonwealth of Massachussets-- they will send nothing but liberal Democrats to represent them in congress and foul the nation's water supply, but when it comes to their own backyard, they haven't elected one as governor in a decade and a half.
On PBS tonight, there was an interesting story about the slowly disappearing middle class. Unfortunately, they didn't see what was causing it. Pretty soon we will have mostly rich and poor. I think we all know what that means, but hopefully people will be able to see the error in their ways before it is too late. I have no illusions that I will ever work as a software engineer again, but that is ok. I can carve out a living trading shares of the companies that are doing their level best to earn a profit at everyone else's cost.
Thanks sweetie.
But the other 73 or 74 people help create thousands of jobs at the welfare and food stamp offices. It's called trickle down insanity!!
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