THE FARMER IS THE MAN
I’ll never look at a watermelon the same way again, after reading Sean Sellers’ and Greg Asbed’s account of what happened in Georgia after they passed a tough, punitive anti-illegal-immigration law.
As anyone might have predicted who knows the dynamics of immigrant farm labor and family life, the increased chance of being arrested and deported caused a massive labor shortage, as potential field workers steered clear of the Peachtree State. Not just peaches, but also notably cucumbers, blackberries and watermelons, went from being potential produce to actual fertilizer, as they rotted in the fields. The president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council, called the law, which was similar to Arizona’s and Alabama’s, “the equivalent of a giant scarecrow in the middle of a cornfield.” By the end of the harvest season, the value of lost crops was estimated at $300 million, losses of all kinds in the agricultural sector were put at $1 billion, and no one felt capable of tallying the negative multiplier effects on stores, motels, and such.
Proponents of the immigration control bill hoped that substitute laborers could be readily hired. They should have talked with the people who tried to start an agricultural labor service in Vermont: those willing even to try working long hours in sometimes 100 degree heat for as little as $8 an hour were few, and those who tried it generally gave up or gave out.
This was particularly true for watermelon harvesting, a big deal in Georgia because it is the nation’s third largest producer following Florida and Texas. It’s a subject Sellers and Asbed know well because they are both watermelon workers as well. Asbed is co-founder of the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The article notes that Edgerrin James, a standout runner for the University of Miami who went on to be a four-time all-pro running back with the Indianapolis Colts, grew up in Immokalee in a family of watermelon workers. He told ESPN magazine “I never lifted a weight in my life. I was hardened in every way.”
Harvesting watermelons is arduous enough to be considered skilled labor. First, they need to know which melons are ripe, reading five or six signs to make a judgment on which keeping their job depends Meanwhile, they have to keep up with the watermelon truck, to which they throw 20- to 30-pound oblongs thousands of times a day (or if in the truck must catch them after a toss of as much as 10 feet). Some of the crew need to estimate the weight of the melons as they zip by on a conveyor belt at a rate of two or three per second, because mis-sized melons can cause a load to be rejected. All this takes place in the summer Georgia sun, sometimes for as long as 16 hours, with no breaks other than gulping a drink of water. Next day they rise before dawn and go out to do it again, sometimes after a poor night’s sleep: having lost as much as five to seven pounds of water weight during the day, they can suffer from spasms of seizing hamstring and hand muscles at night. Newer workers sometimes reach up to catch flying melons in their sleep.
But perhaps the most important ability watermelon workers must develop is an almost Herculean endurance. They work up to sixteen hours a day under a hot summer sun, in temperatures that often climb over 100 degrees, often without stopping for much longer than it takes to catch their breath and drink much-needed water. Then they wake up before dawn the next day and do it all over again. It is not uncommon for workers to lose five to seven pounds of water weight in a single day and to cramp up at night, their hamstrings and hands in spasms from painful seizures brought on by dehydration. Newer workers are often stalked in their sleep by the demands of the job, their arms jumping to catch imagined melons hurtling toward them.Sellers and Asbed witnessed what happened last summer when inexperienced crews tried to do the same job. “New workers threw melons every which way, making the job a lot more painful and causing truckloads of bruised and broken melons to be hauled away,” they wrote. “Every day, within just a few hours, the packinghouse was a postapocalyptic scene of shattered melons, with clouds of bees swarming around the sugary piles.”
Here I’m going on what may seem like a digression, which is in reality goes to the heart of the agricultural labor question.
Earlier this year, I was saved from a seeming death spiral of overweight and fatigue by the work of Dr. Joel Fuhrman, whose nutritional recommendations in Eat to Live and other works changed my diet and played a major role in helping me to lose more than 30 pounds. There was a moment when the following chain of logic struck like lightning:
1. Only by promoting and furnishing a diet of fresh food, chiefly fresh fruits and vegetables, will we overcome the growing public health problems in this country.
2. For people to afford the prices required to supply such food, they will need more money.
3. Not only is income inequality the cause of many of our problems, that syndrome is symptomatic of the need for a change in the nature of “income.” People should have the right to good food, shelter and clothing in return for being good citizens—the key to changing the nature of our educational system, by the way.
To put it another way, everyone who does something necessary for the proper functioning of our society is equally necessary, and should be paid accordingly. For many, many years we have been exploiting those who work on farms, so that high food costs would not interfere with our quest for more lavish lifestyles. Depression era singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie had it right when he observed that “The gambling man is rich and the working man is poor,” after which came the song’s refrain, “And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.”
From the same era came a song that proclaimed “The farmer is the man who feeds them all.” It went on to the verse “The farmer is the man, the farmer is the man, lives on credit till the fall. Then they take him by the hand and they lead him from the land, and the banker is the man who gets it all.” Then the song makes the point “It would put them to the test if the farmer took a rest. Then they’d know that he’s the man who feeds them all.”
Far from suffering from low self-esteem, the professional watermelon workers were proud of their attainments, Sellers and Asbed said. As the produce industry grew in the 20th century, “harvesting crews were increasingly drawn from Florida, where year-round farmworkers spend the winter months picking citrus and tomatoes in the south of the state, then travel north to follow the crops, beginning with melons, cucumbers and peaches in south Georgia.”
“These Florida crews were experienced workers—“gators” in field parlance—many of whom learned the trade from family members. Florida watermelon crews were famously proud of their unrivaled skills, and though the demographics of crews working Georgia’s fields shifted steadily away from African-Americans toward Latinos in the 1990s, that same pride, born of the grueling, unforgiving nature of the work, was passed on. “Yo soy sandillero“—I am a watermelon worker (sandía is Spanish for watermelon)—may have largely replaced “I’m a gator,” but the honor of the title is the same.”
We should be proud of them, too, and show it by paying them more. As members of a workers’ group in Florida, Sellers and Asbed have researched the larger economic picture associated with harvesting. Their conclusion: “The good news is, although most produce growers operate on razor-thin margins, the trillion-dollar food industry has the resources to raise wages dramatically and virtually overnight. Massive consolidated retail purchasers—companies like Walmart, Kroger, Publix and Trader Joe’s—could, for as little as a penny per pound in the case of tomatoes, raise wages by up to 70 percent…And even if retailers passed the price increase on to consumers, who would notice if tomatoes went from $2.93 to $2.94 per pound? Across all crops, according to a recent analysis, a 40 percent farmworker wage increase would require the average American household to spend only $15 more per year on fruits and vegetables. That’s a drop in the bucket, given that an average household’s annual food budget is $6,400. These pennies add up for farmworkers, however, and would help transform their job from one of the country’s worst to one where they could take their first step out of poverty and toward a living wage.”
Sellers and Asbed first published their findings with their Florida group, then they were picked up by The Nation, to which my son subscribes me each Christmas. For those who don’t know the publication, it is an editorially independent, hard-hitting source of important research and analysis. Right-wingers would add that it’s “leftist,” but I will leave to readers the decision whether The Nation’s positions are leftist or liberal or just plain reasonable. What they are not is propaganda for any political party or movement.
At a time when investigative journalism is on the wane, due to the demise or decimation of so many newspapers, The Nation continues that tradition. The corrupting effects of power being what they are, this in many cases continues another journalistic tradition: “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”
Here in Vermont, we have a growing small farms movement dedicated to the production of high quality food for local markets. It deserves our support, but we should not forget the national situation. For instance, we should make sure that our Congressional delegation does not back the kind of immigrant guest farmworker program that ties a worker to one grower, a situation that has resulted in widespread abuses and even charges of enslavement. The farmer is the man, but at harvest time, immigrant crews may be the best men to assure the farm’s survival.
Not to neglect the farm women. When the day is done, guess who feeds the farmer—if the farm woman is not out there in the fields or barn herself.