With shortage of workers, apple crop falls on rotten times

PRESCOTT, Walla Walla County — This tract of Broetje Orchards is filled with jumbo red- and golden-delicious apples, hanging from branches that arc across long, fruit-scented rows.

Though pockmarked by spring hailstorms, the fruit is sugar sweet and prime for juice.

But there are no bins, no tractors and no crews here. These apples — an estimated 15 million pounds — will not be picked.

"We didn't have enough pickers, so they are going to drop," said Ralph Broetje, who will forgo harvest on 400 of his 5,400 acres of orchards.

For Broetje, the rotting apples are a disturbing sight both for the waste and what they may portend for an orchard industry that for years has relied on immigrants — legal and illegal — from Mexico.

Typically, the orchards hire more than 30,000 people during the peak September and October harvest season.

This year, amid a tightening border and a strong economy that has lured many farm laborers to other jobs, apple growers have scrambled to cope with a significant labor shortage.

The shortage has prompted some growers to bypass damaged fruit in scattered tracts of lower-value acreage and delay harvests in other acreage, according to growers and state officials.

"From my perspective, from working with growers and the industry for the past nine years, this is the toughest I have ever seen it," said Larry Sanchez, area director in Yakima for Worksource, a state-run job bank.

The shortage also has meant better pay for the tens of thousands who do show up in the orchards for the tough hours spent climbing up and down ladders to empty aprons full of apples.

Wages have typically climbed by 10 to 25 percent or more, with workers flexing newfound labor muscle to leave one orchard for another if they don't like the pay, according to Sanchez and Mike Gempler of the Washington Growers League.

And the shortage has hit unevenly. A handful of small growers have suffered huge losses. Most growers will get in most of their crops, assuring a sizeable overall harvest that — if markets remain strong — could rival or surpass last year's record $1.2 billion value.

But most everyone is wary about where they will continue finding workers in coming years.

A community

The Broetje orchard spreads like a vast green carpet over a sagebrush mesa along the Snake River.

A deeply religious man, Broetje calls this place a community, and has helped finance red-tiled-roof housing, a private school and twice-weekly medical clinic for the year-round workers who tend to the orchards, as well as work in a mammoth packing and storage complex.

Each harvest requires a huge seasonal influx that normally doubles the workforce from about 850 to some 1,700.

This harvest season, the seasonal recruiting began early with advertising on three Spanish-language radio stations. Broetje also posted the jobs through the state Worksource offices and planted help-wanted signs along the highway leading up to the orchard.

To help attract and retain workers, Broetje also raised wages, bumping up pay in the Granny Smith tracts by $2 to $20 a bin. Harvesting those apples, experienced pickers can earn from $80 to about $120 a day.

Still, his recruitment campaign fell some 300 pickers short. That forced some tough decisions.

In a normal year, Broetje said he would pick all his tracts with lower-value juice apples, a break-even proposition that helps prevent rotting fruit from spreading disease in the orchard.

This year, with a shrunken labor force, he opted to abandon 250 acres of red- and golden-delicious apples as well as an additional 150 acres of Granny Smiths — roughly 7 percent of the total acreage in his three orchards.

As the harvest enters the final weeks, pickers have focused on the best acreage and the fruit in its peak condition. The later the harvest drags on, the greater the risk of more damage due to a cold snap or other weather troubles.

"Our labor supply has been our number one concern," Broetje said. "There's just not enough people."

Another large operator, AgriNorthwest, has been short about 200 pickers for most of the apple harvest. The 1,200-acre harvest got so far behind that some 78 acres of gala apples were lost, too overripe even for juice, according to Maria Mendoza, who helps manage the harvest.

Last harvest

For a few smaller growers stuck with older, harder-to-pick trees, the shortage has hit much harder.

Paul Kauzlarich was unable to pick 70 percent of the red-delicious apples in his 80-acre orchard in Central Washington's Naches valley.

Normally, he would have a crew of 30 to push through the harvest in a few weeks. This year, with a light crop and a remote location, he figured he was at the bottom end of the pecking order for prospective workers. So, he upped his bin price from $16 to more than $20 a bin to try to coax workers to his orchard.

He still never had more than 13 people show up for work, and many quit after a few hours of labor. So, the 60-year-old Kauzlarich joined the harvest, and sometimes, at the end of the day, found himself the lone picker still on a ladder.

Last Wednesday was the final day of harvest, with Kauzlarich standing in the driveway next to the orchards to welcome anybody who showed up for work.

A packing-house worker who did short morning stints in the orchards inquired about work but couldn't stay. A young man with a baby in the back seat of his truck also pulled up, and then left.

But Lester Bolster, a 48-year-old trucker whose business had gone bankrupt, did stay, along with his fiancée, Vanessa Rogers, and his son, Jay.

"The farmers brought this on themselves; they wanted the Mexican labor because it was cheap, and made it so the rest of us couldn't work," said Bolster, who was a full-time farm worker into his mid-20s.

For Kauzlarich, this was the first time in 35 years of farming that he couldn't pick all the fruit off his trees.

It also will be his last harvest.

Kauzlarich says that with the big fees paid to packing houses, soaring fuel costs and the labor problems, his small orchard just can't compete.

"I'm tired and there's no way I'm going to keep going," said Kauzlarich, whose grandfather homesteaded the Naches valley land back in 1916. "I'm going to get rid of my orchards."

Trying to reduce the need

In the Washington apple industry, labor shortages will likely accelerate efforts already under way to reduce the amount of workers needed. Some farms are growing smaller, flatter trees that can be picked more rapidly. There are experiments with harvest systems that incorporate a moving, adjustable-height platform to shuttle workers down the rows.

For the next 10 to 20 years, though, the apple industry is expected to rely on big infusions of seasonal labor.

Both growers and labor-union officials support a provision introduced in the U.S. Senate earlier this year that would streamline the program for bringing in temporary workers in times of shortage at wages that don't undercut the local job markets, and help resident farm workers who are here illegally gain legal permanent residence.

"Absolutely, we do have common cause about what should happen next. We need to have a legal labor force," said Erik Nicholson, the United Farm Workers Northwest regional director.

The House of Representatives hasn't supported such legislation. The House's Republican majority has backed a bill that would beef up security along the border with a 700-mile extension of fences and barriers on the southern borders.

Growers say that unless the politics change in Congress, they expect more labor shortages next season.

"What we are experiencing this year is a red-flag warning," Broetje said. "We are beholden to these workers, and they should be able to get here without risking their lives to cross the border."

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com